- Heretical Thoughts On Orthodoxies
Heretical Thoughts On Orthodoxies
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Heresy evolves, orthodoxy cannot. Plan accordingly. Orthodoxies offer the comforting illusion of solidarity. But in what lies ahead, we’re on our own.
In today’s world, the key orthodoxies are secular rather than religious: they are economic, ideological, political. Religious orthodoxy is in the spiritual realm. It may have secular ramifications (for example, Galileo being forced to renounce his scientific advances) but it doesn’t deal with forecasts of real-world systems.
Economic, ideological and geopolitical orthodoxies are different. They make forecasts about the real world, and they will be right or wrong.
The orthodoxies are roughly divided into two camps: the Establishment/Status Quo orthodoxies and the alternative orthodoxies.
Both are fiercely defended by True Believers, as the orthodoxy is the foundation of the True Believers’ identity and worldview.
The two orthodoxies aren’t necessarily diametrically opposed. Sometimes they overlap.
Much of what passes for “informed commentary” now is nothing more than True Believers cherry-picking whatever supports their orthodoxy. In this mindset, what’s important is that everyone agrees with the orthodoxy. Public fealty to the orthodoxy is all that matters.
In this climate, projecting an outcome that doesn’t fit an orthodoxy is heresy and must be suppressed.
I don’t see any value in trying to persuade others to agree with me. The analysis goes where it goes, and it doesn’t really matter if we like the conclusion or not.
What matters is one forecast will be accurate and the rest will be wrong. If 99.99% of the populace doesn’t like the accurate forecast, that doesn’t change the outcome.
If the analysis is sound, then the forecast is sound, and it won’t change if it offends our sensibilities.
In other words, an emotionally detached analytic view is more likely to generate accurate forecasts than defending orthodoxies.
Put another way, accurate forecasts don’t arise from popularity contests.
We might not like the results of a detached analysis, but liking it or hating it isn’t the point. The accuracy is the point.
We might disagree with the forecast and hope it isn’t accurate, but we understand our opinions and hopes won’t change the outcome.
If we want to prepare an appropriate response to what’s coming down the pike, we’re better served by cultivating a detached view that favors our own independent analysis rather than orthodoxy. In other words, our self-interest is best served by becoming self-reliant.
Consider all the standard-issue orthodoxies, neatly packaged for easy marketing / consumption: Left and Right, Conservative and Progressive, Capitalist and Socialist, etc.
I find all the orthodoxies lacking. None makes sense of the dynamics I see as consequential, so we’re forced to assemble our own analysis.
In other words, we’re forced to secretly dabble in heresies.
For example, the Status Quo orthodoxy holds that the world is now multipolar and the influence and power of the U.S. / West is in an inevitable decline.
The West’s dominance was a bad thing, so multipolarity is a good thing.
The alternative orthodoxy holds that the U.S. / West are doomed not just to decline but to give way to the dominance of China and its partners.
The West had its day, now it’s China’s turn.
This orthodoxy holds the US dollar will collapse in a heap, replaced by Bitcoin, a gold-backed yuan, or a basket of non-Western currencies.
Questioning these orthodoxies is akin to declaring God is dead in 1500. It doesn’t go over very well with True Believers and their enforcers.
These orthodoxies are values/identity-based rather than analytic. They project what we think should happen because it fits our value system and what we identify with.
This is why orthodoxies are so vehemently defended: to question them is to question the moral rightness of the orthodoxy.
The problem with orthodoxy is two-fold: 1) orthodoxies suppress evolution and 2) we’re blinded by our emotional attachments to orthodoxies.
We don’t get attached to forecasts that don’t impact our values or our financial security.
If someone forecasts inflation in Lower Slobovia will rise from 8% to 10%, we don’t have any emotional stake in the forecast. If inflation there rises or falls, we don’t care. We don’t bristle and rush to defend either forecast.
Unless we’ve staked a speculative bet on inflation rising in Lower Slobovia. Then we care, deeply. We’re completely emotionally engaged, and ready to tear the head off anyone arguing that our position is faulty and we’re going to lose the bet.
Those with no emotional stake in the issue look on us with bemusement. What’s the big deal? Whatever is going to happen is going to happen, so why get worked up about it?
Indeed.
As longtime readers know, I favor looking at everything as a system. There is really only one system dynamic, Natural Selection, i.e. evolutionary success or failure when evolutionary pressure is applied.
Human societies and economies are ecosystems, too, and so their success or failure is Natural Selection at work.
Two things matter in evolution: transparency and variability. Evolution is only possible if the genome / society / economy generates a steady stream of mutations / variations.
Variations / variability are the fuel of evolution: if there are no mutations / variations, then there’s nothing new being fed to the system which can offer selective advantages.
Transparency is the mechanism needed to test / select variability. In the genome, mutations that offer some selective advantage are conserved by an automatic process.
In human organizations, transparency means there’s a free-for-all churn of variability / dissent, experimentation and sharing of results. New ideas and data flow freely between all the nodes of the system.
Human organizations with weak variability and transparency fail to adapt because they lack the means to do so.
This is scale-invariant. Relationships lacking variability and transparency fail, enterprises lacking variability and transparency fail, nations lacking variability and transparency fail.
Authoritarian regimes, be they relationships, enterprises or nations, fail because there is no other possible outcome other than evolutionary failure. Any success will be illusory / temporary.
Finding this regime attractive or repugnant won’t change the inevitability of its failure.
Transparency is not easy. People contest our treasured orthodoxies, upsetting us. We’re forced to admit to being wrong far more often than we like. It hurts our pride and we lose face, but the upside is the immense success of the evolutionary churn.
This process is scale-invariant: every argument / disagreement reflects the underlying dynamics of the system, so every negotiation to resolve the conflict reflects these same dynamics.
This process is also evolutionary. The previous negotiation may leave one side dissatisfied, and so the negotiations evolve.
From the perspective of evolutionary churn, we shouldn’t grudgingly allow variations, we should elicit them, welcome them not as threats but as essential churn, and then negotiate an outcome that is evolutionary, i.e. contingent and open to being changed as conditions change.
The couple that never argues and always puts on a smiley face isn’t the healthy relationship. It’s evolutionarily doomed to failure because the facade of unity and happiness is not actual unity or happiness.
The lack of variability and transparency have a cost that the participants and the system pay one way or another. It can be hidden for a while but not indefinitely.
The same can be said of nations. If dissent is suppressed, data is suppressed, communication is shackled by fear of exposure or censure and all decisions are made opaquely, that regime is doomed to evolutionary failure.
The nation where all the dirty laundry is out and everybody is arguing about it is evolutionarily robust. The nation where the dirty laundry is hidden deep in the basement to preserve the illusion of unity and success has been stripped of variability and transparency.
My analytic forecast (laid out in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal) is that evolutionary success demands relocalizing production of essentials and consuming less, and all the systemic changes required to enable and incentivize this evolution.
Evolutionary pressure doesn’t go away when you hide the dirty laundry. It builds up. When variability / dissent are suppressed, the system has no evolutionary fuel. Starved, it collapses.
I don’t think it matters what we call the world system or what configuration aligns with our values or what we think should happen. Evolutionary pressure is building, and those organizations which choose autocratic suppression of variability / dissent and transparency will fail.
Those that defend the churn of variability / dissent and transparency will evolve, come what may.
Orthodoxies by definition have been of stripped of variability and transparency. That’s what makes an orthodoxy an orthodoxy.
For this reason, evolutionary success cannot arise within orthodoxies. Dissent, variability, sharing ideas, proposing solutions and negotiating transparently are all intrinsically heretical.
Orthodoxies have mastered the illusion of adapting to changing times. Orthodoxies introduce updated catch-phrases to mask their inability to evolve.
Heresy evolves, orthodoxy cannot. Plan accordingly. Orthodoxies offer the comforting illusion of solidarity. But in what lies ahead, we’re on our own. Orthodoxy is a luxury we can ill-afford. What will prove consequential is Self-Reliance.
New Podcast: UPThinking Finance with Emerson Fersch and Charles Hugh Smith (55 minutes)
* * *
This essay was first published as a weekly Musings Report sent exclusively to subscribers and patrons at the $5/month ($50/year) and higher level. Thank you, patrons and subscribers, for supporting my work and free website.
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Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 23:30 - Eight Years Later: #OscarsStillSoWhite?
Eight Years Later: #OscarsStillSoWhite?
Michelle Yeoh was nominated this week for an Academy Award for her lead role in independent flick Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Malaysian Chinese actress is the first women of Asian descent ever to be nominated in the Best Actress category (when disregarding Natalie Portman who has U.S. and Israeli citizenship) .
However, as Statista’s Florian Zandt reports, while the milestone has received widespread coverage, there have also been voices criticizing the lack of black Best Actress nominees this year, showing that eight years after the hashtag #oscarssowhite, the discussion about diversity at the Academy Awards is still ongoing.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Looking at nominations in the Oscar’s Big Five categories since the #oscarssowhite controversy, Best Actress is the category where the least Black, Asian and Latin American people (or those with a corresponding family background) have been nominated – just seven out of 40. Best Actor is not far behind at eight out of 40 nomination. This includes last year’s nomination and win by Will Smith for his role as the father and coach of Serena and Venus Williams in the sports drama King Richard.
The Big Five, generally seen as the most prestigious categories at the Oscars, grow slightly more diverse in the categories Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (both adapted and original). Best Director saw 11 nominations in the given time frame, including the nominations and wins of Chloé Zhao for Nomandland, Bong Joon-ho for Parasite, Alfonso Cuarón for Roma and Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water between 2017 and 2020. This year, the director duo of Everything Everywhere All at Once, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, is nominated in the category and could snag another win with Asian-American participation.
