- Think Trump Is Hitler? Go To Dachau
Authored by Peter van Buren via The American Conservative,
You won’t find any shallow hashtags at the former concentration camp, just quiet, powerful reality…
Right now, someone in the media is finding another excuse to proclaim that Trump is Hitler, America is Germany 1933, and detention centers on the southern border are concentration camps.
Recently I went to Dachau, just outside of Munich, to see a real concentration camp.
The first thing you notice is the irony. The people who, in too loud voices, mill around the station entrance asking “Is this the train to Dachau?” and then the conductor’s announcement calling out the name as if it were just another stop. The mediocre station has a McDonald’s. The bus stop sign for the shuttle you need to take has “Concentration Camp” written in English. Everyone around you is on vacation, dressed for it and chattering like it. You arrive at a visitor’s center, and there’s a rush for the toilets and the snack bar. Which way to the camp, Dad? Can we see the crematorium? Can we?
A hundred steps outside the snack bar, the world changes. The road turns gray even though the light playing through the poplars is out of a postcard. They’ve changed the entrance location from a few years ago so that you now enter through the former SS barracks and come to the gate. It really says Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Will Set You Free”) on the iron bars and you walk through just like they did. The gate only swings one way; you will leave today, but it wasn’t originally designed that way and you can tell. There may be a hundred people with you but it is completely silent as you enter.
It is too small. You see the administrative buildings to the right, the reconstructed prisoner barracks to the left, the assembly ground in front of you. You see the fences and walls on all four sides, walkable in a few minutes at an easy pace on a gorgeous day. It is too small to have held all those people, too small for all that happened, too small to be the symbol of Nazi power it was then. You expect something more substantial, with the distant site lines obscured, like at Disney World, where tricks of the eye make things seem grander.
It is too familiar. It takes only a few minutes to get your bearings. You’ve seen photos before, and there are many posted, populating the place with buildings and people once here and forever gone. It is unlike, say, an art museum on the scale of the Met or the Uffizi, where, after hours of circling corridors, you have no idea where you’ve been. You know Dachau.
The museum unfolds in the order that new prisoners were processed. The early days of National Socialism are explained where the inmates were once assigned numbers. The seizure of power by Hitler is documented in the room where people were stripped and deloused (subtlety is missing when the backdrop is Nazism). And you exit into the campgrounds awkwardly after reading about their liberation by the 45th Infantry Division.
You think, after all that reading and those museum exhibits (and it is a thorough education, much more than an Instagram collection of artifacts and, oh look, a real prisoner’s uniform, honey!), you understand something. But not yet. You have really just arrived, and in front of you is Dachau itself, the ground, the air—the same ground they saw and air they breathed—and you have a choice. Many visitors turn back towards the snack bar, falsely satiated after an hour, thinking they’ve seen Dachau and anxiously trying to remember when the shuttle bus runs back to the station.
If you wait for them to leave, you can see Dachau.
Most of the place is empty, acres of crushed stone with flat markers showing where the now-missing barracks were. The trees lining the central road bisecting the camp are old. They were here when Dachau was working. You can match up an individual tree from a 1942 photo with the one in front of you and touch it. The sun is warm; it’s a beautiful late summer afternoon with those wonderful tickles of early fall all around. A day to be alive, grandpa would have called it. There must have been days just like this one in 1942.
There is some minor archaeological excavation work going on. An archaeologist stands over a hole about three feet deep and explains that he’s looking for evidence of the original fence line, the border of the camp before it was expanded in 1937. He’s found some wooden post fragments and some barbed wire. So the bottom of that hole is 1937, I ask? Yes, he says, the dirt and stones piled here haven’t seen sunlight since then. I ask if I can take one of the stones with me as a keepsake, and he explains that is not allowed, even as he looks away just long enough. Doing the right thing is hard enough elsewhere, never mind in Dachau.
A sign states simply that the area in front of you is where the barracks used for medical experiments on live humans once stood. Another denotes the punishment barracks, where the SS concocted even darker methods of retribution. You see where the bodies were stacked like cordwood but you know that wood is strong and straight and the images you are recreating show corpses floppy and tangled in their piles. Now you are seeing Dachau, here in the deeper waters.
Dachau does not believe in your tears. This is not a sentimental place. It is not clean. A universe of victims died here but there is no acknowledgement of victimhood, or raising of awareness, or giving of voice, or trafficking in of shallow hashtags. Dachau is here to declare what happened and charge you with doing something on the scale and with the accuracy that are required.
