- Understanding The Tyrannical Mind And How It Operates
Understanding The Tyrannical Mind And How It Operates
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us
All people seek to control their environment to a certain degree. They want a reliable level of management over their world, and to remove whatever doubts they might have about their survival in the future. If they can, people will take measures to remove any potential pain or struggle and establish a life of perpetual comfort. The easy road is the dream for most, and in order to get it human beings see power as a formidable tool.
I’m exploring this common condition because I want to make it clear that almost ALL PEOPLE desire power to a degree. Sometimes this even means controlling the actions of others to prevent them from disrupting the oasis of comfort we construct around us. Sometimes there are destructive people that we feel we are forced to inhibit and cage in self defense. And still other times, we try to control those around us out of irrational fear.
The tyrannical mindset is not exclusive to the Stalins, Maos and Hitlers of history, it is a deep rooted shadow that lurks in the majority of us at times. It is this condition that political tyrants try to exploit to their advantage, because no authoritarian government can ever be successful without the help of millions of little tyrants supporting them. They find a way to feed our desire for control and predictability while simultaneously enslaving us.
The point is, tyrants need us. We all have a little dash of tyranny in our souls; we are linked, but we are different.
This is not to say that order in itself is evil or that social structures are inherently oppressive. People need boundaries because not all people are good or sane; some are vicious, some are lazy, some are crazy, some are incompetent and some are dishonest and they drag the rest of us down. Anarchy is not the solution, but neither is totalitarianism. It’s all about who sets the boundaries and how.
This is where we uncover a specific human element that is obsessively attracted to control, not because they are afraid, and not because they want comfort, but because they enjoy the feeling of power. They are addicted to it. I’m speaking specifically about narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths; they are members of our species but they are lacking the key psychological traits that make us human, such as empathy, conscience, imagination, love and shame. In almost every case of government gone wrong it is because these types of people were able to slither into positions of authority and take advantage.
Despite the exaggerated depictions in movies and TV, your average psychopath is not all that complex or interesting – The fact of their existence is interesting, but as people they tend to be boring. The idea of them is fascinating because they are a biological anomaly, an evolutionary mistake or maybe a spiritual deformity. Around 1% of any given population is prone to psychopathy and an even smaller percentage are high functioning psychopaths that are adept at hiding their monstrous natures.
Most average psychopaths eventually end up in prison or involved in an endless succession of life failures. They can’t get it together and maintain relationships and build a normal life because they are too self obsessed and dangerous and eventually the people around them notice. These types of people are what I would call the “little tyrants.” They seem to rise to the surface of society when times are desperate; when people are distracted by crisis is when psychopaths feel it’s safe to show their true natures.
For example, during the covid pandemic lockdowns and the government attempts to introduce draconian vax mandates the little tyrants were everywhere. They just appeared out of the ether and swirled around the authoritarian vortex like it was a feeding frenzy. They took pleasure in the opportunity to order others around about masks and vaccines and “social distancing,” even though none of these measures made ANY difference whatsoever to the spread of covid or the rather minor median Infection Fatality Rate of 0.23%.
They were being tossed scraps from the table of power and they savored every minute of it. The real science wasn’t on their side, but they didn’t care; the media and the government were on their side and that’s all that mattered. They were happy to be used as weapons against other citizens that just wanted to be free.
Beyond the symbiotic (or maybe parasitic) relationship between big tyrants and little tyrants, there are a set of standards that have to be met for tyranny to be successful:
Destruction Of Choice
At the core of tyranny is the removal of choice. Centralization is all about eliminating options for the public while telling them their lives will be streamlined, easier and safer. If people have options outside the establishment system or ideology then they might question the validity of the power structure. They might ask themselves “What if there is a better way than this?”
And, since there is always a better way than fear and slavery, tyrants have to engage in a constant war with all alternative ideas and principles. The only way they can be sure that people won’t rebel someday is to erase the existence of choice. Not only that, but they have to convince the masses that to even suggest another choice is sacrilegious and dangerous. The system must become absolute in all things and in every area of daily life.
Create A False Moral Paradox
Freedom is slavery – Ignorance is strength. It’s the old Orwellian paradox that perverts the meaning of words and deeds to justify tyranny. An extension of this twisted way of thinking is the religion of the “greater good”; the idea that all evils are justified as long as the “greater good” is accomplished. But what is the greater good? It’s anything the tyrants say it is; usually anything that helps them to gain more power. One would think that a “good” that is “greater” would entail more freedom and less fear, not less freedom and more fear.
As a part of the tactic of removal of choice, tyrants often create a fake moral conundrum in which people are told that their freedom is actually harmful to others, therefore their freedoms must be taken away “for the greater good.” Again, the covid medical tyranny experiment was built completely around this argument. What if your choice to not wear a mask, to not stay locked in your house and to not take a questionable vaccine harmed hundreds or thousands of others? Doesn’t that justify taking your choices away? These claims are complete fantasy, of course, but in the heat of a national panic people can be led to believe that the false paradox is real.
Obsessive Compulsive Expansion
As noted, tyrants are usually psychopathic personalities, and a part of this mindset is the compulsion to expand and devour. Like a growing amoeba, or that creature from the movie ‘The Blob.’ Their hunger for control is never sated, they will always want more.
People will be told that they are only losing one freedom, or two freedoms, or that their freedoms will be restricted “for a short time.” This is always a lie. Once tyrants gain new power they will hold onto it obsessively as if it is oxygen and without it they might die. And, then they will seek more powers because what they have is never enough. A friend of mine once described it this way:
Piled before the tyrant is a feast of kingly proportions, like a Thanksgiving Day feast flowing across his dinner table. You sit quietly without access to the table, but in your hands you do hold a little crust of bread. This is all you have and you cradle it carefully because it must be made to last. And even though the tyrant’s belly is full and he has more than he could possibly ever eat in a lifetime, all he can think about is YOUR little crust.
All he wonders about day and night is why you have that crust when it should be his. He grinds his teeth frothing in desperation for your meager meal. Then one day he decides he will not stop until your bread crust is in his hands while you starve. This is now his mission in life – To take your crust and crumbs and leave you with nothing. Any other outcome would be unimaginable.
He not only wants to steal your crust, but he wants to see your despair when he does it. He wants you to know he has your last meal, and he wants to see the pain in your face when he takes it away. Then, he wants you act like you love him for it.
This is how the mind of a psychopath works. Why do their brains function this way? There are many theories but no one really knows for certain. The majority of evidence suggests that they are actually born the way they are; with no conscience and no counterbalance to the madness.
The bread crust story is a metaphor, but it illustrates how psychopathic authoritarians view various freedoms – They are pieces of life that tyrants cannot tolerate you having in your possession. It drives them insane to know you have that little spark of light and joy in your hands and they scheme and plot and scream and wail and claw until they can get it away from you.
Tyranny Cannot Be Defeated Unless It Is Understood
There will be people out there that make the common ignorant argument that all of this is an exercise in futility because it doesn’t “address solutions.” There are many solutions to authoritarian systems, I have been writing about them for over 16 years now. We can talk all day about decentralization and localism and organization and revolution, but none of that matters unless we understand how our enemies think and the tactics they use. If we do not know them we cannot defeat them.