The fact that this share of Oscar nominees doesn’t reflect the demographics of the United States and serves to underline the minority status of non-white voices in the movie industry led to the #oscarssowhite movement in 2015, which gained increased traction in 2016 after the Academy allegedly failed to address the concerns voiced by proponents of this movement. The issue that the movie industry doesn’t reflect general society has also been backed by research. For example, according to a study by the University of California, 26 percent of movie writers and 25 percent of movie directors had a minority background in 2020, while the group of people with singular Hispanic, Latin American, Black or African American backgrounds alone comprised 31 percent of the U.S. population in the same year.
One group that’s particularly absent and isn’t talked about at length is actors, directors and writers with a distinctly Arabian background. In 2021, for example, only two films by Arabian filmmakers were nominated, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin and The Present by Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi. In 2018, Egyptian-American actor Rami Malek won Best Actor for his role as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 23:00 - 'Curiouser And Curiouser' – Is Joe Biden Serving Two Masters?
‘Curiouser And Curiouser’ – Is Joe Biden Serving Two Masters?
Authored by Rob Smith via RealClear Wire,
Here is something you won’t hear anywhere else. It is clear that Joe Biden is being ratted out in the classified document scandal, but by whom? Tucker Carlson is convinced it is a cabal of Democratic Party members who want a new presidential nominee for 2024. Tucker, I love ya, but I don’t think so. I believe foreign actors and their interests may be involved.
Joe Biden has been in politics for 50 years. He’s never had a real job. The only core conviction he has is the self-aggrandizement that comes from being able to have people suck up to him due to the power and vast resources at his disposal. He’s dumber than a doorknob. Yet, with 50 years of experience, he is on automatic pilot when it comes to self-preservation. He simply does what he is told and reads his teleprompter without really knowing what he is reading. Thus, I don’t buy Tucker’s analysis because the “powers that be” controlling him already have a pretty good gig. Why would they want to dump him?
I have great respect for anybody who risks his own money creating a product or service that others want to buy, whether it is a plumber growing his business or a software engineer creating the next new gizmo that charms Menlo Park. But people who sell influence and access to American politicians are despicable. The conspiring politicians are sewer rats. They are fiduciaries of your money, and they use their access to your money to grant favors to others so they will have the benefit of your money and in return they enrich themselves. The nation’s interests take second fiddle to their interests. Yet, the pernicious, indeed the treasonous element of all this is when they sell influence to foreign actors, bad people in charge of powerful governments that are hostile to the United States. It is sick. It is despicable. It is treasonous.
Money is money. It is a force for great good, but can also be a force for evil and corruption. Men of integrity, the type that should be our elected officials know this. They understand that they as humans are corruptible and thus studiously avoid any potential conflict which would compromise their integrity or loyalty to their principal. These are age old truisms that have been in circulation and practiced by those who are serious about preserving their character for at least the past 2,000 years. See Matthew 6:24. “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
Space is limited for me to list every Biden family “crime” of influence peddling, though Hunter Biden’s laptop is a wealth of information. The Biden family took money from Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs closely associated with their country’s governments. They orchestrated Defense Department money to fund bio-labs in Ukraine to enrich themselves, as they had financial ties to these entities. We know about Burisma, Bobulinski, SinoHawk and no interest forgivable loans. Ever hear of IRS imputed interest? And by the way, forgiveness of debt is taxable as ordinary income. Then there is Hunter’s 2013 trip on Air Force II with his dad where the Biden crime syndicate walked away with $1.5 billion of communist Chinese government funding into an “equity fund” that crack-head Hunter was to manage. I always look to invest my money with crack addicts, don’t you? Then there is CEFC Energy. There were huge fees paid by China to the Bidens to secure cobalt mining in the Congo Republic in order to manufacture Chinese electrical vehicles. Jim Biden secured a $1.5 billion contract to build 100,000 homes in Iraq. He’s never driven a nail into a 2 by 4. The Penn-Biden Center, funded almost exclusively by the Chinese government and other “dark” money emanating from China, paid Joe a salary of $900,000 to basically do nothing. His cronies like Anthony Blinken got a “get paid” for doing nothing quasi-job too. By the way, he’s now the Secretary of State. Author Peter Schweizer has done excellent work thoroughly documenting Biden family corruption with hostile foreign governments, but as recent as these works are, they do not even scratch the service of what we now know as each day reveals explosive new stories.
This past week I was deposed by California and New York lawyers because I publicly ratted out a lawyer who represented both sides in a multi-million-dollar business deal. The deal went south and he was a principal on the “buy side” of the transaction where his client was the seller. Per the Matthew scripture above, one can’t serve two masters. In this instance, as despicable as the lawyer’s actions were, only one individual was harmed. But when the President of the United States serves two masters, the harm is incalculable. Corrupt governments like Ukraine and China know exactly what they are doing when they buy political influence, aka bribe American politicians. They control the politician. The politician does their bidding instead of his nation’s because the politician can be so easily blackmailed.
Why did President Biden withdraw one million barrels of oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to “sell” to Sinopec, a Chinese firm with ties to Hunter Biden?
More importantly, why are we giving $100 billion dollars to Ukraine? I understand that Putin is a bad guy, but Zelensky ain’t exactly Mother Teresa. Ukraine is as notoriously corrupt as Russia as illustrated in this recent news story of brazen thievery. Would the lives of ordinary Ukrainians (not the oligarchs) living in the breakaway republics of Donestsk and Luhansk (both with a majority of ethnic Russians) really be that much different under Russian control? One thing we have learned from this conflict is the mighty Russian armed forces are not the threat to the West that we all thought. So what is the real goal? Once the conflict ends, how will things really change? One can look at the tragedy of many wars and Monday morning quarterback. What did all the death and property destruction solve?
This week, Joe Biden announced further escalation of the war by providing Ukraine with 31 Abrams tanks. This is a massive new commitment of American servicemen, as these Americans will have to train Ukrainians; arm, supply and maintain these vehicles, which means US servicemen in Ukraine fighting Russians. Y’all may want to read Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution. Only Congress can declare war.
So why is the Joe Biden risking nuclear war by escalating this conflict?
Miranda Divine in the New York post printed an April 12, 2014 email off of Hunter Biden’s laptop which Hunter wrote to his business partner Devon Archer (currently in jail for fraud) in which he knew an amazing amount of detailed information about Ukraine, the type of information one might well have learned from reading top secret classified reports given to him by his father to help their influence peddling racket. He clearly implicates his father in their influence peddling and concludes his email in Tony Soprano fashion by instructed Devon to buy a “burner phone.”
So who ratted Joe out? Could it have been the Russians? They have a pretty good intelligence system. They certainly have good reason to rat Joe out and expose his ties to Ukraine. Then again, suppose Zelensky said “Joe, either give me the tanks or I will take you down,” and wanted to fire a shot over Joe’s bow to get him to act? Certainly, Zelensky has a dossier on all the Biden activities in Ukraine and is willing to use it. Our president is bought and compromised. He and his family are scoundrels and traitors. Call me a conspiracy nut, but it is absolutely reasonable to ask such questions when someone has betrayed his country.
I suspect that these classified documents have something to do with Ukraine and exposing the Biden family corruption that has jeopardized the security of the United States and of course put us closer to a nuclear war. Slow Joe’s personal attorneys were trying to nab these files to do what with them? Almost certainly to keep their contents and subject matters from implicating the President in criminal activities. Merrick Garland named a Special Prosecutor. Is he in on the cover up? Watch my friends. He will almost certainly refuse to disclose the content of the files seized and aid the National Archives to evade Congressional subpoenas by claiming “disclosing any information will jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation.” You can fool the Washington press corps, but you can’t fool Rob Smith.
To quote young Alice of Wonderland fame, this is getting “curiouser and curiouser.” We don’t know all the answers, but one thing is for absolutely sure, one can’t serve two masters.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 22:30 - Map Reveals US Cities With Most Homeless Gen-Zers
Map Reveals US Cities With Most Homeless Gen-Zers
From couch surfing to shelters to sleeping on the streets, new research revealed the top US cities with the most homeless Gen-Z youth (aged 18 to 24).
The nonprofit United Way of the National Capital Area reviewed data from the US Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development and found San Jose had the largest number of homeless Gen-Z youth per 100,000 residents. New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Seattle round out the top five cities for homeless young adults.
The latest data from the National Network for Youth, a DC-based nonprofit that helps young people, showed about 3.5 million young adults are homeless.
When thinking about homelessness, young adults generally don’t come to mind. However, their struggles are mounting under the highest inflation in a generation, a lack of affordable housing, and a nationwide drug crisis.
Millennials don’t realize how good they have it – at least their baby boomer parents have basements.
It does not surprise us that the cities with the most homeless Gen-Zers are Democratically-run.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 22:00 - Are You Really Against Fossil Fuels? Read This Before You Answer
Are You Really Against Fossil Fuels? Read This Before You Answer
Authored by Vijay Jayaraj via RealClearEnergy.org,
It is easy for anyone to say that they are against fossil fuels. Opposition to coal, oil and natural gas is fashionable and will prompt heads to nod and even hands to applaud in most places.
But are people aware of the extent to which their lives are dependent on fossil fuels? Do they know that more than 90 percent of things used in their everyday lives are derived from fossil fuels?
From your toothbrush to your car tire, a majority of the things you use today has been made possible because of fossil fuels. Shoes, refrigerators, washing machines, coffee makers, furniture, pens, eating utensils, eyeglasses, commodes, medical gear, camping equipment, and the list goes on and on.
Consider the computer or the phone from which you are reading this article. They are made of glass, metal, plastic, lithium and silicon – all of which require fossil fuels to mine, process or manufacture. While some are chemical derivatives of fossil fuels, all depend one way or another on their combustion for electricity generation, process heat or transportation.
You wouldn’t have the iPhone, Android or MacBook without fossil fuels. Imagine the irony of typing out “end oil” from a phone that is made from fossil fuels! Or supporting climate activism by relaying video that was recorded with a camera made from fossil fuels! Of course, this sort of irony is displayed regularly and missed constantly.