See, by coming here, it is now handed to you, that obligation. Hitler and his Dachau did not emerge from an election that frowned on a favored candidate. Following World War I, Germany was purposefully humiliated and saddled with war reparations that were not payable. An economic crisis unrolled. Inflation drove the nation to starvation. With no history of democracy, Germany was willed into a republic as unprepared as two virgins in an arranged marriage. Both across the border and at home, powerful communist forces threatened. Hungry people weren’t tricked into a strongman because of Facebook or some Electoral College fluke; they demanded one.
Within three months of taking office, Hitler gave himself the right to amend the constitution, ended representative government, created special political courts, made criticism of the government a capital crime, and established Dachau. Two months after that, Jews were fired from government positions, political parties and unions were prohibited, opponents were murdered, and books were burned. There was no slippery slope. It was not incremental; it was inevitable.
There is obviously more to this story than a travelogue about an interesting day trip out to Dachau by train from nearby Munich. To say that Trump is Hitler, America is Germany in 1933, and a grimy detention facility is a concentration camp means you have never been to Dachau.
The presentation at Dachau is very un-2019, where everyone vies for adopted victimhood and chosen trauma. Dachau is cold because only its facts matter.
Tweets childishly mocking political opponents and regulations preventing a small number of self-declared trans people from joining the Army have nothing to do with Dachau. To cite 2019 border facilities or exaggerate the historical impact of a march in Charlottesville is to turn Dachau relative, the dial jiggered to magnify some other event. It makes people numb; it dumbs down discussion; it is cheap, inaccurate, and exploitative. It demands mighty outrage from a partial set of facts. Both butterflies and elephants have legs, but no one should claim a butterfly is an elephant.
Propagandists have always used ignorance to manipulate. Yet while CNN works to convince viewers that silver mylar blankets instead of comfy quilts for migrants means there are concentration camps in America, Dachau reminds us that physicians here dissected human beings alive as part of medical experiments. Just as is taught in beginning writing courses, truth comes from showing, not just telling. For those who call Trump a Nazi, there is Dachau to visit. For the record.
- Americans Spent Nearly $150 Billion On Illegal Drugs Last Year
The U.S. opioid crisis has been making headlines again this week after pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson was fined $572 for fuelling the epidemic in Oklahoma in a historic ruling.
As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, last year, drug overdoses claimed more than 68,000 American lives and 47,000 of those deaths involved an opioid. Even though heroin, prescription opioids and synthetic opioids like fentanyl are receiving most of the attention, deaths from other drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine are increasing.
A new report from the RAND Corporation has shed light on just how many people use illicit drugs across America as well as how much they pay for them.
You will find more infographics at Statista
In 2016 alone, people in the U.S. spent an estimated $146 billion on cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine. Adding RAND’s figures together from 2006 to 2016 would mean total spending on illegal drugs over the course of the decade was nearly $1.5 trillion.
Out of all four drugs in 2016, users spent the most on illicit marijuana – $52 billion.
The market for the illegal green stuff is around the size of the cocaine and methamphetamine markets combined. Heroin has the second highest financial outlay ($43 billon) followed by methamphetamine ($27 billion) and cocaine ($24 billion).
- What Is Justice For McCabe?
Authored by Andrew McCarthy via NationalReview.com,
The former deputy director’s FBI coddled Clinton and addled Trump. Now he seeks clemency… even as he sues the Justice Department…
Hillary Clinton checked every box for a violation of the Espionage Act. So much so that, in giving her a pass, the FBI figured it better couch her conduct as “extremely careless,” rather than “grossly negligent.” The latter description was stricken from an earlier draft of then-director James Comey’s remarks because it is, verbatim, the mental state the statute requires for a felony conviction. It wouldn’t do to have an “exoneration” statement read like a felony indictment.
In point of fact, the careless/negligent semantic game was a sideshow. Mrs. Clinton’s unlawful storage and transmission of classified information had been patently willful. In contemptuous violation of government standards, which she was bound not only to honor but to enforce as secretary of state, she systematically conducted her government business by private email, via a laughably unsecure homebrew server set-up. Her Obama administration allies stress that it was not her purpose to harm national security, but that was beside the point. The crime was mishandling classified information, and she committed it. And even if motive had mattered (it didn’t), her purpose was to conceal the interplay between her State Department and the Clinton Foundation, and to avoid generating a paper trail as she prepared to run for president. No, that’s not as bad as trying to do national-security harm, but it’s condemnable all the same.
