- World Economic Forum Encourages Plebs To Eat Weeds & Drink Sewage
World Economic Forum Encourages Plebs To Eat Weeds & Drink Sewage
Tyler Durden
Thu, 12/03/2020 – 02:00Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
The World Economic Forum published two articles on its website which explored how people could be conditioned to get used to the idea of eating weeds, bugs and drinking sewage water in order to reduce CO2 emissions.
Yes, really.
“Finding new plant-based foods is becoming increasingly urgent with the world’s population forecast to grow by two billion in the next 30 years,” states an article authored by Douglas Broom published on the official WEF website
“While farming animals for meat generates 14.5% of total global greenhouse emissions, weeds capture carbon from the atmosphere and can therefore help to control climate change.”
According to Broom, “Weeds can be nutritious and tasty” and are easy to grow.
The article fails to explain why weeds such as dandelion leaves, given that they are so ubiquitous, haven’t been made a staple of western diets already.
“The next time a panhandler approaches your car at a stoplight, point to the tasty and nutritious weeds sprouting up through cracks in the pavement and tell him, “Bon appétit!” writes Dave Blount.
A separate article also published on the WEF website investigates how people can be conditioned to enjoy consuming ‘food’ which on the surface sounds disgusting.
“Responses involving culturally conditioned ideas of what is “natural” may be modified over time,” states the piece, before asking why there is a revulsion against “insect-based foods” and “drinks with ingredients reclaimed from sewage.”
The author concludes that “desensitisation (repeated exposures)” may be effective in “reducing disgust (versus fear)” among the “general population.”
Maybe the WEF will be satisfied when we’re all forced to eat tree bark and roots, food sources that starving peasants in Stalinist Ukraine were reduced to consuming during the Holodomor.
And that’s the point.
The ‘Great Reset’ is about enacting a drastic reduction in living standards for the plebs which will force them to put bugs, weeds and sewage on the menu while the Davos elites continue to feast on the finest cuisine in their ivory towers.
* * *
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- UN Says 233,000 Yemenis Dead After 6 Years Of Saudi-US Coalition Bombing
UN Says 233,000 Yemenis Dead After 6 Years Of Saudi-US Coalition Bombing
Tyler Durden
Thu, 12/03/2020 – 01:00A grim milestone in the “forgotten war” which has close US involvement: six years after the Saudi coalition began bombing Yemen to prevent a full Houthi rebel takeover of the country, the United Nations has issued an updated official tally of the death toll.
The UN now says an estimated 233,000 people have died as a result of the over half-decade long conflict. Most of the deaths are believed to be from ‘indirect causes’ such as collapse of societal infrastructure, disease, and lack of food and resources.
“The war had already caused an estimated 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure,” the UN’s top humanitarian office said early this week. This leaves a staggering over 100,000 direct combat deaths – likely most from aerial bombing.
American-supplied Saudi F-16, file image. Calling it an “imminent catastrophe” the UN office described that “Yemen’s complex civil war began in earnest in 2015, foisting disease, hunger and economic collapse on an already impoverished population. In 2020 the violence escalated and the hardship deepened with torrential rains, a fuel crisis, COVID-19 and desert locust infestations that are expected to cause damage and loss worth $222 million to staple crops, animals and livestock.”
“Hostilities have directly caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties; 3,153 child deaths and 5,660 children were verified in the first five years of the conflict, and 1,500 civilian casualties were reported in the first nine months of 2020,” it added of direct combat deaths in addition to indirect casualties.
The US-Saudi coalition had also for years imposed a full blockade on the country’s main ports, including the major Hodeidah, which is the country’s most important shipping port. Humanitarian goods were also blocked for years.
When during the first half of the war in Syria casualties reached over 200,000 lives lost it drove international headlines and became a key talking point for those urging military intervention to oust Assad there.
Why the hell is the US helping Saudi Arabia bomb Yemen? A brief guide. https://t.co/KVHaYEwiES
— Vox (@voxdotcom) October 14, 2016
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However, given the US and UK are direct participants on executing the war in Yemen alongside the Saudis and the UAE (including US and UK advanced weaponry being used), the tragedy of Yemen has been glaringly absent from the talking points of the Western political class.
- COVID-19 Vaccines Pave The Way For A New Frontier In Surveillance
COVID-19 Vaccines Pave The Way For A New Frontier In Surveillance
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 23:40Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
– C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Like it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic with its veiled threat of forced vaccinations, contact tracing, and genetically encoded vaccines is propelling humanity at warp speed into a whole new frontier – a surveillance matrix – the likes of which we’ve only previously encountered in science fiction.
Those who eye these developments with lingering mistrust have good reason to be leery: the government has long had a tendency to unleash untold horrors upon the world in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.
Indeed, “we the people” have been treated like lab rats by government agencies for decades now: caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
You don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace, making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.