They are not complex and they are not necessarily ingenious but they are relentless and their simple methods can sometimes be very effective. Underestimating their obsession with control would be disastrous. That said, the one thing they value more than power is their own lives, and (if we’re going to address solutions) until these people are made to understand that their lives could be the cost of their compulsions they will never stop. There is no reasoning with them. There is no diplomacy or compromise. There is no middle ground. They will continue to take until the losses they face outweigh the gains of treachery. Knowing their mindset brings us several steps closer to shutting them down.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/31/2022 – 00:05 - US Army Grounds Entire Fleet Of Chinook Helicopters After Reports Of "Engine Fires"
US Army Grounds Entire Fleet Of Chinook Helicopters After Reports Of “Engine Fires”
WSJ reported one of the US Army’s top heavy-lift helicopters was grounded in the last 24 hours due to a risk of engine fires.
US officials said the Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopter fleet (about 400 helicopters) had been grounded after numerous engine fires were reported. One of the officials said no injuries or deaths occurred during any of the incidents. They said the latest occurred a few days ago.
The US Army Materiel Command grounded the fleet of CH-47s “out of an abundance of caution.” Officials have narrowed down more than 70 helicopters that contained a part that could be the source of the fires.
An Army spokeswoman told WSJ the defected part is causing fuel leaks that sparked “a small number of engine fires among an isolated number” of the helicopters. She said maintenance crews are taking steps to resolve the issue.
“The grounding was targeted at certain Boeing Co.-made models with engines manufactured by Honeywell International Inc.,” WSJ said, citing one of the US officials.
Neither officials nor spokeswoman gave a timetable when the Army’s workhorse for transporting troops and heavy items on the modern battlefield would be back in the air.
The grounding comes two weeks after the US Air Force returned its Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II to the air. The USAF’s 349 stealth jets were grounded due to a faulty component in the ejection seat that could endanger pilots during emergencies.
Also, the USAF grounded all 52 of its CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft two weeks ago due to mechanical issues. As for the Marines Corps, the service kept its fleet of Ospreys operational.
Earlier in the summer, three military aircraft in three separate incidents crashed in one week in Southern California.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 23:45 - The American Kleptocracy: A Government Of Liars, Thieves, & Lawbreakers
The American Kleptocracy: A Government Of Liars, Thieves, & Lawbreakers
Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”
– H. L. Mencken
The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
Think about it.
Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.
Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.
In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.
Who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.
Who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government.
Which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.
Which country has conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins? The U.S. government.
What country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.
Are you getting the picture yet?
The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.
The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.
Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.
So why is the government doing this? Money, power and total domination.
We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.
Case in point: the FBI.
The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.
It’s a diabolical plot with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings.
As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”
This is not an agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.
For instance, the FBI has been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.
All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.
What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.
Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.
This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.
To go after terrorists, they become terrorists. To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers. To go after thieves, they become thieves.
It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy.
This certainly isn’t a constitutional republic, however.
Some days, it feels like the government is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.
In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI—the government’s law enforcement agency—also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.
USA Today estimates that government agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.
In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.
For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”
Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.
The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”
Another fallout from 9/11, National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread violations.
The FBI’s surveillance capabilities, on a par with the National Security Agency, boast a nasty collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls.
In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.”
The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.
Indeed, for years now, the U.S. government has been creating what one intelligence insider referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive attacks. As part of this cyberweapons programs, government agencies such as the NSA have been stockpiling all kinds of nasty malware, viruses and hacking tools that can “steal financial account passwords, turn an iPhone into a listening device, or, in the case of Stuxnet, sabotage a nuclear facility.”
In fact, the NSA was responsible for the threat posed by the “WannaCry” or “Wanna Decryptor” malware worm which—as a result of hackers accessing the government’s arsenal—hijacked more than 57,000 computers and crippled health care, communications infrastructure, logistics, and government entities in more than 70 countries.
Mind you, the government was repeatedly warned about the dangers of using criminal tactics to wage its own cyberwars. It was warned about the consequences of blowback should its cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.
The government chose to ignore the warnings.
That’s exactly how the 9/11 attacks unfolded.
First, the government helped to create the menace that was al-Qaida and then, when bin Laden had left the nation reeling in shock (despite countless warnings that fell on tone-deaf ears), it demanded—and was given—immense new powers in the form of the USA Patriot Act in order to fight the very danger it had created.
This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party controls the White House: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.
Yet the powers-that-be don’t really want us to feel safe.
They want us cowering and afraid and willing to relinquish every last one of our freedoms in exchange for their phantom promises of security.
As a result, it’s the American people who pay the price for the government’s insatiable greed and quest for power.
Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the United States is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.
Somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy, and representative government has been rejected in favor of rule by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.
This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 23:25 - First Of Hundreds Of Iranian Drones Delivered To Russia For Ukraine War: Pentagon
First Of Hundreds Of Iranian Drones Delivered To Russia For Ukraine War: Pentagon
The Pentagon has confirmed that a previously widely reported deal for Russia to acquire Iranian drones has now gone through, given US officials say a first shipment of Iranian-made Mohajer-6 and Shahed-series have been delivered to Moscow.
A Pentagon spokesperson has told Politico that an initial round of what is eventually expected to be “hundreds” of armed unmanned aerial vehicles has arrived in Russia. They are capable of conducting strikes and assisting ground forces with targeting, as well as electronic warfare – and are expected to be deployed in Ukraine amid depleting Russian munitions.
Iranian Mohajer-6, via Oryx media “Russia deepening their alliance with Iran is something that the whole world — and especially those in the region — should watch and see as a profound threat,” the DOD official, Todd Breasseale, was quoted as saying. “We will vigorously enforce all U.S. sanctions on both the Russian and Iranian arms trade and we will stand with our allies and partners throughout the region against the Iranian threat.”
“This demonstrates that as Russia endures costs on the battlefield in Ukraine, it is experiencing difficulties in sustaining its own weapons, as it looks to countries like Iran for capabilities to sustain its forces,” Breasseale explained. “It also makes the case for U.S. engagement in the region so we don’t leave a vacuum for China or Russia.”
The Islamic Republic and Russia have been drifting into slow, deepening cooperation for years – but the Ukraine invasion appears to have hastened Moscow’s willingness to proceed with military deals with Tehran.
Starting over a month ago, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan cited US intelligence to warn that Iran is “preparing to provide Russia with several hundred UAVs, including weapons capable UAVs” for use in Ukraine. The story was initially met with some degree of skepticism, given its unprecedented nature and the fact that many military technology observers considered Russia’s own drone program to be advancing.
Politico underscores further that as part of the deal Russian personnel have already been in Iran to receive training on the new systems:
Russian operators have been undergoing training in Iran for weeks as part of the agreement for UAV transfers, according to a spokesperson for the National Security Council, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss a sensitive matter.
Beyond the drone transfers, the U.S. has seen recent reports that Russia launched a satellite with “significant spying capabilities” on Iran’s behalf, the spokesperson said.
The timing is interesting, given it could negatively impact a restored Iran nuclear deal, at a moment the world awaits final word from Tehran and Washington on whether the ‘final text’ presented by the EU is acceptable to both of them. So far, it’s not looking like a restored JCPOA will be announced anytime soon, and this drone deal without doubt complicates matters further.
If the JCPOA is revived and European firms consider doing business with #Iran, some added business risk: they would be investing in Tehran which is providing lethal drones to #Russia for use against EU candidate country #Ukraine.https://t.co/54LLPqL35S
— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) August 30, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
As for the initial delivery, the AP has these details: “Russian cargo planes picked up the first batch of drones from an airfield in Iran earlier this month, leaving with two types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the Washington Post reported Monday.”
“According to intelligence gathered by US and other spy agencies, the delivery has been marred by serious technical failures in early tests and the Russians are displeased with the performance of the drone systems,” the unconfirmed report said.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 23:05 - China's $29 Billion Property Bailout Plan Falls Short
China’s $29 Billion Property Bailout Plan Falls Short
By Ye Xie, Bloomberg markets live analyst and reporter.