While Clinton’s mishandling of classified information got all the attention, it was just the tip of the felony iceberg. Thousands of the 33,000 emails she withheld and undertook to “bleach bit” into oblivion related to State Department business. It is a felony to misappropriate even a single government record. The destruction of the emails, moreover, occurred after a House Committee investigating the Benghazi massacre issued subpoenas and preservation directives to Clinton’s State Department and Clinton herself. If Andrew Weissmann and the rest of the Mueller probe pit-bulls had half as solid an obstruction case against Donald Trump, the president would by now have been impeached, removed, and indicted.
And that dichotomy is the point, isn’t it?
In the Obama Justice Department — as extended by the Mueller investigation, staffed by Obama Justice Department officials and other Clinton-friendly Democrats — justice was dispensed with a partisan eye. If you were Hillary Clinton, you skated. If you were Donald Trump, they were determined to dig until they found something — and, even when they failed to make a case, the digging never stopped . . . it just shifted to Capitol Hill.
No one knows the skewed lay of the land better than Andrew McCabe.
The FBI’s former deputy director is in the Justice Department’s crosshairs. His lawyers are reportedly pleading with top officials not to indict him for lying to FBI agents who were probing a leak of investigative information, orchestrated by none other than McCabe.
McCabe is feeling the heat because the evidence that he made false statements is daunting. So daunting, in fact, that even he concedes he did not tell the truth to investigators. Listen carefully to what he says about the case — there being no shortage of public commentary on it from the newly minted CNN analyst. He never “deliberately misled anyone,” he insists. Sure, he grudgingly admits, some of his statements “were not fully accurate,” or perhaps were “misunderstood” by his interrogators. But “at worst,” you see, “I was not clear in my responses, and because of what was going on around me may well have been confused and distracted.”
Uh-huh.
Seems to me that General Michael Flynn “may well have been confused and distracted,” too. After all, it was on Flynn’s insanely busy first full day on the job as the new president’s national-security adviser that McCabe and Comey dispatched two agents — Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka — to brace him for an interview.
As our Rich Lowry recounts, Comey later bragged to an audience of like-minded anti-Trumpers at the 92nd Street Y that he knew this was a breach of protocol. Because seeking to interview a member of the president’s staff in a criminal investigation is a big deal, the Bureau is supposed to go through the attorney general, who alerts the White House counsel. That ensures that the administration is aware of the situation, and that the suspected staffer is advised of the reason for the interview and given an opportunity to consult with a lawyer.
Of course, if protocol had been followed, McCabe would not have been able to have Flynn grilled without preparation and without counsel. That put Flynn in a very different posture from Hillary Clinton.
She got every courtesy. The FBI not only scheduled her interview well in advance; before she showed up, before they asked her a single question, they had already finished drafting Comey’s statement exonerating her. Not just that. Clinton was permitted to bring along — among her phalanx of lawyers — her State Department aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, key witnesses who had gotten immunity from prosecution. (In a real investigation, they’d have been considered subjects, not witnesses.) Allowing witnesses to sit in as lawyers was not just a violation of Justice Department practice (to say nothing of common sense). Federal criminal law prohibits former officials from lobbying the government on behalf of another person in a matter in which the former official was heavily involved while working for the government.
Recall that when he decided against an indictment of Clinton, Comey famously pronounced that “no reasonable prosecutor” would charge her. Even though Clinton’s conduct technically transgressed the law, the then-director rationalized that he could find no prior Espionage Act prosecution for gross negligence on facts analogous to Clinton’s case.
Where exactly would we expect find analogous facts? Not much precedent about secretaries of state sedulously setting up non-government communications systems for years of correspondence involving thousands of classified communications. But let’s put this historical anomaly aside. Let’s even ignore that military officials have been prosecuted for less-egregious classified-information violations. Here’s the point: In giving Clinton a pass, Comey explained that “responsible” prosecutorial decisions “consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.”
Okay . . . then how is it that General Flynn gets investigated and charged?
Flynn, as a member of Trump’s transition team and incoming national-security adviser, had been consulting with the Russian ambassador, among other foreign counterparts. Context? There was nothing illegal or illegitimate about such communications. And even if it had been appropriate for the FBI and the Justice Department to inquire into the foreign policy of the incoming president elected by the American people, the Bureau did not need to interview Flynn. They had recordings of the conversations. What reason could there have been to question Flynn about them — without playing the recordings for him — except to lay the groundwork for a false-statements prosecution?