In short, the most fundamental necessities – and the most cherished conveniences – of daily life are products dependent on the use of fossil fuels.
Electricity and Transportation
The industrial era was a time of great change, and the use of fossil fuels played a big part in that. From the early 1800s to the mid-1900s, coal was the primary fuel source for industry and transportation. Oil and natural gas became much more prominent in the latter half of the 20th century.
Cars, trucks, planes, ships, and trains use oil. If you go electric, the electricity for the vehicle is again predominantly generated from coal or gas. Even wind, solar, nuclear and hydro power are dependent on manufacturing and mining processes reliant on fossil fuels. If you intend to start a new life on the planet Mars or the moon, the rockets you use need fossil fuels.
While the use of fossil fuels as a source for electricity generation and transportation fuel has been discussed widely, their role in the manufacturing and farming sectors is seldom highlighted.
Cement, Steel, and Plastic
Cement, steel, and plastic are essential materials that are used in the construction, transportation and manufacturing industries, playing a key role in the development of modern civilization.
Being the primary ingredient of concrete, cement is the most frequently used construction material in the 21st century. It is used in the construction of homes, roads, bridges, commercial buildings and other infrastructure. The manufacture of cement is one of the most energy intensive processes, requiring the mining of limestone and other minerals that are eventually heated in kilns at temperatures of 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
Another common construction material is steel, which is preferred for its immense strength compared to its volume and weight – a quality desirable for the structural frameworks of tall buildings, industrial facilities and bridges. Steel is also used in the reinforced concrete of roads and in the manufacture of vehicles, machinery, tools and appliances.
Paints, resins, fiberglass, coatings, varnishes, adhesives, and thousands of other materials are all made from fossil fuels. It is likely the clothing that you are wearing now was made using fossil fuels. In fact, most carpets, fabrics, coatings, cushions, upholstery, drapes, spandex and other textiles are made with the help of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are used as raw materials in the production of many chemicals and plastics. Lightweight, durable and versatile, plastics are used in a wide range of products, from packaging and consumer goods to automotive parts and medical devices.
Food Production
Fertilizers – produced with the help of fossil fuels – replenish the soil with essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, improving soil structure and fertility. Fertilizers have played a crucial role in meeting the global food demand by increasing crop yields by as much as 50 percent.
According to OurWorldInData, which compiles information from the United Nations and World Bank, “From 1961 to 2014, global cereal production has increased by 280 percent. If we compare this increase to that of total population (which increased by only 136 percent over the same period), we see that global cereal production has grown at a much faster rate than the population.”
Not only do fossil fuels enable us to meet the bare necessities our everyday lives, but they are also the reason for the worldwide improvement in the quality of life since the 1950s.
The campaign against fossil fuels focuses on their use in the generation of electricity. However, every part of our material life is made better by fossil fuel derivates. They help us live more efficiently, safely and in an environmentally friendly way, reducing poverty and helping billions enjoy decent and safe lives.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 21:30 - What Is Going On Between Kevin McCarthy And Marjorie Taylor Greene?
What Is Going On Between Kevin McCarthy And Marjorie Taylor Greene?
Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA,
The unusual relationship between new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., saw another twist Monday after the New York Times quoted McCarthy as pledging his undying loyalty to the second-term congresswoman.
“I will never leave that woman,” McCarthy told a friend in a private conversation reported by the Times. “I will always take care of her.”
Frightening. Kevin McCarthy on Marjorie Taylor Greene: “I will never leave that woman. I will always take care of her.” (New York Times) pic.twitter.com/SDfnk7BioZ
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) January 23, 2023
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Photos of the two becoming unusually close on the House floor began to surface during the votes for House speaker in early January.
Greene, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, surprised many by breaking rank with other conservatives to voice her staunch support of the centrist and often ineffectual McCarthy.
She quickly lashed out at his detractors after the GOP secured a slimmer-than-expected House majority in the November midterm election.
“I want to tell you how shortsighted and ridiculous that is,” Greene said in November Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.
“It is pathetic, the people that are running out saying it’s his fault,” she continued. “No, that is a lazy, pathetic, wimpy, easy mindset. They just want one thing and then they want to carry on without doing the hard work—the real changes in the Republican Party and the way we fight the fight.”
Ostensibly in return for her loyalty, McCarthy promptly reinstated Greene’s committee assignments, which had been revoked in an (at the time) unprecedented partisan move by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Her appointment to the House Homeland Security and Oversight committees roiled leftists, who claimed she was unqualified for the plum posts.
Asked if Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene should be on Homeland Security and Oversight Committees after previously embracing 9/11 conspiracy theories, GOP Rep. McCaul says, “She has matured, I think. She realizes she doesn’t know everything.” https://t.co/nvA1rMizYa pic.twitter.com/b6RXExFAPZ
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 22, 2023
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According to the Times, McCarthy also “spent hours on the phone trying to cajole senior executives at Twitter to reactivate her personal account after she was banned last year for violating the platform’s coronavirus misinformation policy.”
LOVE, REPUBLICAN STYLE?
It remained unclear, despite speculation, whether there was a romantic component to the relationship.
Greene was recently divorced amid allegations of infidelity. McCarthy’s marital situation is also the subject of intrigue.
Although he and his wife, Judy, have been together since 1992 and have two adult children, he was foisted into the center of speculation after then-Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., hinted that McCarthy might be aware of drug-fueled orgies involving Republican members of the Swamp.
McCarthy subsequently went on record saying he had “lost his trust” in Cawthorn.
The nature of McCarthy’s relationship with his former landlord, RINO pollster Frank Luntz, who is himself a close friend of Hunter Biden, also raised questions about whether McCarthy’s unconventional lifestyle might conflict with his leadership ability.
McCarthy was previously accused of conducting an affair with former Rep. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., who bears a striking ressemblance to Greene.
Those allegations, based on an anonymous Wikipedia entry, were blamed for derailing an earlier bid for speaker in 2015 after the Freedom Caucus forced the ouster of weepy-eyed ex-Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio.
After McCarthy dropped out, members settled instead on failed vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan, R-Mich.
MARRIED TO THE SWAMP?
Some have posited an alternative—although no less unseemly—theory to explain Greene’s flirtation with the D.C. Establishment, citing a personnel change as the driving force.
A highly placed conservative GOP staffer on the Hill, speaking on the condition of anonomity, told Headline USA that a shift in Greene’s staff “appears to have heavily influenced her shift toward the swamp,” especially when her current chief of staff, Ed Buckham, assumed the reins.
Buckham, a longtime Washington insider, was once chief of staff to Majority Whip Tom Delay before forming a K Street lobbying firm called Alexander Strategy Group. He was forced to close the firm and left the lobbying world in the aftermath of the poltical corruption prosecution of his close associate Jack Abramoff until he resurfaced to lead Greene’s staff.
Yet, some, including McCarthy, have praised the mollifying effect that Greene’s new alliances have had in helping bring her into the mainstream after a bumpy first term.
“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy explained in a brief interview for the Times article.
“When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over,” he added. “She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”
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Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 20:30 - Leftist Media Claims Tyre Nichols Death At The Hands Of Five Black Police "Still About Racism"
Leftist Media Claims Tyre Nichols Death At The Hands Of Five Black Police “Still About Racism”
We all knew it was coming; the establishment media never seems to miss a trick when it comes to making a tragic death into a race conflict. The exploitation of the murdered as a means to gain social influence is a decidedly leftist endeavor. You might even start to think that they want to trigger rioting across the country based on false premises. But that would be crazy, right?
Mobs directed by disinformation are a useful weapon for national division. Mainstream media outlets seem to be searching intensely for any new act of police brutality, any new mass shooting, any crime that might fit the bill for their ongoing narrative that America is a “white supremacist nation” that needs to be torn down. Unfortunately for them, the majority of these events in recent months have not involved white police officers, straight white conservative shooters, or any person the fits the woke narrative. They have been left grasping at straws.
So, it would appear that the spin doctors are changing strategies. If they can’t find a race based killing involving a minority and white people, they will simply blame every act of violence on systemic racism anyway.
CNN has recently targeted the Tyre Nichols beating and subsequent death at the hands of five Memphis police officers as its test case for linking all law enforcement brutality to racism. The problem for them is that Tyre Nichols is black, and so were all the officers involved.
Don’t worry, though, CNN has an answer for that. The platform published an opinion piece this week from Van Jones, arguing that even though all five LEOs involved in the death of Nichols were black, the event can still be blamed on anti-black culture.
How is this possible? Van Jones leaps into a bizarre display of mental gymnastics and baseless pseudo-psychology, building a tale of black cops brainwashed into “self hatred” by white supremacy and convinced to kill black victims. You see, it’s not the fault of the cops per se, it’s the fault of the “system” that has made them into weapons of an anti-black society. Individual responsibility no longer applies when the cops involved are not white.
What evidence does Van Jones have to back this argument? He has none, but systemic racism is a vaporous and ambiguous condition based on feelings and fears rather than facts; it is an open ended villain that leftists can apply to almost any situation. The root foundation of Jones’ argument is best clarified by the claim he makes here:
“At the end of the day, it is the race of the victim who is brutalized — not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence. It’s hard to imagine five cops of any color beating a White person to death under similar circumstances. And it is almost impossible to imagine five Black cops giving a White arrestee the kind of beat-down that Nichols allegedly received.”
In other words, if the victim of police violence is a minority, it was a race based crime regardless of circumstances. If the victim is white, it is not a race based crime. The assertion here is that only police brutality against minorities matters; or, that only police brutality against minorities is common.
Van Jones chooses his words carefully (and dishonestly) in this statement, because he is well aware that there have been many white victims of minority police officers in the past; just not many recorded instances of five black cops killing a white person in the same manner as Tyre Nichols.