China is reportedly setting up a national bailout fund to finance stalled real-estate projects. The move, if confirmed, will reduce some systemic risk in the sector. Unfortunately, it’s neither a cure-all designed to save troubled developers, nor a game changer to turn around the market.
We have a date! Beijing set Oct. 16 as the start of the Communist Party’s twice-a-decade leadership congress, where President Xi Jinping is widely expected to retain his power for an unprecedented third term. Optimists might take the news as a positive, hoping that Beijing will improve its economic and Covid policies once the uncertainties about leadership are removed. The CSI 300 did rise in the three months following the two previous leadership changes at the party congresses — in 2002 and 2012.
One area in desperate need of improvement is the housing market. Despite various supportive measures from Beijing, including lowering mortgage rates, the sector shows few signs of a meaningful recovery. New home sales in 30 cities fell about 22% from a year earlier in the month through Aug. 27, only slightly better than the 33% contraction in July, according to Nomura.
The government is doing more. Caixin magazine reported Monday that Beijing has set up a 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) fund — financed by two policy banks – to help stalled property projects. It’s in-line with earlier reports from other media outlets, including Bloomberg, but contains more details.
- Local governments will borrow these special-purpose loans and complete the unfinished projects, according to Caixin. The loans will carry low interest rates of 2.8% in the first two years, but rates will jump to 6.4% if they cannot be repaid within three years. In other words, it’s not a blank check.
- Crucially, regulators have made it clear that the fund will only be used to finish stalled projects. It will not be used to stimulate the housing market or rescue developers.
- Leaving aside the question of whether it’s enough money, the plan won’t hand cash to the developers. It’s unlikely to completely break the vicious feedback loop between delayed projects, mortgage boycotts and slumping home sales.
As long as home sales are depressed, more credit problems are likely. Goldman Sachs’s analyst Kenneth Ho expects the default ratio of high-yield dollar bonds by Chinese developers to rise this year to 45%, from the current 30%.
Source: Goldman Sachs This may not topple China’s credit system as offshore bonds only account for 4% of the total debt of Chinese developers, according to Ho. By the same token, it shows why Beijing can afford to stand tough against developers.
The reported rescue plan makes it clear that President Xi is only willing to save the little guys on Main Street, not greedy and reckless tycoons.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 22:45 - California Senate Passes Bill To Create "Fast Food Council" With Wage-Setting Power
California Senate Passes Bill To Create “Fast Food Council” With Wage-Setting Power
The California Senate on Monday voted to create a “Fast Food Council” that would have the authority to set minimum wages and issue safety, health and anti-discrimination regulations.
The 10-member council, which would include four worker representatives, four employer representatives and two state officials, would have the authority to increase California’s fast-food minimum wage to as much as $22 in 2023.
California’s minimum wage is $15 today, and is scheduled to rise to $15.50 on Jan. 1. The board — 40% of which would be worker reps — would thus be empowered to institute a 42% minimum-wage hike. Thereafter, the cap would rise by the smaller of the consumer price index or 3.5%.
Supporters of the Fast Food Council bill demonstrate at the California Capitol (Rich Pedroncelli/AP) Any California store that’s part of a chain with at least 100 outlets nationwide would be subject to the Fast Food Council’s edicts. There are over a half-million fast food workers in the state.
If enacted, it would be the first law of its kind in the United States. Putting workers’ representatives on a wage-setting government board could begin reshaping the way compensation is negotiated in America.
“The bill could herald an important step toward sectoral bargaining, in which workers and employers negotiate compensation and working conditions on an industrywide basis, as opposed to enterprise bargaining, in which workers negotiate with individual companies at individual locations,” writes Noam Scheiber at The New York Times.
The council’s wage power would have ripple effects throughout California’s economy, as employers in other low-skill industries would be forced to compete with compulsory rates paid by fast-food companies.
Of course, further minimum wage hikes will also encourage fast food outlets to replace workers with machines, and higher wages will mean higher fast food costs for Californians — including many of those at the lower end of the economic ladder.
A deep-fryer-operating robot from Miso Robotics Leftists were exuberant. “We made history today,” Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry told the Associated Press. “This legislation is a
great leaphuge step forward for workers in California and all across the country.”It’s “one of the most significant pieces of employment legislation passed in a generation,” gushed similarly enthusiastic Columbia Law School professor Kate Andrias, who called it “a
great leaphuge step forward for some of the most vulnerable workers in the country, giving them a collective voice in their working conditions.”Each of the California Senate’s nine Republicans voted against the measure, known as the Fast Act, as did three Democrats. Speaking against the bill, Republican Senator Brian Dahle — who is also the nominee for governor — said, “There are no slaves that work for California businesses, period. You can quit any day you want and you can go get a job someplace else if you don’t like your employer.”
The state assembly is expected to pass the bill by Wednesday, but governor and likely presidential candidate Gavin Newsom hasn’t made his position on the final bill known. Earlier, his administration expressed concern that the general concept would create “a fragmented regulatory and legal environment.”
His administration opposed an earlier version that would have given the proposed Fast Food Council even more power. It would also have treated restaurant chains as joint employers of franchisee’s employees, leaving them vulnerable to liability for labor law violations.
The fast food industry worked hard to get those measures stripped from the bill. “This is the biggest lobbying fight that the franchise sector has ever been in,” Matthew Haller, president of the International Franchise Association, told The Wall Street Journal.
That’s not to say they’re at all happy with the final product. “We are pulling the fire alarm in all states to wake our members up about what’s going on in California,” Haller separately told The New York Times.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 22:25 - Japanese Firm Signs New LNG Deal With Russia's Sakhalin-2
Japanese Firm Signs New LNG Deal With Russia’s Sakhalin-2
By Tsvetana Paraskova of Oilprice.com
Tokyo Gas, the largest city gas supplier in Japan, has signed a long-term LNG agreement with the new Russian operator of the Sakhalin-2 project to keep supply volumes from the project, a spokesperson for the Japanese company told Reuters on Tuesday in a second such deal between a firm from Japan and the new operator.
Last week, the largest power generation firm in Japan, JERA, told Reuters it had signed a long-term LNG deal to maintain its supply from the Sakhalin-2 project.
Western majors hastened to announce they are abandoning joint projects in Russia after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine at the end of February. Some international companies have managed to exit their participation, such as Norway’s Equinor, which said at the end of May that “The exit from all Joint Ventures has been completed in accordance with Norwegian and EU sanctions legislation related to Russia.”
A decree from Putin stipulated in early July that a newly set up state Russian company take over the rights and obligations of Sakhalin Energy Investment Co., the joint venture running the Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project. Shell and Japan’s Mitsui and Mitsubishi were minority shareholders in Sakhalin Energy Investment Co. Shell already said a few months ago it would leave the project and has since then been looking for buyers for its stake in Sakhalin-2.
Shell has already completed the sale of its retail and lubricants businesses in Russia to Lukoil, but hasn’t exited the Sakhalin-2 LNG project yet.
In early August, the Russian government gave Sakhalin-2 minority foreign investors – Shell, and Japan’s Mitsui & Co and Mitsubishi – one month to claim their stakes in a new entity that will replace the existing project. Shell has confirmed it is looking at ways to exit the project. The Japanese companies are expected to keep their stakes, Japan’s Industry Minister Koichi Hagiuda has said, as carried by Reuters.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 22:05 - A Third Of Pakistan Is Underwater As Monsoon Rains Create Crisis Of "Unimaginable Proportions"
A Third Of Pakistan Is Underwater As Monsoon Rains Create Crisis Of “Unimaginable Proportions”
Record monsoons in Pakistan have forced “a third of the country” underwater, according to Sherry Rehman, the country’s country’s climate change minister.