Moreover, how have similar situations been handled in the past? In investigating Flynn, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI theorized that he might have violated the Logan Act, a dubious law that purports to criminalize foreign policy freelancing by private citizens. Despite being on the books for over two centuries, the Logan Act has never resulted in a successful prosecution. Not once. In fact, it has not even been used to indict anyone in the last 170 years. Indeed, but for its desuetude, the Logan Act would certainly have been held unconstitutional; because the Justice Department never invokes it, no one has had the opportunity to challenge it. Yet, the Logan Act was used to justify investigating Flynn — a transition official whose very job entailed consultation with foreign officials.
As we noted a few days ago, the FBI and Mueller’s investigators prosecuted George Papadopoulos for lying about the date of a meeting. Though the lie was inconsequential to the probe, they made the then-28-year-old eat a felony charge. And while they could easily have had his lawyer surrender him for processing on the charge and quick release on bail, they instead choreographed an utterly unnecessary nighttime arrest that forced him to spend a night in jail.
Suffice it to say that Paul Combetta did not get the Papadopoulos brass-knuckles treatment.
Combetta was not prosecuted even though he brazenly lied to the FBI about the circumstances of his destruction of Clinton’s private emails. He was the key witness who had been in communication with Clinton confederates before and after his bleach-bit blitz through Clinton’s emails. In a normal case, prosecutors would charge him with obstruction and false statements to pressure him into cooperating. In the Clinton caper, though, he was given immunity . . . and duly clammed up.
No false-statements charges against Combetta. No false-statements charges against Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, intimate Clinton aides who claimed not to know about Clinton’s private server while they worked for her at the State Department — even though emails show them involved in discussions about the server.
In the Clinton investigation, if you were a lawyer, such as Mills and Samuelson, the Obama Justice Department said “pretty please” and gave you immunity — rather than a subpoena — to induce you to surrender private laptop computers containing classified Clinton emails. And then the Justice Department, in consultation with the Clinton camp’s lawyers, imposed restrictions on what the FBI could look at and what its agents could ask. After all, we wouldn’t want to imperil the attorney-client privilege, right?
Well, at least as long as you were not a lawyer in the Trump-Russia investigation. If you were, as was Melissa Laurenza, an attorney who worked for Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, prosecutors and the FBI compelled you to testify about client communications. If you were Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, the FBI executed search warrants at your home and office, and you were prosecuted. So was Alex van der Zwaan, an attorney who worked with Manafort and Gates in representing Ukrainian interests. He was induced to plead guilty to a false-statements charge in the Mueller probe.
And needless to say, if you were Manafort, there was no act-of-production immunity for you. And no one asked “pretty please” for you to turn over evidence. Under the Mueller team’s direction, the FBI got search warrants allowing them to break into Manafort’s home before dawn and at gunpoint to seize documents. Of course, this seems like kid-gloves treatment compared to what was done to Manafort’s friend and fellow Trump adviser, Roger Stone. The S.W.A.T.-style raid on Stone’s home included helicopter surveillance, an amphibious team (apparently to guard against escape by sea), and so many FBI vehicles that the CNN crew that just happened to be on scene almost couldn’t find a parking space! Was that show of force really necessary for a 66-year-old man charged with nonviolent process crimes whom the court released on bail a few hours later?
Mueller spent nearly two years trying to make an obstruction case against Trump for endeavoring to influence the Russia investigation. Congressional Democrats are still trying to breathe impeachment life into this effort. By contrast, the media-Democrat complex was unperturbed when Obama publicly announced in April 2016 that he did not think Clinton should be indicted. Far from accusing the 44th president of endeavoring to influence an investigation, the prosecutors and the press amplified Obama’s narrative that Clinton had not intended to harm the country — and dutifully looked the other way when the FBI airbrushed Obama’s name out of Comey’s Clinton exoneration speech (the president having knowingly communicated with Clinton through her unsecure server when she emailed him from a hostile foreign country).
The goal was to make Clinton’s crimes disappear, while suspicions about Trump were was blazoned on the public consciousness. Even though the Trump-Russia probe was a counterintelligence investigation, then-director Comey went public about it in March 2017 congressional testimony.
That was stunning. It is not enough to say that the Justice Department and the FBI customarily neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation, no matter how comparatively trivial. Counterintelligence investigations are classified. They are never spoken of. Yet, Comey both revealed the investigation and identified the Trump campaign as a subject, suspected of “coordinating” in Russia’s cyberespionage. For good measure, he gratuitously added that an assessment would be made about whether crimes had been committed. As any sensible person would have foreseen, the FBI director’s proclamation was taken by the media and the public as a signal that President Trump was the prime suspect in one of the most heinous crimes in American history.