For example, in 2017 a black officer from Minneapolis, Mohamed Noor, fatally shot an unarmed white woman after she called 911 to report a possible rape happening behind her home. He was later sentenced in 2021 to only five years in prison — the maximum allowed for manslaughter, after his murder conviction was overturned. With good behavior Noor could be released in half the time. Does this sound like something that would occur in a country dominated by white supremacy?
At no point did the media suggest that this was a crime based on racism on the part of the black officer. This is Van Jones’ concept of no white victims of racism in action, just not in the way he implies. Compared to the death of George Floyd and now Tyre Nichols, the media barely reported on the murder or Noor’s sentencing. This leads us to a much more important question than any question CNN posits: What if it’s really corporate media journalists that are racist? And, are they projecting their racism on the rest of us?
The vast majority of tragedies and crimes in the US have nothing to do with racism, and systemic racism doesn’t exist in our nation. Leftist journalists are the only people talking about it because they are among the few zealots obsessed with skin color and diversity politics. They focus on race because they see it as advantageous, and they see minorities as people to be conned and used for their political ends.
The theory presented by Van Jones should be insulting to minorities everywhere, because it is based on the notion that minorities cannot think for themselves and are not responsible for themselves. If five black cops can be hypnotized by white supremacy into killing other black people against their “better natures”, then what possible “agency” do any black people have? The journalists at CNN and other leftist outlets paint a vision of an America in which minorities are zombies who do nothing more than the bidding of a racist phantom that controls every aspect of their behavior. All while those same journalists try to influence minorities into mob violence with false claims.
Is anything more racist than that kind of agenda?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 20:00 - The West Must Never Again Go Totalitarian
The West Must Never Again Go Totalitarian
Authored by Joakim Book via The Brownstone Institute,
The West can never again go totalitarian.
We saw it happen generations ago. We fought two of humanity’s most destructive wars and faced the horror of industrial-scale extermination. Never again, said the world’s peoples in the late 1940s, and they began the difficult task of uncovering all that had been done, all that had gone wrong.
The mass graves, the German and Soviet labor camps, the Japanese massacres in the Far East, America’s internment camps, the secret police and the mutilations, the ever-present threat of violence hanging over every member of society. We saw the personality cults around Hitler or Stalin for what they were, the blatant ideologies for what they had resulted in.
When the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989, and with it the remains of the Evil Empire that had put it there, we discovered more horror. The archives of East Germany and the Kremlin showed that informants were everywhere happily giving up information – real or invented – on their fellow humans. We found more bodies. We learned that under enough fear and pressure, human life wasn’t worth anything. When push came to violent shove, bonds of family and community meant nothing.
The error of this terrifying history is to think that this was a problem of “the other,” someone far away who is nothing like us. Asks Thorsteinn Siglaugsson in a recent article: ”How do you find your inner Nazi? And how do you get him under control? Most people would have participated in the atrocities of their time, had they been put in that position – or at least sat by and allowed them to happen.”
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s oft used and highly relevant phrase says that the line between good and evil passes “right through every human heart.” The passage goes on, and Solzhenitsyn digs even deeper into the most horrifying self-reflection a man can reach: the line of good and evil goes through all human hearts, mine included, “This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
It oscillates. What is evil isn’t always an identifiable thing, a clear enemy, but a blurry line that moves and becomes clear only in hindsight. History is hard like that. It’s us, but in the past, doing things we couldn’t imagine ourselves doing. Yet millions of our prior selves did. Are we really confident enough that with the right external circumstances “we” wouldn’t once again?
We received a small-scale test with the upheaval of societies in the last three years. Many of us wonder both what went wrong in the Covid saga and how the future will look upon the events that took place. Are the anti-vaxxers the unsung heroes who stood up against unjust tyranny, or the new 9/11-truthers nobody really cares about? Are the lockdowners wise lifesavers who hadn’t yet perfected a tool that the future takes for granted as obvious and necessary? Only on a long enough historic timeline will we know.
Take the following segment from Michael Malice’s The While Pill: A Tale of Good And Evil, a newly released and much-needed account of the Soviet Union’s totalitarianism:
“Even if the man on the street felt something wasn’t quite adding up, it was very difficult for him to get the full picture – especially in a culture where questioning authority could have deadly consequences for oneself and one’s entire family. The newspapers were filled with boasts about enormous achievements of production and the success of heroic ‘Stakhanovite’ workers, yet there were no clothes in the stores and no food on the shelves.”
Even to the regular Joe (or Vladimir…), something wasn’t adding up:
“Sure the papers might make mistakes or have a bias, but they couldn’t realistically be filled with lies, week after week, year after year. … Only crazy people would think that there was a conspiracy to control the news and what information reached the public. The only possible logical alternative was that someone must have been keeping the productive socialist bounty from reaching the people. It had to be the wreckers.”
The echo of 2020-22 intrudes, too close for comfort. For is not this precisely what happened to us?
In the early days of Covid, the newspapers were filled first with outrageous disaster porn and fear-mongering and later with “boasts about enormous achievements of production and the success of heroic [Big Pharma] workers,” all the while there were “no clothes in the stores and no food on the shelves.” Everyone took outlandish personal actions, yet the catastrophic numbers shot higher and higher.
Clearly, somebody must have been ruining the good men’s neatly laid plans, those who chanted messianic faith in “two weeks to flatten the curve.” They told us what to do; it got worse than they said; somebody must be wrecking the process.
I did my pandemic part, many people reasoned: I masked and desanitized and kept my distance and vaxxed myself over and over to Fauci’s delight. Yet, the pathogen kept spreading and people kept dying and I even got sick, again and again – something the rulers repeatedly said was impossible. And then it wasn’t, which they said was always going to happen.
It felt scripted, of course. When I for Brownstone reviewed Mattias Desmet’s great book on totalitarianism last summer, I wrote that toying with objective truth is precisely what totalitarian regimes do:
“The collective hums together and upholds the rules, no matter how insane or ineffective at achieving their supposed aim. Totalitarianism is the blurring of fact and fiction, yet with an aggressive intolerance for diverging opinions. One must toe the line.”
It matters not whether the charge holds water or has logic on its side; it just has to stick, by endless repetition if need be. Like all propaganda. In the last few years surely, there must have been some evil group of detractors undermining the Party’s good efforts. Those fifthly pandemic wreckers, the anti-vaxxers! They are nothing; less than nothing, and it’s OK to blame them!
Replace “wreckers” with anti-vaxxers, the media’s boasts of Soviet production with today’s establishment elite’s never-ending yapping about vaccine efficacy or lockdown effects or responsible monetary policy, and Malice’s distant history feels much closer to our recently lived-through present.
We might still have food on the shelves — though of worse quality and at much higher prices. We might still have the ability to move and work and travel, but heavily circumscribed, always at risk of canceling and always with papers showing the number of needles in your arm, or your scarred heart tissue. Nobody is torturing us (yet anyway) and for the most part we have some semblance of rights and freedoms remaining.
But we’re closer to that horrific totalitarian world today than we were, say five years ago. Or perhaps it was just always there, calmly waiting to be unleashed like Solzhenitsyn implied.
What Malice’s book so expertly chronicles is that elites can be wrong. Wrong in facts, wrong in morals. It is possible that whole sways of intellectuals, scientists, journalists, professionals, and civil servants can be deceived and deluded, for decades stubbornly refuse to admit their error.
The 1930s US intelligentsia’s view of Comrade Stalin and the Soviet Union is one such episode. The warmongering early 2000s in Britain and the US, though far from unopposed by the public, is another.
Nothing shows this better than my own field of economics, riddled with wrong calls and embarrassing prediction errors. The Great Moderation of stable growth, low inflation and unemployment, circa 1990 to 2007, is another collective bout of madness and mistaken optimism.
Four years before the Great Recession began, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas gave a presidential address to the American Economics Association saying that macroeconomics had succeeded: “its central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.” In the summer of 2008, already nine months into the recession and merely weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed, Olivier Blanchard, then at the IMF, published “The State of Macro is Good.”
The year 2020 marked the beginning of just another such episode of collective insanity. It will take some time and soul-searching before we can once again view the errors of our time the way we now view the “adulation of Stalin’s professed ideology,” or laugh at them like we do the crooks in The Big Short.
But Malice’s message is ultimately optimistic. “I’m not saying nothing bad ever happens,” he confesses, but that evil isn’t almighty, doesn’t have to win. It might take a while, but even for the West’s most malevolent elements, the “costs are just going to be too much for them to bear – and they’re going to fold.”
One day, a future chronicler might look upon the Covid era with the same deep incredulity that Malice’s readers look upon the Soviet Union.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 19:30 - How Many People Are Killed By Police In The US?
How Many People Are Killed By Police In The US?
The Washington Post counted 1,096 people in the U.S. who were shot and killed by police in 2022.
In previous years, about as many people – around 1,000 annually – have died this way.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz shows in the infographic below, most of those killed by police were male and armed…
You will find more infographics at Statista
While the race of more than a third of those killed by police in 2022 is not known, 389 of the deceased were white, while 224 were Black.
This equals 52 percent and 30 percent, respectively, of those for whom a race is known. The share of Black people is elevated here, keeping in mind that only close to 14 percent of Americans belong to that race group.
Around 58 percent of those shot and killed by police carried a gun themselves.
But in the case of more than 180 people, they were either unarmed or it is unknown whether they carried a weapon. In 17 cases, the deceased had been seen with a replica weapon that was mistaken for the real thing.
Out of the 1,096 killed, 138 were listed as having shown signs of mental illness.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 19:00 - Taibbi Shreds Hamilton 68 'Laughable And Damning' Response To Being Exposed As Frauds
Taibbi Shreds Hamilton 68 ‘Laughable And Damning’ Response To Being Exposed As Frauds
Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket,
Days before yesterday’s Twitter Files report about Hamilton 68, I wrote the public relations officers of both of the sites’ parent organizations, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) and the German Marshall Fund (GMF). I told them I was in possession of the Hamilton 68 list, which purported to track “Russian influence activities.” I said I had a slew of internal Twitter documents that among other things identified their project as “bullshit.” Toward the end I added:
Given the sheer quantity of news stories sourced to Hamilton 68, this has to go down as one of the great media frauds of all time. Unless you have an explanation for how and why hundreds of non-Russians like Dennis Michael Lynch, Patrick Hennigsen, Joe Lauria, and [I inserted the name of a San Diego school board member] came to be on this list, there’s no other conclusion.