Rehman said of her country, which is about 340,000 square miles: “It’s all one big ocean, there’s no dry land to pump the water out.”
The country is the 33rd largest by area, bigger than countries like Turkey and France, according to RT. It is inhabited by nearly 242 million people and is the fifth most populated nation in the world, the report says.
Rehman said the occurrence was “very far from a normal monsoon” and called it “climate dystopia at our doorstep.” The crisis that has been created as a result of the flooding has been of “unimaginable proportions”, she continued.
She called the flooding a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.”
“We’ve had to deploy the navy for the first time to operate in Indo-Pakistan,” she said, due to the water. “Frankly, no one has seen this kind of downpour & flooding before, and no one country can cope alone with the multiple, cascading effects of extreme weather, climate events.”
As of Monday, the death toll from the rains was over 1,000 people. More than 3,000 roads have been destroyed, RT reports. 130 bridges and 495,000 homes have also been damaged or affected by flash floods.
33 million people in the country were estimated to have been affected.
ABC reported that in the last 24 hours alone, 75 people had died and 59 had been injured.
“Padidan, in Pakistan’s Sindh Province, received an “unheard of” nearly 70 inches of rain in one day,” the report said.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 21:45 - Lower Court Formally Lifts Injunction Against AB5 In California Trucking
Lower Court Formally Lifts Injunction Against AB5 In California Trucking
By John Kingston of FreightWaves
The injunction that kept California’s independent contractor law, AB5, out of the state’s trucking sector is officially dead.
In a hearing Monday, according to a statement released by trucking-focused law firm Scopelitis, Garvin, Light, Hanson & Feary, Federal District Court Judge Robert Benitez formally lifted the injunction that had been in effect since New Year’s Eve 2019. A filing by the court of its ruling was not available online at publication time.
The lifting of the injunction, which was expected, puts into effect an April 2021 U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that overturned the original injunction handed down by Benitez. The appellate court ruling reversing the Benitez injunction nonetheless allowed the injunction to stay in place while the California Trucking Association, which filed the original lawsuit in the case, pursued its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
When the high court chose not to review the case, California Trucking Association v. Bonta, that put it back into the hands of the appellate court. That court in turn handed down a mandate to the district court ordering the reversal of the injunction. The action Monday formalized that step.
But the case is not over. The legal arguments put forth by the CTA — that AB5 as applied to trucking in California violates parts of the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act — was only argued through motions on the injunction, rather than a full court procedure. The CTA will now pursue the case from the beginning and has asked for a new injunction. None was forthcoming Monday.
According to the Scopelitis memo, an earlier Benitez ruling that denied a CTA argument regarding AB5 and the Dormant Commerce Clause, which impacts interstate commerce, was vacated by Benitez, per the request of the CTA. The issue of whether the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) can intervene in the case remains to be decided.
Next steps are the filing of briefs in the case, which can take place into December, according to an earlier court filing.
AB5 requires workers be judged against the provisions of the so-called ABC test to settle the question of whether they are independent contractors or employee. In particular for trucking, the so-called B prong is troublesome, as it says an independent contractor must be involved in “work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business.” A trucking company hiring an outside truck driver runs the risk of being ruled in violation of the B prong.
The ruling did bring a quick media outreach from a public relations firm offering up commentary from the union side of the ledger.
“Today, drivers across California can rest easy knowing that trucking companies that have gotten away with misclassifying workers can no longer exploit their workers or the people of California to further their bottom line,” the email from Teamsters PR agency Berlin Rosen said. “These companies are going to be held accountable, and drivers’ rights will be protected under the law.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 21:25 - Baby Wipes Used To Smuggle $12 Million In Cocaine Across Border
Baby Wipes Used To Smuggle $12 Million In Cocaine Across Border
US Customs (CBP) announced on Monday that they had seized nearly $12 million worth of cocaine over the weekend, after smugglers used a tractor-trailer full of baby wipes to disguise their haul.
In a Monday press release, the CBP announced that agents on Friday selected the big-rig for inspection at the Colombia-Solidarity Bridge just outside of Laredo, Texas.
“The truck was referred for a canine and non-intrusive inspection system examination, resulting in the discovery of 1,935 packages containing 1,532.65 pounds of alleged cocaine within the shipment,” reads the press release, which notes that the total amount seized was worth around $11.8 million.
“Officers assigned to CBP cargo facilities ensure effective border security by preventing and countering the flow of suspected narcotics entering the country,” said Port Director Alberto Flores in the release, adding “This seizure is a prime example of border security management and how it helps prevent dangerous narcotics from reaching our communities.”
And in other smuggling news:
CBP officers in New Mexico seized 4,600 Tramadol pills and 90lbs of prohibited pork bologna. Mexican bologna is a prohibited product because it has the potential for introducing foreign animal diseases to the U.S. pork industry.
MORE: https://t.co/uW6LB0ic4F pic.twitter.com/qqXUoNnhD8
— CBP (@CBP) August 27, 2022
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 21:05 - China-Backed Solomon Islands Suspends All US Naval Visits
China-Backed Solomon Islands Suspends All US Naval Visits
Authored by Daniel Teng via The Epoch Times,
The Solomon Islands has informed U.S. authorities that all naval visits have been suspended until further notice following an earlier incident on Aug. 23 when a U.S. Coast Guard vessel, the Oliver Henry, was denied permission for a scheduled port call.
The incident comes amid mounting concerns about Beijing’s influence in the region and Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare’s moves to deepen ties with the Chinese regime while solidifying his hold on power.
According to the U.S. Embassy in Canberra:
“On Aug. 29, the United States received formal notification from the Government of the Solomon Islands regarding a moratorium on all naval visits, pending updates in protocol procedures.”
“We will continue to closely monitor the situation,” a spokesperson told The Epoch Times.
The freeze on naval visits comes after the Oliver Henry wrapped up its part in Operation Island Chief to monitor and prevent illegal fishing activity in the region—an ongoing issue with Chinese fishing fleets. Operation Island Chief was conducted in conjunction with members of the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA), including Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji.
Oliver Henry was supposed to stop in Honiara, Solomon Islands, on Aug. 23 for refuelling and re-provisioning but received no response from Solomons authorities. Subsequently, the crew were diverted to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.
“It is disappointing that the USCGC Oliver Henry was not provided diplomatic clearance in support of its operation with the FFA,” the U.S. Embassy said in response.
Solomons PM Solidifying Power
The Solomons opposition leader Matthew Wale was critical of the Sogavare government’s decision.
“‘Friends to all, enemies to none’ is clearly a joke, the prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, clearly treats the U.S. and its allies as hostile nations. All our friends must be treated equally,” he said in comments obtained by RNZ.
The radio silence from Solomons authorities follows a series of incidents suggesting the government of Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare is not only deepening ties with Beijing but also steadily eroding the country’s democratic institutions to strengthen his position.
The Sogavare government signed off on a major deal with Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei on Aug. 18 to build 161 mobile towers in the country with a 448.9 million yuan (US$66.15 million) loan from the state-owned Export-Import Bank of China.
On Aug. 8, the prime minister’s team submitted a Bill to Parliament to delay national elections, which some experts have suggested could be a way for the prime minister to avoid a potential election defeat.
These actions come after Sogavare locked in a security pact with Beijing to allow the Chinese Communist Party to station weapons, troops, and naval ships in the country. This would give Beijing a military presence close to Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. territory of Guam.