To say the least, a different tune was sung in the Clinton emails probe. There, Comey acceded to the instructions of Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch, that he not publicly speak of it as an investigation. Just call it “a matter,” he was told. Funny thing about that: it sounded exactly like what the Clinton campaign was saying at the time.
I don’t pretend to be a McCabe fan. Nevertheless, I have sympathy for him. The 2016 election will define his career, but it does not fairly reflect his long years of service defending the rule of law and American national security. If we could consider his case in a vacuum, and I had my druthers, I would not want to charge him. He was fired for cause in disgrace and is slated to lose at least some of his pension. These are significant penalties. I’d like to be able to say, “Enough is enough, no need to pile on with an indictment.”
But there’s more to it than that. A lot more.
For one thing, McCabe is suing the government for wrongful termination, arguing that he was fired due to a political vendetta carried on by President Trump. I certainly agree that the president should not have commented on McCabe’s case or status. As I’ve repeatedly argued, the president’s often-unhinged commentary makes investigations and prosecutions much more difficult to execute. It has already resulted in slap-on-the-wrist treatment for deserter Bowe Bergdahl, who should have received a stiff sentence.
That said, though, it is an audacious strategy on McCabe’s part to (a) ask the Justice Department to exercise clemency by declining to charge an eminently prosecutable false-statements case against him, while (b) simultaneously hauling the Justice Department into court on an accusation of bad faith in a case in which McCabe leaked and then provided explanations that weren’t true. If I were the attorney general, my inclination would be to say, “If he’s going to make us go to war, let’s go to war on offense — indict him.”
More significantly, we are now living in a law-enforcement world of McCabe’s making.
Again, in a better world, I’d prefer to take account of the considerable positive side of McCabe’s ledger and what he’s already suffered, especially if he exhibited some contrition. That is, I’d ordinarily be open to declining prosecution. But then, how about the positive side of General Flynn’s ledger? And why, if it would be overkill to charge McCabe was it not overkill to charge Papadopoulos? Why do Clinton, Mills, Abedin, and Combetta get a pass in a criminal investigation triggered by actual crimes, but Flynn, Papadopoulos, van der Zwaan, and Stone get hammered in an investigation predicated by no crime — just a fever dream of Trump-Russia cyberespionage conspiracy?
FBI and Justice Department officials keep telling us they grasp that there must be one standard of justice applicable to everyone, not a two-tiered system. So, here’s the question: If Andrew McCabe’s name were Michael Flynn, how much mercy could he expect from, say, Andrew Weissmann?
- Now Could Be The Time To Sell Your Classic Car Before The Downturn
Have you ever thought about thinning out your classic car collection? Now could be the time before the antique car market rolls over.
Hagerty Price Guide, the premier collector car value guide, shows that in the last four years, 1960s American cars, blue-chip cars, British cars, Ferraris, German collectibles, and Muscle cars have seen their prices stagnate at record highs.
Prices have been flat, depressed, and unlikely to go higher ahead of the next recession. A possible correction in the classic car market could unfold into the early 2020s.
However, affordable classic cars, around the $20,000 price range, bucked the trend with prices moving higher.
The overall vintage car market is beginning to show signs of fatigue. Results from the Monterey Car Week earlier this month, an important bellwether for the state of the classic car market, had one of its worst auctions in 8 years.
Hagerty reported $245 million in sales during the two-day auction from Aug. 15 to 17. It represented a 34% drop from 2018’s results, which makes it the worst auction since 2011.
The average selling price plummeted by 36.7% to $319,610; the median sale price plunged 22.7% to $24,200; the sell-through rate (percentage of vehicles that sell) fell to 58% from 62%.
“Whether it’s threat of recession, broad economic volatility or too many cars crammed into too few hours, there’s no denying this year’s Monterey Auction Week results were depressed when you compare the results to recent years,” Hagerty’s Jonathan Klinger said.
This isn’t the first time Monterey’s sales have crashed. Sales plunged 72% from 2000 to 2002 and fell 14% between 2008 and 2009, according to Hagerty.
Klinger said recessions and credit bubble burstings fueled those drops.
“This year seems to be more anticipatory and reflective of broader market jitters,” Klinger said.
The downturn isn’t limited to just Monterey – it’s a broad-based cyclical downshift in the entire classic car market, except for cars priced under $20k. So now looks like the best time to thin out the collection before the next recession strikes.