Now this same government—which 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—wants us to fall in line as it prepares to roll out COVID-19 vaccines that owe a great debt to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for its past work on how to weaponize and defend against infectious diseases.
The Trump Administration by way of the National Institute of Health awarded $22.8 million to seven corporations to develop artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, etc., with smart phone apps, wearable devices and software “that can identify and trace contacts of infected individuals, keep track of verified COVID-19 test results, and monitor the health status of infected and potentially infected individuals.”
This is all part of Operation Warp Speed, which President Trump has likened to the Manhattan Project, a covert government effort spearheaded by the military to engineer and build the world’s first atomic bomb.
There is every reason to tread cautiously.
There is a sinister world beyond that which we perceive, one in which power players jockey for control over the one commodity that is a necessary ingredient for total domination: you.
By you, I mean you the individual in all your singular humanness.
Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.
These COVID-19 vaccines, which rely on messenger RNA technology that influences everything from viruses to memory, are merely the tipping point.
The groundwork being laid with these vaccines is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
If you were unnerved by the rapid deterioration of privacy under the Surveillance State, prepare to be terrified by the surveillance matrix that will be ushered in on the heels of the government’s rollout of this COVID-19 vaccine.
The term “matrix” was introduced into our cultural lexicon by the 1999 film The Matrix in which Neo, a computer programmer/hacker, awakens to the reality that humans have been enslaved by artificial intelligence and are being harvested for their bio-electrical energy.
Hardwired to a neuro-interactive simulation of reality called the “Matrix,” humans are kept inactive and docile while robotic androids gather the electricity their bodies generate. In order for the machines who run the Matrix to maintain control, they impose what appears to be a perfect world for humans to keep them distracted, content, and submissive.
Here’s the thing: Neo’s Matrix is not so far removed from our own technologically-hardwired worlds in which we’re increasingly beholden to corporate giants such as Google for powering so much of our lives. As journalist Ben Thompson explains:
Google+ is about unifying all of Google’s services under a single log-in which can be tracked across the Internet on every site that serves Google ads, uses Google sign-in, or utilizes Google analytics. Every feature of Google+—or of YouTube, or Maps, or Gmail, or any other service—is a flytrap meant to ensure you are logged in and being logged by Google at all times.
Everything we do is increasingly dependent on and, ultimately, controlled by our internet-connected, electronic devices. For example, in 2007, there were an estimated 10 million sensor devices connecting human utilized electronic devices (cell phones, laptops, etc.) to the Internet. By 2013, it had increased to 3.5 billion. By 2030, it is estimated to reach 100 trillion.
Much, if not all, of our electronic devices will be connected to Google, a neural network that approximates a massive global brain.
Google’s resources, beyond anything the world has ever seen, includes the huge data sets that result from one billion people using Google every single day and the Google knowledge graph “which consists of 800 million concepts and billions of relationships between them.”
The end goal? The creation of a new “human” species, so to speak, and the NSA, the Pentagon and the “Matrix” of surveillance agencies are part of the plan. As William Binney, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA, said, “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”
Mind you, this isn’t population control in the classic sense. It’s more about controlling the population through singularity, a marriage of sorts between machine and human beings in which artificial intelligence and the human brain will merge to form a superhuman mind.
“Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it,” predicts transhumanist scientist Ray Kurzweil. “It will have read every email you’ve ever written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.”
The term “singularity”—that is, computers simulating human life itself—was coined years ago by mathematical geniuses Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann. “The ever accelerating progress of technology,” warned von Neumann, “gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
The plan is to develop a computer network that will exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to or indistinguishable from that of human beings by 2029. And this goal is to have computers that will be “a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on earth.”
Neuralink, a brain-computer chip interface (BCI), paves the way for AI control of the human brain, at which point the disconnect between humans and AI-controlled computers will become blurred and human minds and computers will essentially become one and the same. “In the most severe scenario, hacking a Neuralink-like device could turn ‘hosts’ into programmable drone armies capable of doing anything their ‘master’ wanted,” writes Jason Lau for Forbes.
Advances in neuroscience indicate that future behavior can be predicted based upon activity in certain portions of the brain, potentially creating a nightmare scenario in which government officials select certain segments of the population for more invasive surveillance or quarantine based solely upon their brain chemistry.
Case in point: researchers at the Mind Research Center scanned the brains of thousands of prison inmates in order to track their brain chemistry and their behavior after release. In one experiment, researchers determined that inmates with lower levels of activity in the area of the brain associated with error processing allegedly had a higher likelihood of committing a crime within four years of being released from prison. While researchers have cautioned against using the results of their research as a method of predicting future crime, it will undoubtedly become a focus of study for government officials.