I hope you will treat this matter with respect and answer this query. My story is going to identify not just people like Clint Watts but members of the ASD advisory board as party to this.
The story eventually published, “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, The New King of Media Fraud,” was based on email assessments of Twitter executives like Yoel Roth and Nick Pickles, the forensic analysis Roth had done in 2017 and which was excerpted yesterday, and interviews with people on the list. These elements — especially the interviews — made for a pretty ironclad case that the much-ballyhooed Hamilton 68 “dashboard” was a sham, that took real opinions of real people and falsely declared them part of a “network” of “Russian influence activities.”
On the remote chance Hamilton 68 had inside information legitimizing the linking of Dennis Michael Lynch, David Horowitz, and @TrumpDyke to “Russian influence activities,” I not only reached out to Hamilton’s creators, but when they were quiet, threw a tantrum on Twitter, tagging every member of the ASD advisory board in an effort to hear from them pre-publication. I genuinely wanted to hear an innocent explanation if they had one. They still said nothing. Only after the story blew up online yesterday did they put out an explanation.
“FACT SHEET: Hamilton 68 Dashboard (2017-2018)” is embarrassing. I’ve been told by several people since yesterday that Clint Watts is a sweet guy and a devoted family man. But the response he put out starts dissembling in the lead paragraph:
By analyzing a dynamic list of more than 600 Twitter accounts linked, wittingly or unwittingly, to Russian influence activities online, the dashboard provided a window into Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts online…
Let’s explore “wittingly or unwittingly.”
Forget that Hamilton 68’s original dashboard said it was “tracking Russian propaganda” and “Russian disinformation” (and not tweets by Consortium, The Sirius Report, and Liberals are Dumb). Forget even that co-founder Jamie Fly regularly compared the Russian cyber threat to al-Qaeda, and used language describing the Hamilton 68 accounts as if they were a front for a league of sleeper cells:
The approximately 600 accounts are a sample of a much wider network of pro-Kremlin accounts… These accounts should be viewed as a sample of distinct networks of Russian-linked accounts that were identified over the course of roughly three years of analysis. They are very likely only the tip of the iceberg.
Hamilton’s claims were even more concrete than that. Its founders told reporters they couldn’t disclose account names because “the Russians will simply shut them down,” implying direct control of Moscow. This is from a Politico interview with co-founder Laura Rosenberger:
Here’s one of Hamilton’s favorite journalists, Ken Dilanian of NBC, offering the same line about how Russia would simply marionette all of its cyber-agents back into darkness if the list were to be released:
By yesterday, the site was claiming its reason for secrecy was that it “took data privacy seriously and worked to maintain the anonymity of monitored accounts to avoid doxing or harassment.” This explanation changed a lot over time. We’ll come back to that, because it’s important.
What if reporters simply misunderstood Hamilton 68? What if the media overreacted? That was the next explanation:
The dashboard’s original methodology acknowledged that “the content within the network is complex and should be understood in a nuanced way.” Members of the media, pundits, and even some lawmakers often failed to include appropriate context when using the dashboard’s data…
We’re meant to believe that through a propaganda campaign that began in the summer of 2017 and saw people like Watts, Fly, and co-founder Laura Rosenberger make regular breathless public appearances about the Russian menace they were tracking, in stories with headlines like “The Russian Bots Are Coming,” was — a misunderstanding. Reporters went overboard, ignoring Hamilton demands for context and “nuance”! Last night they even disavowed the notion that they were responsible for headlines about “bots.” This was first on a list of “false or misleading claims”:
Claim: The Hamilton 68 team selected accounts based on a determination that they were “Russian bots.”
Here’s Watts on NPR on August 20, 2017, responding to a question from host Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who introduced Watts by saying, “The #FireMcMaster hashtag was promoted by computer software known as bots, according to our next guest,” before adding:
“What’s the evidence that Russia is using bots to spread stories against McMaster, and how certain can you be of the source?”
The response:
WATTS: So we start with Russian state-sponsored outlets. We look at what they’re talking about. We then move to what we see are overt Russian supporters. These are people that openly declare and state that they’re pushing Russian propaganda and Russian interests. And then over time, we watch as this community grows. And that’s when we start to pick up on the bots that amplify it. Once we can identify the message, we essentially do a key network monitor. We build out some algorithms, and we zero down on what is being amplified the most. That’s where we pick up on the bots.
Did Watts ever say, “Lulu, they weren’t all bots? In fact, one’s the editor of Consortium, and another does Trump-themed porn”? He did not.
In this early period, Hamilton’s spokespeople never insisted on “nuance,” nor did its patrons. On Christmas day, 2017, two members of the ASD advisory committee — former acting CIA chief Michael Morell and former House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers — wrote a piece called, “Russia never stopped its cyberattacks on the United States” in the Washington Post. The co-written piece cited Hamilton 68 in asserting, again without equivocation, that they were tracking social media cyberattacks directed by Moscow:
Moscow used these accounts to discredit the FBI after it was revealed that an agent had been demoted for sending anti-Donald Trump texts; to attack ABC News for an erroneous report involving President Trump and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser; to critique the Obama administration for allegedly “green lighting” the communication between Flynn and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak; and to warn about violence by immigrants after a jury acquitted an undocumented Mexican accused of murdering a San Francisco woman.
The first link in that passage was to the Hamilton dashboard. As the site Moon of Alabama wittily noted at the time, the top trend on the board that day was actually “Merry Christmas.” In between discrediting the FBI and trying to stir up the locals around the trial of a Mexican immigrant in San Francisco, “Moscow” took time for holiday greetings:
A few weeks later, Rosenberger gave an interview to Vice called “The Former Hillary Clinton Advisor Tracking Russian Bots and Trolls.” She spoke about Hamilton’s relationship with the media:
ROSENBERGER: We do a lot of work with journalists to try to better inform their reporting. Journalists watch the dashboard, see what stories are trending, and think about why they might be promoting this particular story. They can incorporate this knowledge into their reporting. We also do a lot of work with policy makers to make sure they are informed.
This was after Fortune wrote a story called, “Former FBI Agent Says Russian Twitter Bots Were Behind Push for McMaster Firing,” after Mother Jones wrote “Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election—Including Many Likely From Russia,” and after Bloomberg wrote “Pro-Russian Bots Sharpen Online Attacks for 2018 U.S. Vote.” Rosenberger’s Vice interview was also just before “policymakers” like congressman Adam Schiff and Senator Dianne Feinstein cited them in issuing a joint statement about “Russian Bot Activity in the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign.”
Subscribers to Racket can read the rest here…
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 18:30 - Visualizing The Odds Of Dying From Various Accidents
Visualizing The Odds Of Dying From Various Accidents
Fatal accidents account for a significant number of deaths in the U.S. every year. For example, nearly 43,000 Americans died in traffic accidents in 2021.
However, as Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu explains below, without the right context, it can be difficult to properly interpret these figures.
To help you understand your chances, we’ve compiled data from the National Safety Council, and visualized the lifetime odds of dying from various accidents.
Data and Methodology
The lifetime odds presented in this graphic were estimated by dividing the one-year odds of dying by the life expectancy of a person born in 2020 (77 years).
Additionally, these numbers are based on data from the U.S., and likely differ in other countries.
For comparison’s sake, the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,000,000. In other words, you are 4000x more likely to die by a lightning strike over your lifetime than to win the Powerball lottery.
Continue reading below for further context on some of these accidents.
Motor Vehicle Accidents
Motor vehicle accidents are a leading cause of accidental deaths in the U.S., with a 1 in 101 chance of dying. This is quite a common way of dying, especially when compared to something like bee stings (1 in 57,825).
Unfortunately, a major cause of vehicle deaths is impaired driving. The CDC reports that 32 Americans are killed every day in crashes involving alcohol, which equates to one death every 45 minutes.
For further context, consider this: 30% of all traffic-related deaths in 2020 involved alcohol-impaired drivers.
Drowning
The odds of drowning in a swimming pool (1 in 5,782) are significantly higher than those of drowning in general (1 in 10,386). According to the CDC, there are 4,000 fatal drownings every year, which works out to 11 deaths per day.
Drowning also happens to be a leading cause of death for children. It is the leading cause for kids aged 1-4, and second highest cause for kids aged 5-14.
A rather surprising fact about drowning is that 80% of fatalities are male. This has been attributed to higher rates of alcohol use and risk-taking behaviors.
Accidental Firearm Discharge
Lastly, let’s look at accidental firearm deaths, which have lifetime odds of 1 in 7,998. That’s higher than the odds of drowning (general), as well as dying in an airplane accident.
This shouldn’t come as a major surprise, since the U.S. has the highest rates of gun ownership in the world. More importantly, these odds highlight the importance of properly securing one’s firearms, as well as learning safe handling practices.
As a percentage of total gun-related deaths (45,222 in 2020), accidental shootings represent a tiny 1%. The two leading causes are suicide (54%) and homicide (43%).
Interested in learning more about death? Revisit one of our most popular posts of all time: Visualizing the History of Pandemics.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 18:00 - Are You The Collateral Damage Of Central Planners?
Are You The Collateral Damage Of Central Planners?
Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,
The Conference Board – a nonprofit think tank that delivers cutting edge research – recently published its latest Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States. The findings were a giant bummer. In December, the LEI dropped for the tenth consecutive month.