…
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 20:45 - Mississippi Declares State Of Emergency As Broken-Pump Leaves Capital Without Drinking Water
Mississippi Declares State Of Emergency As Broken-Pump Leaves Capital Without Drinking Water
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency for Jackson, the state’s capital, as an ongoing water crisis threatens the “critical needs” of more than 180,000 city residents. Severe flooding knocked out pumps at the capital’s main water treatment center, sparking a massive shortage of clean water.
I have declared a State of Emergency and activated the Mississippi National Guard in response to the ongoing running water crisis in Jackson. pic.twitter.com/dj6xrqfQ95
— Governor Tate Reeves (@tatereeves) August 30, 2022
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Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and Gov. Reeves activated the National Gaurd Monday evening to assist in distributing clean water to the city’s residents.
“The is a very different situation from a boil water notice — which is also a serious situation which the residents of Jackson have become tragically numb to,” the governor said in a prepared statement.
The crux of the problem resides in Jackson’s failed water treatment facility with low water pressure and inadequate treatment to clean the water. Pumps at the water treatment facility were damaged in recent floods.
“Until it is fixed, it means we do not have reliable running water at scale. It means the city cannot produce enough water to reliably flush toilets, fight fire and meet other critical needs,” the governor continued.
MISSISSIPPI GOV: “The total or near total loss of water pressure throughout the City of Jackson .. has created a condition of disaster and extreme peril to the safety of persons and property.”#MississippiFlooding https://t.co/PEP7TtZ3J2
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) August 30, 2022
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The mayor warned residents:
“Do not drink the water. In too many cases, it is raw water from the reservoir being pushed through the pipes,” Reeves told Jackson residents Monday. “Be smart, protect yourself, protect your family.”
Gov. Reeves said emergency maintenance is underway at the water treatment facility as there is no timetable on when the water shortage will be resolved.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 20:25 - China Threatens To Destroy Elon Musk's Starlink
China Threatens To Destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink
Authored by Judith Bergman via The Gatestone Institute,
Chinese military researchers recently called for the destruction of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, an extraordinary threat for a state to make against a private foreign enterprise.
In December 2021, China filed a complaint with the United Nations, claiming that two of Musk’s Starlink satellites had nearly collided with the Tianhe module of its Tiangong Space Station — in April and October of 2021– and that Chinese astronauts had been forced to maneuver the module of the station to avoid the collision. Starlink is part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the satellites are part of a plan to make internet coverage from the satellites available worldwide, with the goal of launching nearly 12,000 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit.
Space is becoming crowded and risks of collision — whether with satellites or space debris — are not new. Tellingly, China was among the first to help create much of that debris: In January 2007, China tested its first successful anti-satellite missile (ASAT), destroying one of its own inactive weather satellites and creating one of the world’s largest space debris incidents. That space debris is still floating around in space, causing collision risks every day.
The United States rejected China’s claims that the Starlink satellites had endangered China’s space station. The US stated that if there had been a “significant probability of collision” with China’s space station, the U.S. would have given notice to China ahead of time. “Because the activities did not meet the threshold of established emergency collision criteria, emergency notifications were not warranted in either case.”
China is now taking things a step further: Chinese military researchers are threatening that Musk’s Starlink satellites must be destroyed. The problem, however, does not appear so much to be the fear of collision, but rather that China believes that Starlink could be used for military purposes and thereby threaten what China calls its national security.
Five senior scientists in China’s defense industry, led by Ren Yuanzhen, a researcher with the Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications — which is under the People Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) Strategic Support Force – recently wrote that “a combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation’s operating system.”
Soft kill methods target software and operating systems of the satellites, whereas hard kill methods physically destroy the satellites, such as using an ASAT weapon.
According to the scientists, China should “vigorously develop countermeasures” against Starlink, as such capabilities are necessary for China “to maintain and obtain space advantages in the fierce space game.”
Unsurprisingly, China has eagerly copied Elon Musk’s SpaceX to achieve its own space ambitions: China’s Long March 2C rocket, for instance, which China launched in the summer of 2019, had parts that were “virtually identical” to those that are used to steer the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
China is not the only state actor to show an interest in interfering with Musk’s Starlink satellites.
Russia too has sought to jam Starlink’s internet service in Ukraine and failed. “Starlink has resisted Russian cyberwar jamming & hacking attempts so far, but they’re ramping up their efforts,” Musk tweeted in May.
Starlink is a problem for Russia because Musk’s satellites have enabled Ukraine to stay connected to the internet – and the rest of the world – amid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to cut the country off.
Musk began to send Starlink terminals to Ukraine in late February at the request of Ukrainian government officials, as a backup for when Russia would predictably try to cut off internet access. According to one US general, the use of Starlink in Ukraine ruined Putin’s attempts to isolate the country.
“The strategic impact is, it totally destroyed Putin’s information campaign,” said Brig. Gen. Steve Butow, director of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit.
“He never, to this day, has been able to silence Zelenskyy.”
“We’ve got more than 11,000 Starlink stations and they help us in our everyday fight on all the fronts,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime minister, told Politico.
“We’re ready, even if there is no light, no fixed internet, through generators using Starlink, to renew any connection in Ukraine.”
China’s threats against Musk’s Starlink is more proof that the country is not ready to let anyone stand in the way of its “fierce space game”, as China put it. General David Thompson, the U.S. Space Force’s first vice chief of space operations, possibly trying to downplay the Chinese’s Communist Party’s threat to the West, described it as merely a “shadow war.”
In this “space war“, China – and Russia to a slightly lesser degree — is conducting attacks against U.S. satellites with lasers, radio frequency jammers, and cyber-attacks every day. While the attacks are “reversible” for now, which means that the damage to the attacked satellites is not permanent, they demonstrate China’s malign intentions.
“The threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it’s really an evolution of activity that’s been happening for a long time,” Thompson said in November 2021.
“We’re really at a point now where there’s a whole host of ways that our space systems can be threatened.”
In addition to its “fierce space game”, China is forging ahead with a number of projects that will significantly accelerate the country’s space capabilities.
China has reportedly sped up its program to launch a solar power plant in space. The purpose of the plant is to transmit electricity to earth by converting solar energy to microwaves or lasers and directing the energy to Earth, according to the South China Morning Post. The first launch of the project is scheduled for 2028 and will be the world’s first such project in space. It is probable that China got the idea from the US; NASA reportedly proposed a similar plan more than two decades ago but never went on to develop it.
China recently launched its third crewed mission to the Tiangong Space Station’s Tianhe module, where three astronauts will work on completing the space station before returning to Earth in December. China only launched the first module of the Tiangong Space Station in April 2021, but expects to have the space station fully crewed and operational by the end of the year, when the space station will have an additional two science lab modules and a robotic cargo ship. The space station will also help China to deploy and operate its new space telescope, Xuntian, meant “to rival NASA’s aging Hubble Space Telescope, with a field of view 300 times larger and a similar resolution. It will make observations in ultraviolet and visible light, running investigations related to dark matter and dark energy, cosmology, galactic evolution, and the detection of nearby objects.” Xuntian is scheduled to launch in 2024.
China’s explicit goal is to become the world’s leading space power by 2045. It is important to keep in mind that China’s space program – even what might look like harmless, civil aspects of space exploration – is heavily militarized. The organization in charge of China’s manned space program, for instance, is the China Manned Space Engineering Office, which is under China’s Central Military Commission Equipment Development Department. Similarly, the People’s Liberation Army runs China’s space launch sites, control centers and many of China’s satellites.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 20:05 - Used-Car Market Cools As Prices Plunge To One Year Low
Used-Car Market Cools As Prices Plunge To One Year Low
In April, while wholesale used-vehicle values were at record highs, we asked, “Are Used Car Prices About To Peak For Real This Time?” We pointed out one month later, “Used Car Prices Are Crashing At A Near Record Pace.”