- What Will China Do With The Hong Kong Protests?
Authored by Lawrence Franklin via The Gatestone Institute,
Protests in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (SAR) — which began in early June with demonstrators denouncing a proposed law to permit the extradition of SAR residents to the mainland to be tried in Chinese Communist courts — have entered their 12th week and show no signs of abating. If anything, they are becoming increasingly strident, with calls for the resignation of Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s administration, among other broadening demands . The unfolding events present the Communist Party leadership in Beijing with a serious dilemma: to quell the protests with military force or wait until they die down.
According to a recent analysis in Bloomberg:
“In theory, [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] could quickly do away with Hong Kong’s autonomy and activate the city’s garrison overnight. But the likelihood of mobilizing troops remains low and the fallout from doing so — for both China and Xi personally — is potentially much higher than dealing with the political and economic repercussions of the protests, not least because he’s already engaged in a damaging trade war with U.S. President Donald Trump.”
The Hong Kong protests reportedly were a topic of debate at this year’s annual meeting of current and former Communist Chinese leaders, which was held in Beidaihe in early August. The discussions likely included possible courses of action that the Xi government could take, such as encouraging Hong Kong’s business community to call for an end to the demonstrations, for the purpose of restoring economic stability by reversing recent negative trends in retail sales, tourist-generated income and nervousness among foreign investors.
Pictured: Riot police detain a pro-democracy protester on August 24, 2019 in Hong Kong. (Photo by Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)
Beijing is currently exercising some version of this option, but by depicting protesters in a poor light — accusing them of being “terrorists” manipulated by “foreign forces” bent on harming China — and warning them to stop “playing with fire.”
China’s state media accused the demonstrators of conducting a “color revolution.” The name reflects Beijing’s sensitivity to how many of the former satellites of the USSR successfully seceded from the Soviet Empire, employing different colors of the rainbow as a symbol of their revolutionary intent.
Beijing also attempted to discredit the protesters through hundreds of fake accounts on social media. To their credit, Facebook and Twitter discontinued the Chinese government’s access to those accounts.
A more forceful option that the Xi government may decide to pursue involves the infiltration of Hong Kong’s local police force with the People’s Liberation Army Garrison. Beijing cannot count on the loyalty of the Hong Kong police force, many of whose members are close relatives of the protesters.
Moreover, the Hong Kong police have proven unable to control, much less terminate, the protests. Acknowledging this reality, Carrie Lam could request the intervention of the People’s Armed Police (PAP), a paramilitary force stationed in the nearby town of Shenzen in mainland China’s Guangdong Province.
It may be, however, that Lam, a Catholic, would be loath to make such a request — formally — as a heavy-handed Chinese intervention could endanger the independence of Hong Kong’s economic, political and religious institutions.
Alternatively, the People’s Republic of China Liaison Office might bypass Lam’s local administration and order the deployment of the PAP, China’s most effective arm against domestic strife. If this option is exercised, Hong Kong would be completely bypassed by the Chinese Defense Ministry.
Any move by Beijing aggressively to suppress the people of Hong Kong’s demand for the full implementation of their democratic rights would further hobble foreign investment, thereby seriously eroding the economic blueprint of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. A military solution would render meaningless Xi’s flowery rhetoric of a “win-win” international system, and reveal it as part of its scheme to fulfill its global hegemonic ambitions. Mainland and archipelago Southeast Asian nations would likely seek alternatives to Chinese regional leadership. One such alternative might be a U.S. Indo-Pacific community of nations.
In addition, any crackdown on the protesters in Hong Kong would likely dissuade Taiwan, and likely everyone else, from considering support for Beijing’s “one country, two systems” policy to solve the island’s standoff with the mainland’s People’s Republic.
China’s ruling Communist Party might decide , therefore, that an armed suppression of the Hong Kong demonstrations would be too costly, economically, politically and in terms of public relations. If so, the Xi administration may decide, instead, to tamp down the spiraling crisis, by ordering Lam to meet with protest leaders and agree to shelve extradition legislation and to establish a commission to investigate local police brutality — both original demands of the protestors.
Although such a maneuver could benefit Xi’s reputation internationally, his rivals within the Communist Party might criticize him for what they would consider to be acts of weakness and capitulation to the protesters, possibly encouraging what Xi might consider the greatest threat: opposition from his own 1.5 billion people on the mainland, who might also secretly be wishing for more freedom in their lives. China is a totalitarian power that cannot brook any source of independent thinking. Fearing that the Hong Kong protests could prove contagious, Beijing is more likely to crush, rather than cede, to the protesters.