The LEI, if you’re unfamiliar with it, consolidates various measures of economic activity, including credit, interest rate spreads, consumer expectations, building permits, new orders of goods and materials, and several other items, to assess which way the economic winds are blowing. Over the past six months, the LEI has fallen by 4.2 percent. This is the fastest six-month decline since the great coronavirus panic.
This week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis provided its advance estimate of Q4 U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). For the final quarter of 2022, real GDP increased at an annual rate of 2.9 percent.
How could it be that GDP is expanding while the LEI is contracting?
The most probable answer we can think of is the massive expansion of consumer debt. For example, credit card balances hit a new record of $866 billion during Q3 2022. That marks a year-over-year increase of 19 percent.
Americans are borrowing from their future to make ends meet today. This may give GDP the appearance that it’s expanding. But, in reality, the GDP expansion is merely a measurement of the rate that consumers are going broke.
The fact is the U.S. economy is traversing headlong into a recession at the worst possible time. We expect things will get especially ugly, as consumers are operating in a world of chaos…
World of Chaos
In a centrally planned economy, decisions are not made between individuals through free market mechanisms. Instead, they’re made by politicians and bureaucrats through policies of mass market intervention.
The elites pass down their edicts. Thou shall not use gas burning stoves, for example. Or though shall burn corn in their gas tank.
The central planners, many of which are unelected administrators, force the decrees upon the populace. Programs, forms, penalties, and whatever else are imposed. Pounds of flesh must be exacted at every turn.
The real tragedy, however, the very thing that makes ultra-mega governments possible, is the monopoly on the control and issuance of money that’s granted to central bankers. Without the Federal Reserve, the central bank to the U.S. government, and its seemingly endless supply of fake money, it would be impossible for Washington to cast its wide nets across the entire planet.
Feeding the Leviathan is only a small part of what the Fed does. Through its control of the money supply the Fed causes a world of chaos to storm through the economy and financial markets. When the money supply is inflated, a false demand is signaled. Businesses and individuals change their behavior to exploit the apparent demand.
Then, when the money supply is contracted, and the rug is yanked out from under the false demand, disaster strikes. Businesses go bankrupts. People lose their jobs. Stocks and real estate prices crash.
In short, the Fed’s money games make it exceedingly impossible for a wage earner to save, invest, and build real wealth. The uncertainty this provokes turns regular wage earners into speculators and gamblers. Here’s why…
Uncertainty and Instability
In a centrally planned economy, like America and most countries today, where people are compelled by legal tender laws to use fiat money, people must work, save, and invest with the recognition that the government will continue to arbitrarily change the rules. The Fed may command ultra-low interest rates one year. The next year it’s jacking them up by hundreds of basis points.
We know that central planners change course at whim and often for political reasons. Where did the most campaign contributions come from? Their decisions can be downright suicidal.
The 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs, for instance, turned a routine recession into the Great Depression. Likewise, Fed tightening of monetary policy in 1987 drove interest rates up and triggered a massive stock market crash.
The great consumer price inflation of 2021 into the present marked the highest rate of inflation in 40 years. And now it’s providing an instructive lesson to individuals and organizations about the uncertainty and instability that’s inherent to centrally planned economies.
As the Fed hikes rates and tightens its balance sheet in the face of a recession, many overleveraged businesses and individuals find themselves wholly unprepared for the central planner’s new set of rules. Decisions were made in 2021 under a framework that’s radically different today.
Consider real estate investors. Over the last decade, as interest rates were artificially suppressed by the Fed, their businesses flourished. They could easily borrow money to buy properties to refurbish and resell at a profit.
But then raging consumer price inflation, which was manufactured by the Fed in the first place, became politically indefensible. So, the Fed had to move to rein it in by restricting the money supply. This pushed interest rates relatively higher and undermined the real estate market.
Investors who had planned for mortgage rates at 3 percent are being absolutely destroyed by mortgage rates at 6 percent. Suddenly their investments don’t pencil out. Real estate agents and mortgage brokers may find the years ahead to be extraordinarily challenging.
Are You the Collateral Damage of Central Planners?
When the Fed inflates the money supply it also inflates asset prices, including stocks, bonds, and real estate. When it then yanks the rug, and contracts the money supply, businesses and investors face big losses. And employees become collateral damage.
According to tech job tracker layoffs.fyi, there have been more than 200,000 technology jobs lost since the start of last year. What’s more, in 2023 alone, not even one month into the New Year, technology companies have laid off over 67,000 employees. What’s going on?
Right now, technology companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, are discovering that the world they knew and loved over the last decade no longer exists. As the supply of money has tightened, and the flow of speculative money into technology stocks has dried up, these companies have learned they have far too many employees who produce far too little value.
Coding senseless applications and widgets may be a viable job when there’s a seemingly endless supply of the Fed’s cheap credit being pumped into financial markets. Take the money away, however, and those jobs are incapable of standing on their own two feet.
The point is in a centrally planned economy people are continually misled about how they should go about working, saving, and investing for the future.
Just asked the former code cruncher who was RIFed after two decades of Googling all day. They thought they were set for life.
Instead, whether they know it or not, they’re the collateral damage of central planners. Are you the collateral damage of central planners too?
* * *
You may not know it. But you could unwittingly be wiped out be the schemes and designs of central planners. One way to avoid becoming their collateral damage is to significantly increase your wealth. The decks stacked against you. But it can be done. If you’re interested in learning how, take a look at my Financial First Aid Kit. Inside, you’ll find everything you need to know to prosper and protect your privacy as the global economy slips into a worldwide depression.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 17:30 - New RAND Study Breaks From US Hawks, Warns Against "Protracted Conflict" In Ukraine
New RAND Study Breaks From US Hawks, Warns Against “Protracted Conflict” In Ukraine
The famous Pentagon and US government-linked think tank RAND Corporation has finally attempted to inject some rare realism into the Washington establishment’s thinking and planning regarding the Ukraine war. So far throughout eleven months of conflict which remains largely stalemated, though the last few days have seen Russian military momentum and advance grow in the Bakhmut offensive, US and NATO officials have unhesitatingly and enthusiastically cheered on every major escalation of the West’s involvement.
But the new 32-page RAND document has sounded the alarm over the dangers of this approach, which is unusual given the think tank is notorious for being the hawkish academic arm of the military-industrial complex. This was especially the case in the Vietnam war era, when RAND became infamous for its fueling the policy behind various insurgency and counterinsurgency fiascos in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.
RAND now argues that in Ukraine “US interests would be best served by avoiding a protracted conflict,” and that “costs and risks of a long war…outweigh the possible benefits.”
US Marine Corps image: war gaming The policy document lays out that allowing the conflict extend longer, which we should note the Biden administration has almost guaranteed with its decision this past week to supply advanced battle tanks, is itself a severe danger.
The abstract on the introductory page reads as follows:
The authors argue that, in addition to minimizing the risks of major escalation, U.S. interests would be best served by avoiding a protracted conflict. The costs and risks of a long war in Ukraine are significant and outweigh the possible benefits of such a trajectory for the United States. Although Washington cannot by itself determine the war’s duration, it can take steps that make an eventual negotiated end to the conflict more likely.
Ultimately the study (pdf) explains why from a strategic point of view based on real US interests, there’s little benefit for Washington in rolling back Russia’s control of territory in east; however, there remains immense risk and high costs that would be attached to it.
The study additionally concludes of ongoing efforts to punish Russia economically and militarily that
“further incremental weakening [of Russia] is arguably no longer as significant a benefit for US interests.” Alternately it warns that the impact on energy markets and food in the at-all-costs drive of “keeping the Ukrainian state economically solvent” may not be worth it, given these costs will only “multiply over time.”Similar to some recent media reports based on the reluctant acknowledgement of US officials, RAND also points out that continuing NATO military aid to Ukraine “could also become unsustainable after a certain period,” given the likelihood that Russia may “reverse Ukrainian battlefield gains.”
From the Rand Study: “Avoiding a Long War U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict” Another crucial admission in the document is that the Ukraine war distracts and wastes precious defense resources away from another important theatre of operations: China and east Asia. It states:
Beyond the potential for Russian gains and the economic consequences for Ukraine, Europe, and the world, a long war would also have on sequences for U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. ability to focus on its other global priorities —particularly, competition with China— will remain constrained as long as the war is absorbing senior policymakers’ time and U.S. military resources.
And although Russia will be more dependent on China regardless of when the war ends, Washington does have a long-term interest in ensuring that Moscow does not become completely subordinated to Beijing. A longer war that increases Russia’s dependence could provide China advantages in its competition with the United States.
Thus open-ended and deepened Pentagon involvement in helping Ukraine to push back Russia ultimately benefits Beijing.
But at this point, the authors ask, what can be done? RAND recommends the following course to be put into action immediately:
A dramatic, overnight shift in U.S. policy is politically impossible—both domestically and with allies—and would be unwise in any case. But developing these instruments now and socializing them with Ukraine and with U.S. allies might help catalyze the eventual start of a process that could bring this war to a negotiated end in a time frame that would serve U.S. interests. The alternative is a long war that poses major challenges for the United States, Ukraine, and the rest of the world.
…So even RAND is sane enough to see that the Western world is headed for disaster if it keeps up this jingoistic push to support Kiev at all costs and with no off-ramp.
* * *
Meanwhile, most top decision-makers and commanders are unlikely to heed the memo…
🇺🇸🇪🇺🇷🇺Journalist(1:05 of the video):”We are ready to a direct confrontation with Russia?”
“We are” – Chair of the NATO Military Committee Rob Bauer pic.twitter.com/GbrzgYzMN4
— AZ 🛰🌏🌍🌎 (@AZgeopolitics) January 28, 2023
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 17:00 - Pro-Life Activists Face Prison Time As DOJ Increases FACE Act Prosecutions
Pro-Life Activists Face Prison Time As DOJ Increases FACE Act Prosecutions
Authored by Beth Brelje via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Holding bullhorns and sometimes graphic signs depicting aborted babies, sidewalk ministers around the United States have seconds to reach the hearts of pregnant women moments before they walk into abortion facilities.