The latest Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index that tracks what dealers pay for used cars at auction is at a one-year low of 211.6.
Used car prices drop to 1 year low, plunge most since April 2020 pic.twitter.com/Biez6v9DuE
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 30, 2022
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The index declined 3.6% from July in the first 15 days of August but is still up 8.8% from August 2021. The monthly slump was the most significant drop since April 2020.
Cox Automotive analysts said sliding wholesale used-vehicle values should continue through August. SUVs and pickups saw the most declines in value at auctions while minivans fell less — likely a function of thin supply, according to analysts. They said compact cars saw auction prices stable, noting it was likely due to more demand because elevated fuel costs have pushed consumers to more efficient vehicles.
A metric called “days of inventory” – how long it would take dealers to sell out of cars at the current sales rate if they couldn’t acquire new stock – was eight days higher than a year ago as the nationwide supply of used vehicles (as of Aug. 15) was improving.
Cox analysts noted consumers’ views of buying conditions for vehicles declined in August due to elevated prices and soaring rising interest rates. They said the only prior time consumers felt this pessimistic about purchasing a car was when auto loan interest rates were sky high in the early 1980s.
Looking at Bankrate data, rising auto loans for used vehicles may have been enough to crimp demand as used car price growth on a yearly basis has cooled since rates began surging in the first quarter.
Perhaps with supply rising and affordability woes mounting, we may have correctly called the peak in used car prices between April-May timeframe. What comes next with a uber-hawkish Federal Reserve is possibly the implosion of the car bubble that could leave millions of Americans who bought the pandemic peak underwater.
Just wait until these youngsters with +$1,000 monthly payments panic sell their vehicles as the economy craters.
The car market is in a very big, ugly bubble. @DiMartinoBooth just did a great episode covering the topic, but the payments people have are unreal. How did it become normal for people to have payments in excess of $1000 a month!? They sound like rents, not car payments. pic.twitter.com/0YoEOL9seJ
— Dime Opinions (@DimeOpinions) August 25, 2022
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It’s anyone’s guess where the used car floor price is as supply returns and Fed crushes demand with rising interest rates.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 19:45 - Pennsylvania Abruptly Changes Voter Registration Form, Combines With Mail-In Ballot Application
Pennsylvania Abruptly Changes Voter Registration Form, Combines With Mail-In Ballot Application
Authored by Beth Brelje via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
In the middle of the election cycle, the Pennsylvania Department of State has suddenly changed its voter registration application form to include a mail-in ballot application.
A portion of the newly combined Pennsylvania voter registration application and mail-in ballot request form introduced just 11 weeks before the Nov. 8 midterm elections. (Pennsylvania Department of State) The applications used to be on separate forms, but this seemingly small clerical change is creating logistical headaches for county election directors and causing voter confusion.
Registering to vote and seeking a mail-in ballot are two different actions requiring different responses in the county election offices.
“We use the voter registration application for one thing, we use a mail-in ballot application for something different,” Christa Miller, Lancaster County’s election director, told The Epoch Times. “One has to be done before the other. Obviously, you have to be a voter in order to get a detailed ballot, so that has to be processed first. And then your mail-in ballot application can be processed. We also file them all completely different.”
All voter registration applications are filed together, and mail-in ballot applications are filed separately. That is because, as per state law, county election offices must mail an application each year to everyone who asked to be on the permanent mail-in ballot list.
“In February, we have to send them an application for that calendar year,” Miller said. Then the voter must send it back, confirming they want to participate in mail-in voting for the year. The office files the mail-in applications alphabetically.
Procedure Changed in Middle of Election Cycle
Between the May primary and the November general election, the county elections office fields a lot of calls from voters who want to verify they checked the mail-in ballot box or to check the address where the ballot will be sent.
Instead of going though something like 400,000 voter registration forms, it’s easier to go through 30,000 specific mail-in ballot forms.
The Department of State combined the documents and implemented the new form on Aug. 19, which was 13 weeks after the primary and just 11 weeks before the general election.
Now the county is processing the first half of the form—getting a person registered to vote—and then making a copy of the form to process the mail-in ballot portion and file that copy separately.
Voters have questions about the new form, too, Miller said. They are not sure if they are registering to vote or registering for mail-in voting, so it has taken some education.
“As election officials, we asked [the state] to wait until December. This is going to take voter education and explaining how the new form works,” Miller said. “There’s a big election coming up in November. I think everybody in Pennsylvania knows that. And all we wanted to do was wait until December to let us keep our offices going the way that they’re going. Not having to teach our staff new ways of doing things, and voters new ways of doing things. You know, keep things the same at least through November.”
Jonathan Marks, deputy secretary at the Pennsylvania Department of State, told The Philadelphia Inquirer the goal of the change is to simplify the process, so voters don’t have to fill out two forms.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 19:25 - The Lab-Leak Theory And What We Know About The Cover-Up
The Lab-Leak Theory And What We Know About The Cover-Up
Authored by Thomas Fazi via UnHerd.com,
For more than a year after the onset of the pandemic, talking about the possibility that the virus might have been lab-engineered was taboo. Then, as the evidence continued to mount, it suddenly became acceptable to talk about it in “respectable” circles. Today, however, we appear to have gone full-circle: a determined effort is once again underway to dismiss the lab-leak theory for good — even though no new evidence has emerged to disprove it.
Considering the endless ways in which the pandemic and our response to it have changed the lives of every human being on the planet, it’s astonishing to consider how little is actually known about the origins of the virus. Two and half years on, we are still very much in the dark as to when, how and even where SARS-CoV-2 first made its appearance.
This isn’t because our efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery have proved fruitless, but rather because those efforts have been systematically thwarted by the world’s two most powerful governments: America and China. This is the mother of all Covid conspiracy theories — but it’s also true.
One of the main “conspiracy theorists” is none other than Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and chair of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission. He is not your typical tinfoil-hat-wearing internet crank. Sachs recently co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling for an independent inquiry into the virus’s origins. He believes there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary US public health agency, and many members of the scientific community have been impeding a serious investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in order to cover up evidence that US-funded research in Wuhan may have played a role in the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Many are convinced that the debate is settled, largely because almost immediately a public narrative surrounding the origin of the virus emerged. This held that the virus was zoonotic in nature, meaning that it had jumped from one or more animals (probably, it was argued, bats) to one or more humans, possibly through one or more unidentified animal intermediate hosts, and most likely at the Huanan Seafood Market — even though there was no conclusive evidence of any of this.
Early in the pandemic, an alternative theory emerged, suggesting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — known, of all things, for its research into SARS-related coronaviruses, and only eight miles from the Huanan Seafood Market — might have had something to do with an accidental outbreak. From a purely circumstantial standpoint, and considering the long history of safety breaches previously recorded at various facilities in China and throughout the world, one could have been justified for considering it, at the very least, a lead worth pursuing.
As Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, Europe’s biggest philanthropic research funding body, notes in his bestselling book Spike: “It was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly in a city with a biolab … which is home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses” — especially with a new virus that “seemed almost designed to infect human cells”. If this were a coincidence, he adds, it would be a “huge” one.
Yet from the beginning the very notion that the virus might have a laboratory-based origin was stifled. The hot denials came not only from the Chinese authorities and the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself, but also from the WHO and leading Western scientists, institutions and media organisations. For around a year and a half, the “lab-leak” hypothesis was ridiculed and dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory and anyone who raised it deemed a crackpot — and even subject to censorship on Twitter and Facebook.