Xi may assess that any opprobrium endured by Beijing if it used force against the protesters would dissipate, just as it did 30 years ago when former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping ordered the 1989 massacre of student protesters in Tiananmen Square.
As China continues ostensibly to weigh its options, then, any optimism on the part of the protesters and the West appears to be premature.
The real “elephant in the room” not being addressed, however, is what the Hong Kong protests are really about: 2047, when Hong Kong is supposed to be handed over to China without any “one country, two systems” protection. What then?
- "It Scares Me To Death": Coding Errors In Sex Robots Make Them Prone To Violence And Strangling Humans
He’s the whistleblower that the future deserves and that the future needs: one expert is sounding the alarm on sex robots, according to The Daily Star.
Oh, and his name happens to be Brick Dollbanger (Yes, it’s his real name. Yes, we checked several sources). Dollbanger, a doll collector, has said that “violent repercussions” are possible if the sex robot industry isn’t regulated properly. He says that one simple “coding error” could turn sex robots against their owners.
“It scares me to death, it’s a machine and it’s always going to be a machine,” Dollbanger said. He has close ties to doll manufacturers Realbotix and Abyss.
He continued, describing in horrifying detail, his vision for the future of the sex robot industry:
“If you’ve watched the movies, Ex-Machina, because I honestly believe synthetics are going to look very similar to that movie. It’s not going to be something you can hit with a pipe and it’s going to fall apart.”
He continued: “I’ve always said, when a synthetic can support itself, that synthetic is going to be much stronger than a normal human. It’s going to be more durable, instead of having bones it’s going to have high impact, plastic or aluminium frame, it’s going to be very strong, and it won’t get tired, it won’t stop unless it runs out of an energy supply.“
Which, we guess, could be a positive or a negative, depending on how you look at it…
Dollbanger continued: “Unless you can stop it with some kind of projectile, like a gun or something like that, if this thing got out of control it could do some serious damage. One line of bad code, as simple as that, one line of bad code. If you make one mistake and you have a line of bad code in there and it hits this line of bad code, depending on what it’s doing or where it’s at or numerous other instances, it could just decide this is what it’s supposed to do.”
He continued laying out his vision of a sex filled robot utopia: “…put it this way, it can put its arm around your neck and just stop you from breathing, and you wouldn’t be able to get away from it, something as simple as that, a simple hug could be a constriction that could literally compress your chest and airway and stop you breathing.”
We wrote back in June that regulating the sex robot industry would be the next big challenge for the government.
We asked the question of how the US Consumer Product Safety Commission should regulate the hazards associated with these robots. We noted that existing products weren’t well regulated and that this could be cause for concern given the obvious – and excrutiatingly painful – ways they could be harmful to their users.
What if parts of a robot are manufactured with lead paint or a toxin? And what if the robot, with the mechanical strength of five human beings accidentally crushes a human’s finger – or a human’s other parts?
- What Percentage Of U.S. Workers Are Union Members?
Authored by Zach Hrynowski of Gallup.com
As Americans prepare to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Labor Day on Monday, Gallup’s latest measurement on labor union membership finds that 10% of full- and part-time U.S. workers belong to a union. This marks the second year in a row of the lowest level of union membership in over 15 years: from 2003 to 2017, union workers made up an average of 13% of the American workforce.
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Over one-third of government employees (37%) belong to a union, versus 6% of all private sector employees.
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Workers in the South are the least likely of any U.S. region to report being part of a union, with 5% saying they belong to a union. That contrasts with 15% and 14% of workers in the East and West, respectively. In the Midwest — where organized labor and right-to-work laws have been the subject of intense political debate in recent years — 10% of workers say they are union members.
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14% of workers reporting an annual household income of $100,000 or more are members of a union, compared with 3% of those in households earning less than $40,000 per year.
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Employed Americans aged 35 to 54 (13%) are more than twice as likely as those aged 18 to 34 (6%) to be members of organized labor.
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- Taxi Medallion Debt Catches A Bid After Prices Plunge 90% Over Last Decade
After years of taxi medallion prices plunging, leading to a slew of taxi driver suicides that we have documented exhaustively, taxi medallion debt (secured by medallions) has finally caught a bid from an unlikely buyer, according to Bloomberg.
For midwest money manager O’Brien-Staley, the disaster that is the New York City taxi industry appears opportunistic. They have acquired hundreds of medallion loans secured by more than 400 medallions from Signature Bank, according to regulatory filings and interviews. This represents about 3% of the over 13,000 medallions that are in use or in storage in New York City.