“We had one mother who came up to me on the sidewalk. She saw some signs of ours, stopped, and said, ‘Is that real?’ It was a photo of a baby that had been aborted,” Denny Green, 56, of Cumberland, Virginia, told The Epoch Times. “We let her know, ‘Yeah, that is real.’ She said, ‘If that’s real, I can’t do that to my baby,’ and she decided not to take her baby’s life.”
Coleman Boyd stands on a ladder near an abortion facility in Bristol, Va., in December 2022. (Courtesy of Coleman Boyd) Green said the group followed up with the woman, helping with food and other needs but eventually lost contact, until five years later.
“She saw us out on the street again, stopped and let us meet her little girl,” he said. “That has happened numerous times. We’re there for the long haul, if they need us, as a friend or as a help. We’re there to walk with them.”
Denny Green with his daughter Charity and his grandson Hudson on the sidewalk in front of a Planned Parenthood abortion facility in Charlottesville, Va., in 2021. (Courtesy of Denny Green) Green is among 11 people federally charged with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for a March 2021 pro-life demonstration at a now-closed abortion facility in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. The FACE Act prohibits interference with obtaining or providing abortions.
In this case, the abortion facility was inside a larger medical building that had other, unrelated medical offices. Some of those charged stood in the hallway, blocking the door, while others stood down the hall, closer to an elevator. They sang Christian songs, prayed, and spoke to women seeking to enter the facility, which is shown in a video captured by one of the group members.
“Sir, that baby is a blessing from God,” one of the 11 told a couple who walked toward the abortion facility door, saw the people in the hallway, then got back on the elevator.
“Yeah. More power to you,” the man with the woman said as the elevator doors closed.
Local police arrested some members of the group and charged them with trespassing. Once the trespassing charges were handled, those arrested thought the incident was behind them. But 19 months later, in October 2022, they were charged by the FBI.
By this time, the abortion facility was closed due to a change in Tennessee law that now bans abortion after a baby’s heartbeat is detected.
The landscape on the frontline of abortion is changing.
While sidewalk counselors preach, most often from the sidewalk, abortion facilities have volunteer escorts to walk women from their cars to the facility doors. The escorts sometimes try to drown out the voices of preachers and counselors by blowing whistles, running loud leaf blowers, or screaming vulgarities at them.
Shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden issued an executive order for his administration to address “the heightened risk related to seeking and providing reproductive health care.” He formed the Reproductive Rights Task Force, a Justice Department-led group focused, in part, on enforcing the FACE Act.
Passed in 1994, the FACE Act chilled some pro-life activity at abortion facilities. Starting in the late 1980s, thousands of pro-life activists willing to face low-level trespassing charges used to hold sit-ins, pray, and carry signs at abortion facilities around the country. But after the fatal shootings of two abortionists and three facility workers in the early 1990s, the FACE Act—which calls for federal prison and fines—was implemented. Fewer people were willing to risk federal charges and left the movement.
Still, some pro-life activists are willing to risk their freedom to save babies headed for death.
Now, the Biden administration is cracking down on them. In the 10 years between 2011 and 2021, the Department of Justice criminally charged 17 people with FACE Act violations, according to the DOJ website. In 2022 alone, the DOJ charged 26 people. The Epoch Times requested comment from the DOJ.
Stiffer Penalties
Paul Vaughn, 55, reads a story to his youngest child at their home in Hickman County, Tenn., in an undated photo. (Courtesy of Paul Vaughn) Paul Vaughn, a father of 11 in Centerville, Tennessee, was preparing to take his children to school on Oct. 5, 2022, when the FBI pounded on his door with their guns drawn, terrifying the children, he said. FBI agents put him in handcuffs, drove him to Nashville, put him in a holding cell, and charged him with violating the FACE Act and with conspiracy to violate civil rights for his participation in the Tennessee event.
By 2 p.m., he said, they released him onto the streets of Nashville with no phone or wallet to find his way home and with a new list of pretrial restrictions to follow, such as where he was allowed to travel.
In addition to there being more FACE Act arrests recently, the penalties are higher. Vaughn faces 11 years in federal prison because of the added conspiracy charge.
“I’ve got an 18-month-old at home and several other children that will spend a good part of their developing years without dad at home, if I end up going to prison for an extended time,” Vaughn told The Epoch Times.
He said he and his wife have cried and prayed about the situation many times.
“God is in control,” he said. “He knows the beginning from the end. My children will see their dad at least had the courage to stand for what’s right.”
There are two federal conspiracy statutes for these kinds of cases, Stephen Crampton, Vaughn’s attorney and senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, told The Epoch Times. One requires that, for a conspiracy violation, the penalty cannot be greater than the penalty for the underlying crime.
“In this case, a first offense, nonviolent FACE violation, you only have a misdemeanor charge, up to one year in prison. So if they were to use that particular generic conspiracy statute, all they could get for the conspiracy part is another one year,” Crampton said, stressing that this is the first time he recalls a conspiracy charge in connection to a FACE charge.
“They dug deep in their little bag of tricks and found the conspiracy to Violate Civil Rights statute and charged us with that one, which carries a sentence up to 10 years,” Crampton said. “What was the civil right we were talking about with FACE? It was abortion. So now they’re going to pretend that the civil rights they’re dealing with, is the right to access to so-called reproductive health care. … Civil rights was always abortion, not the right to go in and get a pregnancy test. Nobody in the pro-life movement is going to engage in concerted activities to prohibit that action. So there’s all these little white lies that they’re using to try to throw the book at Paul and other folks since Roe v. Wade has been overturned.”
The conspiracy charge that some in this case face stems from using Facebook to communicate about meeting and live-streaming the group standing in the hallway.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 16:30 - North Korea Blasts US Tanks For Ukraine, Vows To "Stand In Same Trench" With Russia
North Korea Blasts US Tanks For Ukraine, Vows To “Stand In Same Trench” With Russia
North Korea has issued somewhat rare statements lashing out at growing US military involvement in Ukraine, with the influential sister of Kim Jong Un condemning the decision to transfer heavy battle tanks.
Kim Yo Jong’s statement came on the heels this week of the US confirming it will send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, and they were her first public remarks in months. She charged that Washington is crossing a “red line” in its drive to escalate a “proxy war” aimed at regime change in Russia. “I express serious concern over the US escalating the war situation by providing Ukraine with military hardware for ground offensive,” said Kim.
Image: STR/KCNA/Getty Images “The US is the arch criminal which poses serious threat and challenge to the strategic security of Russia and pushes the regional situation to the present grave phase,” she added, in her official statement as vice-department director of the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea.
“I do not doubt that any military hardware the US and the West boast of will be burnt into pieces in the face of the indomitable fighting spirit and might of the heroic Russian army and people,” she added.
Importantly, at a moment the US is accusing Pyongyang of supplying Russia’s military with artillery shells and other lethal equipment, particularly the Wagner Group, Kim stressed that North Korea will always “stand in the same trench” with Russia.
The US throughout months of the war going back to the summer has issued repeat vague allegations that North Korea supplying Russian forces with tens of thousands of artillery shells, which both sides have denied.
But starting last month the Biden administration narrowed the allegations to Pyongyang’s support to the Putin-linked mercenary Wagner Group.
“Wagner is searching around the world for arms suppliers to support its military operations in Ukraine,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby had said in a late December press briefing. “We can confirm that North Korea has completed an initial arms delivery to Wagner, which paid for that equipment.”
The US now says it has satellite evidence of the transfers, describing weapons-laden trains going back and forth over the small stretch of Russia-North Korea border in the far east.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 16:00 - Masterpiece Cakeshop Loses Appeal Over Gender Transition Cake
Masterpiece Cakeshop Loses Appeal Over Gender Transition Cake
Jack Phillip, the Colorado baker who brought the challenge in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission has again lost an appeal in Colorado state court. After the Supreme Court effectively punted on the issue of his free speech and free exercise challenges to the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (“CADA”), which protects against the denial of service in a place of public accommodation based on one’s identity. After the 2018 decision, Phillip faced additional demands including the creation of a gender transitioning cake. The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that the refusal to make the cake requested by Autumn Scardina did not constitute free speech.
I have a forthcoming law review article on free speech protections for the speech involved in this and similar cases around the country: “The Unfinished Masterpiece: Speech Compulsion and the Evolving Jurisprudence over Religious Speech” (forthcoming 2023).
Many years ago, I wrote an academic piece on how anti-discrimination laws would inevitably collide with free-speech and free-exercise rights. Those conflicts continued to mount across the country. In 2018, the court was thought to be ready to clarify the applicable standards in the case of a religious cake shop owner who refused to make cakes for same-sex couples. The court ultimately punted in Masterpiece Cakeshop, leaving uncertainty over the constitutional limitations on cities and states under anti-discrimination law.
Smith’s case has long been a focus for some of us. I have written in favor of taking a free-speech approach to these cases rather than treating them as conflicts under the Constitution’s religion clauses. For that reason, one aspect of this grant of review was immediately notable. The court agreed to consider only one question: “Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”
For Phillips, he has spent over a decade in state and federal courts. In the latest decision, the appellate court found that the creation of the cake can be “inherently expressive and therefore entitled to First Amendment protection.” However, the court still denied free speech protections by dismissing the notion that this particular cake was expressive:
“We conclude that creating a pink cake with blue frosting is not inherently expressive and any message or symbolism it provides to 39 an observer would not be attributed to the baker. Thus, CADA does not compel Masterpiece and Phillips to speak through the creation and sale of such a cake to Scardina.”
The court used the same rationale of the cakes design to deny Phillips religious claims:
“We also reject Masterpiece and Phillips’ argument that the statute punishes them for exercising their religious beliefs because CADA is “applie[d] through the Commission’s purported use of an ‘offensiveness rule.’” For the reasons previously articulated, even if we were to assume such a standard exists, the trial court’s ruling in this case was not predicated on the perceived “offensiveness” of the message, but rather on the fact that the pink and blue cake expressed no message, whether secular or religious.”