The mood seemed to shift when, beginning in mid-2021, several high-profile Western scientists, intelligence officials and politicians — including President Joe Biden — started to acknowledge the plausibility of a laboratory accident. Almost overnight, the lab-leak scenario went from being a “crackpot theory” to a credible and legitimate hypothesis. On the same day Biden announced that his administration would be investigating the origins of Covid-19, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident”, Facebook stated that it would “no longer remove the claim that Covid-19 is man-made or manufactured” from its apps.
More than a year later, there is simply no conclusive evidence of whether the virus is zoonotic or artificial in nature — even though the public narrative continues to be heavily skewed towards the natural origin theory. What we do know, however, is that a massive cover-up was orchestrated from the earliest days of the pandemic by leading members of the scientific establishment and the Chinese authorities.
This incredible story sheds light on several key aspects of the entire pandemic management, something that Toby Green and I go into in detail in our forthcoming book: the stifling of critical opinion, the lack of transparency by public institutions, the deeply unscientific manner in which the “scientific consensus” about many aspects of the pandemic came about, and how some of the leading actors of the pandemic tragedy — the WHO, Anthony Fauci, the NIH, leading scientific journals — were already engaging in the publication of papers which traduced the scientific method from the very first days of the pandemic.
Here’s a brief recap of what we know about the cover-up — much of which we are aware of thanks to a series of Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requests.
Much of the work on SARS-like CoVs performed in Wuhan was part of an active and highly collaborative US-China scientific research programme funded by the US government — primarily through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), directed by Anthony Fauci, which is part of the NIH — and coordinated by the US-based non-governmental organisation EcoHealth Alliance (EHA). The group’s research work went beyond the simple analysis of existing coronaviruses, and actually involved the engineering of “chimeric” bat coronaviruses, some of which proved to be potentially more infectious to humans — a highly risky technique known as gain-of-function.
In 2018, EcoHealth and the WIV (in collaboration with other institutions) sent a grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which included a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into existing bat coronaviruses — spots in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. The DARPA proposal was rejected — and yet the presence of a furin cleavage site is precisely what sets SARS-CoV-2 apart from all known SARS-like coronaviruses. Did the researchers carry out the research anyway, possibly using other sources of funding? Nobel Prize-winning virologist David Baltimore stated that he considered this to be “the smoking gun for the origin of the virus”.
In light of all this, it’s hardly surprising that in the early days of the pandemic, at the highest levels of the US establishment, the question of whether the virus might have been engineered at the WIV, possibly through research part-funded by the US government, was taken very seriously. As a result of an FoIA request, we know that on February 1, 2020, Anthony Fauci convened a “totally confidential” conference call with at least a dozen high-level experts from around the world, many of whom privately admitted that there was a very high probability that the virus had been artificially engineered and had then “escaped” from the Wuhan lab.
Yet not only did the NIH fail to disclose this to the public or to Congress, but the emails released under the FoIA suggest that it took an early and active role in promoting the “zoonotic hypothesis” and the rejection of the laboratory-associated hypothesis. Indeed, within days of the February 1 call, a group of virologists, including some who were on it and had endorsed the “artificial origin” theory, prepared the first draft of a hugely influential paper on The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 — subsequently published in Nature — that argued for the exact opposite.
Moreover, the NIH has resisted the release of important evidence, such as the grant proposals and project reports of EHA, and has continued to redact materials released under FoIA, including a remarkable 290-page redaction in a recent release. Even more incredibly, at some point after March 2020 a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences were deleted from the NIH’s own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.
The strangeness doesn’t end here. In February 2020, an influential letter signed by 27 global experts was published in The Lancet, strongly condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. The letter proved crucial, alongside the aforementioned Nature paper, in nipping in the bud the lab-leak hypothesis and giving the illusion of scientific consensus. In late 2020, however, emails released following a FoIA request showed that the Lancet statement had been orchestrated by one of the 27 co-authors — none other than Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. It was also revealed that all but one of the other 26 scientists were linked to the Wuhan lab, their colleagues or funders.
Daszak was first appointed in late 2020 as chair of the task force created by the Lancet Covid-19 Commission with the aim of establishing none other than “the origins of Covid-19”; and shortly thereafter as the only US representative to a WHO fact-finding mission to China tasked with the same goal. Unsurprisingly, both task forces found that the virus was most likely zoonotic (i.e., natural) in origin, and that transmission through a laboratory incident was extremely unlikely.
The WHO report, in particular, came under heavy criticism, leading to the establishment of a specific work group tasked with ascertaining the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of Novel Pathogens, which published its first preliminary report in June 2022. The results were inconclusive, largely because “key pieces of data” from China were missing, leading the WHO to recommend in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe was required into whether a lab accident may be to blame. As we have seen, however, it’s not only the Chinese government that is covering up its tracks about its possible involvement in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2 — but the American one as well.
A new campaign is now underway to put the lab-leak theory to rest once and for all. The recent publication of two new studies providing more evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged into humans via the live animal trade at the Huanan Seafood Market has led several outlets to emphatically claim that “the Covid lab leak theory is dead”, once again misleading citizens into thinking that the debate is now really settled.
But the studies don’t provide any evidence that the virus didn’t escape from the Wuhan lab — they simply argue that it’s not a plausible scenario, also based on the fact that there’s no evidence that the virus was present at the WIV before the pandemic started. But of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As Sachs notes, “this [claim] is only as good as the limited data on which it is based, and verification of this claim is dependent on gaining access to any other unpublished viral sequences that are deposited in relevant US and Chinese databases”.
Ultimately, the virus may indeed be conclusively proven to be natural in origin. But in order to do that, as Sachs stresses, a real independent scientific investigation is needed. The public deserves to be shown incontrovertible proof that the Wuhan lab has nothing to do with all this — but that means that the US and Chinese governments have to open up their lab records instead of going out of their way to prevent a real investigation. Amid a time of heightened geopolitical tensions and crumbling faith in political leadership across the West, transparency is needed more than ever.
If we can’t get this one right, how else can we be expected to place our faith in authorities ever again?
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 18:45 - Biden Preparing $1.1 Billion Arms Sale To Taiwan
Biden Preparing $1.1 Billion Arms Sale To Taiwan
A month after China’s unprecedented live fire exercises in direct response to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei, the Biden administration is set to ramp up its arms sales to Taiwan with numbers that suggest Ukraine levels of aid.
“The Biden administration plans to formally ask Congress to approve an estimated $1.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan that includes 60 anti-ship missiles and 100 air-to-air missiles, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the package,” Politico is reporting.
Via Naval News: Land-based Harpoon missile launched from a truck trailer. The soon to be proposed package is still said to be in its early stage, but both the White House and bipartisan leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee are expected to sign off on it.
The new urgency to send more advanced arms to Taiwan, which the US will no doubt emphasize are defensive in nature, is driven by fears that Beijing has only shortened its timeline for Taiwan reunification, also following the month of August which saw no less than four separate Congressional delegations visit.
According to Politico, the over $1 billion arms package is to include “60 AGM-84L Harpoon Block II missiles for $355 million, 100 AIM-9X Block II Sidewinder tactical air-to-air missiles for $85.6 million, and $655.4 million for a surveillance radar contract extension, the people said. The Sidewinder missiles will arm Taipei’s U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets.”
The Biden administration has already seen through three major packages of arms sales to Taiwan, continuing on a trend of increased arms deliveries that Trump set in motion.