Lenders like Signature and Capital One have suffered increasing losses on medallion loans as Uber and Lyft have both up-ended the industry. This has also led many cab drivers, who once banked on their medallions for retirement, to severe financial distress.
Meanwhile, regulators are investigating predatory lending within the medallion industry and prices for a medallion have fallen to as low as $110,000 from about $1 million at the start of the decade. Banks that haven’t refinanced their loans and don’t want to compromise with borrowers may see selling to private equity and hedge funds as an opportunity, also.
Matthew Daus, an attorney at Windels Marx who formerly served as commissioner of New York’s taxi and limousine bureau said:
“There are other players resurfacing. Some banks may cut their losses once and for all.”
A spokesperson for Signature confirmed that the company made a bulk sale of performing loans to O-Brien-Staley earlier this year, representing more than 400 medallions. Signature’s financials disclosed about $46.4 million in loans tied to medallions and $4.6 million in repossessed medallions.
O-Brein-Staley’s website says that it specializes in “unloved” credits and the firm has about $1.3 billion in assets under management.
It is now one of the largest lenders against medallions.
Andrew Murstein, president of Medallion Financial Corp., which originates and services taxi loans, concluded: “It is another positive sign for the industry that another fund with a successful track record believes that medallions are a good investment.”
- A Climate Alarmist Sued A Skeptic For Defamation… And Lost
Authored by Onar Am via LibertyNation.com,
The Supreme Court of British Columbia recently dismissed a defamation lawsuit by celebrity climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann against global warming skeptic climatologist Dr. Tim Ball. Mann must pay the full legal costs to the defendant. The ruling is explosive because it means that Ball’s claim that Mann was a scientific fraudster is now supported by the court.
Background
In 1999, Mann published a 1000-year-long global temperature reconstruction from tree rings that severely undercut the then-accepted knowledge of climate. IPCC’s 1995 Second Assessment Report acknowledged that it was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period than today and that a significant cooling called the Little Ice Age followed and lasted until the end of the 19th century.
Mann’s reconstruction demolished that view and replaced our climate history with something that looks like a hockey stick: For 900 years, the temperature was a slightly falling straight line and then, during the period of human activity, rapid warming in the 20th century.
Climate catastrophists immediately seized on this persuasive graph and made Mann the poster boy of the IPCC, which was now thoroughly controlled by radical greens appointed by leftist politicians.
Wegman Graph
There was only one problem with the graph: It was junk science. Future university courses in statistics will undoubtedly teach the hockey stick as a classic case of faulty methodology. In layman terms: Mann was using a statistical technique that cherry-picked the data needed to make the hockey stick shape.
In 2006, Congress commissioned three statisticians led by Dr. Edward Wegman to produce the so-called Wegman report on the controversy. The report proved that the technique Mann used could create any desired outcome and demonstrated this fact by creating the shape of the global temperature data from 1995.
If Mann had produced this graph in a graduate thesis in statistics, he would have flunked.
Hiding The Decline
Canadian engineer Stephen McIntyre spent several years after the publication of the hockey stick graph trying to prove that it was faulty. He ultimately prevailed – but, during this debacle, Mann engaged in what many have described as intellectually dishonest or even fraudulent behavior. He refused to release the full data and source files that he used in his infamous 1999 publication.
In 2011, Tim Ball summarized this by stating that Michael Mann “belonged in a pen, not in Penn University.” This statement was the basis for Mann’s defamation lawsuit.
Ball defended his remark by saying that if Mann released his data, it would prove that he was a fraudster. Nine years of delay tactics later, the court dismissed the case because Mann refused to release the data that could prove his honesty.
While this technically is not a victory for Ball, it is hard to imagine a legitimate reason for a tax-funded scientist to refuse to release the data upon which the global climate disaster narrative largely rests.
Dubious Science
Under normal circumstances, Mann’s career would have been lying in a pool of utter disgrace long ago. Instead, he is still one of the leading scientists in the climate catastrophe mafia. His colleagues had to defend him because if they ever were to admit that the hockey stick graph is junk science, it would discredit the IPCC and the entire field of paleoclimatology that hailed Mann’s result.
They have doubled down and used political pull and a friendly media to the scandal. So far, they have succeeded, but for every year, the gap between the climate models and reality is widening. At some point, nothing can hide the shaky ground upon which the climate hysteria stands.
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