Fortunately, 303 Creative has the makings of a major free speech victory. The case involves a challenge of a web designer who was not only told that she must prepare websites for same-sex marriages despite her religious objections but that she cannot post a statement on her own website on her views of same-sex marriage. For free speech advocates, it is a nightmarish combination of compelled speech and censored speech.
With this denial of his constitutional rights, Phillips moves closer to a new appeal to the Supreme Court, which left him to years of additional litigation by effectively punting his case in 2018.
Here is the decision: Scardina v. Masterpiece Cakeshop Inc., No. 2023COA8 (Colo. App. Ct. Jan. 26, 2023), https://www.courts.state.co.us/Courts/Court_of_Appeals/Opinion/2023/21CA1142-PD.pdf.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 15:30 - Romance In 2023: 1 In 6 People Run Background Checks On Online Dates
Romance In 2023: 1 In 6 People Run Background Checks On Online Dates
The online dating app Tinder was launched more than a decade ago. Just hearing that makes some of us feel old. But over a decade of people swiping their way to love and sex — there have been horror stories along the way. One poll found an increasing number of people are running background checks on their dates.
Welcome to 2023, and dating has never been easier as Tinder’s algorithm, or any other dating app, supplies the user with compatible matches based on profile and geographical area. The app allows users to instantly communicate and coordinate a first date at a restaurant, bar, and or event, though horror stories have emerged over the years of some users getting scammed, sexually assaulted, and/or having their life threatened.
A new poll of more than 1,000 singles, commissioned by the Thriving Center of Psychology, revealed 1 in 5 (18%) of dating app users ran a background check on their date.
About 38% of respondents admitted to creeping on their date’s social media accounts. More than half of women versus only a quarter of men researched their date online. Nearly a third spend more than 20 minutes investigating their date.
The reason for all this due diligence stems from a decade of Tinder experiences turned into dating horror stories that have been highly publicized in the news. A background check is a blunt tool, more powerful than a Google search, that will reveal criminal record history, employment history, education, and much more.
Tinder has learned over the years of bad actors on their platform. Last year, the company made it easier for users to run background checks within the app for a small fee.
Besides the increasing distrust users have about their dates, more than half (56%) said dating is more challenging than ever. Not just because of the threat of some crazy ‘stage five clinger’ but also because of soaring inflation.
About 35% of respondents said they’ve gone on fewer dates because of inflation, and 26% are now splitting the bill on the date.
Isn’t technology supposed to improve the quality of life? Regarding dating apps, it seems that users are playing Russian roulette on their first date unless a background check is completed.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 15:00 - Pfizer Responds After Director Says Company Is Developing Ways To Mutate COVID-19
Pfizer Responds After Director Says Company Is Developing Ways To Mutate COVID-19
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Pfizer late Jan. 28 responded to comments from a director at the company about exploring ways to mutate COVID-19 as a method to “preemptively develop new vaccines.”
“In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research,” Pfizer said in a lengthy written statement after days of ignoring queries from The Epoch Times and other outlets.
A sign for Pfizer is displayed in New York in a file photograph. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images) Pfizer did say that it has conducted research “where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.”
“This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities. This research provides a way for us to rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize a newly identified variant of concern. We then make this data available through peer reviewed scientific journals and use it as one of the steps to determine whether a vaccine update is required,” the company added.
Pfizer did say it has conducted experiments in a level 3 laboratory.
Pfizer said, in its work developing a treatment for COVID-19, it has “engineered” the COVID-19 virus “to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.”
“In addition, in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory to assess whether the main protease can mutate to yield resistant strains of the virus,” Pfizer said. “It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products and are carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world.”
Pfizer produces a COVID-19 treatment called Paxlovid, or nirmatrelvir that is authorized in the United States and some other countries.
In its statement, Pfizer did not dispute that Dr. Jordon Walker, who told a Project Veritas journalist that Pfizer is exploring how to “mutate” the COVID-19 virus, was or is a Pfizer employee.
Professional profiles for Walker, which have since been taken down, listed him as a director of messenger RNA research at the company. Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine utilizes messenger RNA. The profiles also listed a Pfizer email address, and an email sent to that address did not bounce back. A receptionist at Pfizer on Thursday also told The Epoch Times that Walker had an internal company profile, but a different receptionist on Friday said there was no listing for the doctor, indicating he might have been terminated after the comments were made public.
Malone
Dr. Robert Malone, who helped develop the messenger RNA technology, said that the experiments Pfizer described met the definition of “gain of function.”
“Pfizer is basically acknowledging that they are doing the same type of gain of function research that Boston University was caught doing, but they are denying that it is gain of function or directed evolution,” Malone wrote on Twitter.
1) Pfizer lawyers did not throw their Director of R&D Operations and Scientific Planning under the bus. 2) there is no denial of what he said. 3) No denial that he is Pfizer staff. 4) Swapping new spike sequences into original Wuhan-1 is technically gain of function research.
— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) January 28, 2023
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Malone pointed to Pfizer’s comment about taking the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and using it “to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.”
Gain of function generally describes experiments that aim to increase functions of a virus such as transmissibility and virulence. Walker had said in his comments that the work he was describing was not gain of function, but “directed evolution.”
Researchers with Boston University revealed in 2022 that they had developed a strain of COVID-19 that killed 80 percent of mice infected with it.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is supposed to oversee risky research conducted in or funded by the United States but has faced criticism for only reviewing a handful of projects—none since 2019—under the oversight system.
The NIH funded gain of function experiments at the Wuhan laboratory situated near where the first COVID-19 cases were identified, and officials have promised to keep funding research in China.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) had written a letter to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla referring to Walker’s remarks and questioning whether the company has or is planning to mutate the COVID-19 virus.
Walker’s comments “are alarming,” Rubio wrote in the Jan. 26 missive.
YouTube Takes Down Video
In a notice sent to Project Veritas, YouTube cited its medical misinformation policy, which bars “claims about COVID-19 vaccination that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities or the World Health Organization (WHO).”
It wasn’t clear which authorities specifically YouTube was relying upon to rebut the video.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, did not respond to a request for comment.
O’Keefe noted that the claims in the video were made by a Pfizer director.
Project Veritas was given a “strike,” which prevents the organization from taking actions like uploading new videos for one week. A second strike would block such actions for two weeks and a third strike in a 90-day period would result in a permanent removal of the group’s account, YouTube warned.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 14:30 - Moscow Says 14 Killed In "Deliberate" Ukraine Strikes On Hospital; Russia On Verge Of Taking Bakhmut
Moscow Says 14 Killed In “Deliberate” Ukraine Strikes On Hospital; Russia On Verge Of Taking Bakhmut
Throughout the eleven months of conflict in Ukraine, Kiev authorities have on multiple occasions charged that Russian airstrikes have targeted hospitals, clinics, apartment blocks, and other civilian sites. But on Saturday Russia’s Defense Ministry said that hospitals in Russian-controlled regions are being targeted by Ukraine’s military. What’s more is that the Russians say a deadly attack against civilians was carried out using US weaponry.
The ministry said 14 were killed and 24 wounded – most of them “hospital patients and medical staff” when a hospital was struck by rockets in the Luhansk Oblast town of Novoaidar. A statement alleged that on Saturday morning “the Ukrainian armed forces deliberately attacked the building of a district hospital with rockets of a U.S.-made HIMARS multiple launch rocket system.”
Via TASS/AFP: The Novoaidar district hospital and outpatient clinic in the aftermath of shelling by the Ukrainian Army in the eastern Luhansk region. It further indicated the hospital had been providing “necessary medical assistance to the local population and military personnel for many months” – while calling the crime “deliberate”.
“A deliberate missile strike on a known active civilian medical facility is, without doubt, a grave war crime by the Kiev regime,” the ministry said, according to the AFP. The statement further noted that “All the victims are being provided with professional medical aid.”
Defense officials are now using language that echoes the Ukrainian side and Western side, vowing that the ‘war crime’ would be investigated and that everyone that planned and implemented the strikes would be “brought to justice.” If Ukraine acknowledges the attack, it will likely focus on calling the hospital a ‘military target’ – given the location also treated Russian soldiers.
Meanwhile, on the other side, EU efforts to establish a special Russian war crimes tribunal moved forward this week. “The European Union’s assembly called on the member states on Thursday to back the creation of a special court to judge any war crime of aggression by Russia in Ukraine,” AP reported.
WATCH: #BNNUkraine Reports
Footage shows the aftermath of a Ukrainian Army strike on a hospital in #Novoaidar #Luhansk, according to Russian Defense sources.
The hospital appears to have been completely destroyed in the footage. pic.twitter.com/SjtXwbnwbw
— Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (@gchahal) January 28, 2023
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“The nonbinding resolution was approved by a 472-19 vote with 33 abstentions in the European Parliament, and underscored the EU’s willingness to make sure Moscow should be brought to justice for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” AP detailed.
Currently, Russia is escalating attacks in an around the strategic Donetsk region city of Bakhmut, with international and Western reports acknowledging that Russian forces have the battlefield momentum and upper hand at this point.
Western sources are now advising Kyiv to strategically withdraw | @lucaswebber009 https://t.co/XHy9FHJBPw
— UnHerd (@unherd) January 28, 2023
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The Wall Street Journal reports Saturday that “Inside Bakhmut, gunshots echoed from the east side of the river that bisects the city. Waves of Russian troops were pushing in from the east, and two pontoon bridges across the river hit this week were passable only by foot, Ukrainian soldiers said.”
“Ukrainians said they were fighting for each block, but were outnumbered and outgunned, and the Russians were slowly taking territory in the city,” the report adds. Some war monitors have said the Russians have the city almost encircled at this critical juncture.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/28/2023 – 14:00
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