China is continuing to send warplanes to buzz the self-ruled island’s airspace, and is maintaining a persistent Taiwan Strait presence, also following Sunday the US Navy sending a pair of warships through the Strait for the first time since Pelosi’s trip.
“Troops of the (Eastern) Theater Command are on high alert and ready to foil any provocation at any time,” a spokesperson for the People Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command said in response guided-missile cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville traversing the contested waters.
When it comes to the Taiwan question, the US President is very much like the general sales manager of a big arms dealer. pic.twitter.com/C5toIrxhUw
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) August 30, 2022
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But the 7th Fleet asserted: “These ships (are transiting) through a corridor in the strait that is beyond the territorial sea of any coastal state. The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. The United States military flies, sails, and operates anywhere international law allows,” according to an official statement.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 18:25 - Progressive Policies Turning Chicago's Magnificent Mile Into Murderous Mile
Progressive Policies Turning Chicago’s Magnificent Mile Into Murderous Mile
Authored by Thoimas DeVore via RealClearPolitics.com,
One of Illinois’ major advantages is Chicago, which – until recently – was one of the most vibrant cities in the world. People from across the globe have made their way to Chicago to do business, tour our famous museums, theaters, and restaurants, take in sporting events, and to build their lives. Chicago is a beautiful city that used to be full of opportunity.
Tragically, this vibrant, once-thriving community is being destroyed by the policies of leftist ideologues ruling the city and state: JB Pritzker, Lori Lightfoot, and Kim Foxx.
Consider this: There were four times as many crimes reported in the few blocks around Water Tower Place, one of the more exclusive areas of the city, over the last year than were reported in the once-notorious Cabrini-Green.
I recently visited the scene of one of Chicago’s many crimes in downtown Chicago. It was a chilling experience, and these statistics should shock us to our core. But they seem to have numbed many, as each Monday morning we just read the weekend’s body count in the Chicago Tribune right along with the sports scores.
Violent Crime (Assault, Battery, Homicide, Criminal Sexual Assault) Data (04/10/2022 – 08/19/2022), City of Chicago
The greatest shopping district in the Midwest – the Magnificent Mile – has seen some truly horrific crimes. Just days ago, a man was murdered in the late afternoon right outside high-end shops. His throat was slashed. And he died literally in the middle of Michigan Avenue.
What happens to Chicago if Michigan Avenue becomes known as the Murderous Mile?
The explosion in crime drives away businesses. Who wants to set up a store in a city where the mayor handcuffs police and a county that allows criminals to steal up to $1000 in merchandise before it is considered a felony? The rising crime also repels shoppers – that trip to Neiman Marcus is a lot less glamorous when there is no guarantee you won’t be a crime victim in the parking garage.
As vacancies rise and streets empty, property values fall. According to Redfin, the average sale price of a home in Magnificent Mile was $365K last month, down 50.6% since last year. As home values in the heart of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile fell by 50%, homes in Miami are up 21% over the last 12 months.
This is nothing short of a catastrophe. The ongoing destruction of Chicago is a direct consequence of the radical prosecutorial policies pursued by Kim Foxx. Far from doing anything about it, crime will actually go up after Jan. 1 as Pritzker’s anti-police, pro-criminal SAFE-T Act goes into effect and even more criminals held in Cook County jails are released onto the streets. Chicago politicians, just in the past five years, have made the people of Cook County and the surrounding counties of Will and DuPage (which have also seen rising crime, as it bleeds over the borders of Cook) less safe.
Michigan Avenue can be Magnificent again, but only if the extreme pro-criminal, anti-police ideologues ruining Illinois are turned out of office. Illinoisans shouldn’t have to move to Miami to be safe and happy. All they need to do is stop voting for the people who are coming up with these insane policies.
The attorney general is the chief legal officer of the state, but Kwame Raoul is also Kim Foxx’s silent partner in non-prosecution. Foxx has the obligation under the law to prosecute criminals on behalf of the people.
But she and Raoul have been very cavalier about other people’s lives. Her refusal to do her duty is nothing short of criminal. When a public officer fails to perform a mandatory duty in Illinois, that’s official misconduct – and that’s a felony in Illinois.
I can be a supportive partner to a prosecutor who fights crime on behalf of the people, but I will not stand by silently if Kim Foxx refuses to do her job putting criminals behind bars. No public official should be permitted to destroy a city and the opportunities and property values of the people who reside there. Fiddling as Chicago burns is not an option I find acceptable.
Some called me a bulldog for my refusal to stand by as Gov. Pritzker exceeded his constitutional authority with his illegal mandates. Others called me a watchdog as I highlighted for the people the corruption that goes right into the governor’s office in the Thornley case.
I don’t care what you call me. As a private practice attorney, I stood up for parents, first responders, and state workers against a governor and mayor who were abusing their power over them. I will do the same as attorney general. Illinoisans need a check on the powerful in this state now more than ever. I have been a fighter for you. My loyalty has always been and will always be to you – the people, not the powerful.
Let’s take back Chicago in November. With your vote, we can make the Magnificent Mile truly magnificent again.
* * *
Thomas DeVore is an attorney in private practice and is the GOP candidate for Illinois attorney general.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 18:05 - Another US Food Processing Plant Catches Fire, Add This To Growing List
Another US Food Processing Plant Catches Fire, Add This To Growing List
Another food processing plant went up in flames last weekend. Add this poultry business in California to the growing list of US food plants that have been knocked offline in the past year due to “accidental fires.”
Los Angeles-based KTLA reported QC Poultry processing plant in Montebello, California, located just east of East Los Angeles and southwest of San Gabriel Valley, caught fire around 1600 local time Sunday. Firefighters responded to the large industrial plant as heavy smoke billowed from the roof.
🚨Breaking: Another food processing facility has caught on fire … Getting a little suspicious now …
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) August 30, 2022
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“As members [firefighters] began to deploy, the fire was upgraded to a third alarm commercial fire. Firefighters initially took a defensive stance and held the fire from spreading to any other nearby structures,” Montebello Fire Department said. The fire was declared “knocked down” by 2000 local time.
KTLA said there was no damage to other building structures nearby. The fire’s cause is unknown…
While the fire seems insignificant, it’s part of a much larger issue of a spate of mysterious fires taking out America’s food supply chain one by one over the last year.
We tallied a list in June of a couple dozen or more food processing plants that have caught fire (find the list here).
Some on Twitter questioned if America’s food industry is being sabotaged…
BREAKING REPORT: Major Fire Breaks Out at ANOTHER FOOD PROCESSING FACILITY, this time in Montebello, California…
WTF IS GOING ON?
— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) August 30, 2022
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On Sunday, a huge fire broke out at a commercial poultry processing plant in Montebello, CA.
A week before that, a fire destroyed a Dufur, Oregon vegetable/nut facility.
Week before that, a major fire destroyed a meat processing plant in New Hampshire.Coincidence? Nah..
— 🇺🇸ProudArmyBrat (@leslibless) August 30, 2022
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Man-made Famine,
Another US food factory fire in the US, poultry processor burns down in Montebello, Ca.
Meanwhile,
Belgian farmers in the Antwerp area insurrect government buildings, chants of “farmers.” pic.twitter.com/PJeujuJF6y— 🇺🇸RealRobert🇺🇸 (@Real_RobN) August 30, 2022
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Deym, we really are gonna eat bugs https://t.co/lDo3d06pbU
— TradersApprentice (@Trader4lyf) August 30, 2022
… nothing to see here (story count of “food plant fire” in all media outlets).
Remember who wants the world to “eat bugs“:
…
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/30/2022 – 17:45
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