There’s no limit to what can be accomplished—for good or ill—using brain-computer interfaces.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have created a brain-to-brain interface between lab rats, which allows them to transfer information directly between brains. In one particular experiment, researchers trained a rat to perform a task where it would hit a lever when lit. The trained rat then had its brain connected to an untrained rat’s brain via electrodes. The untrained rat was then able to learn the trained rat’s behavior via electrical stimulation. This even worked over great distances using the Internet, with a lab rat in North Carolina guiding the actions of a lab rat in Brazil.
Clearly, we are rapidly moving into the “posthuman era,” one in which humans will become a new type of being. “Technological devices,” writes journalist Marcelo Gleiser, “will be implanted in our heads and bodies, or used peripherally, like Google Glass, extending our senses and cognitive abilities.”
Transhumanism—the fusing of machines and people—is here to stay and will continue to grow.
In fact, as science and technology continue to advance, the ability to control humans will only increase. In 2014, for example, it was revealed that scientists have discovered how to deactivate that part of our brains that controls whether we are conscious or not. When researchers at George Washington University sent high frequency electrical signals to the claustrum—that thin sheet of neurons running between the left and right sides of the brain—their patients lost consciousness. Indeed, one patient started speaking more slowly until she became silent and still. When she regained consciousness, she had no memory of the event.
Add to this the fact that increasingly humans will be implanted with microchips for such benign purposes as tracking children or as medical devices to assist with our health. Such devices “point to an uber-surveillance society that is Big Brother on the inside looking out,” warns Dr. Katina Michael. “Governments or large corporations would have the ability to track people’s actions and movements, categorize them into different socio-economic, political, racial, or consumer groups and ultimately even control them.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, control is the issue.
In fact, Facebook and the Department of Defense are working to manipulate our behavior. In a 2012 study, Facebook tracked the emotional states of over 600,000 of its users. The goal of the study was to see if the emotions of users could be manipulated based upon whether they were fed positive or negative information in their news feeds. The conclusion of the study was that “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.”
All of this indicates a new path forward for large corporations and government entities that want to achieve absolute social control. Instead of relying solely on marauding SWAT teams and full-fledged surveillance apparatuses, they will work to manipulate our emotions to keep us in lock step with the American police state.
Now add this warp speed-deployed vaccine to that mix, with all of the associated unknown and fearsome possibilities for altering or controlling human epigenetics, and you start to see the perils inherent in blindly adopting emerging technologies without any restrictions in place to guard against technological tyranny and abuse.
It’s one thing for the starship Enterprise to boldly go where no man has gone before, but even Mr. Spock recognized the dangers of a world dominated by AI. “Computers make excellent and efficient servants,” he observed in “The Ultimate Computer” episode of Star Trek, “but I have no wish to serve under them.”
- Australia To Sign Military Pact With US Ally Japan Amid Spiraling China Tensions
Australia To Sign Military Pact With US Ally Japan Amid Spiraling China Tensions
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 23:20Australia is using its formative military alliances as the only leverage it has in the worsening trade spat with China which has grown into a full-blown crisis for Aussie commodities exports.
It also comes after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to India and southeast Asian countries last month seeking to shore up coordinated regional resistance against Chinese economic and military influence and hegemony.
“Australia plans to sign a military exchange deal with U.S. ally Japan so troops from both sides could pool their firepower if needed to counter China, which has become enmeshed in disputes with Australia over the past two weeks,” reports state-funded Voice of America.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, right, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison pose with documents during a signing ceremony at Suga’s official residence in Tokyo on Nov.17. Japan Today via AP “Both sides said after a senior-level meeting November 17 they would sign a reciprocal access agreement next year,” VOA continues. It would allow for each to train and operate from the other’s sovereign territory.
The agreement is seen as greatly bolstering the common readiness of a loosened defense pact known as the Quad which has as its purpose information and intelligence coordination and cooperating on military exercises. India, Japan, Australia and the US formed the group in 2007.
Assuming the deal when signed gets successfully approved by Japan’s parliament it would mark the first time since WWII that Tokyo formally and willingly approved of inviting foreign troops to operate on its soil. Previously Japan’s prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, said it would be toward the two regional militaries cooperation for “a free and open Indo-Pacific,” according to Kyodo news.
Meanwhile a bizarre tweet from the US National Security Council after China slapped import taxes of up to 212.1% on Australian wines, which took effect last Saturday and has made Aussie wines basically unsellable in China:
Australian wine will be featured at a White House holiday reception this week. Pity vino lovers in China who, due to Beijing’s coercive tariffs on Aussie vintners, will miss out. #AussieAussieAussieOiOiOi!
— NSC (@WHNSC) December 1, 2020
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Weeks ago Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison flew to Tokyo to firm up details. He stated at the time that “Japan has a very special relationship with Australia. It is not just an economic one, it is not just a trade one, it is not just a cultural and social one. Importantly, it is a strategic one. We play a very important role together in working in the Southwest Pacific together.”
China’s state media, which often reflects the internal government official statements of high Communist Party officials, condemned the deal, saying it “clearly targets China” and “further accelerates the confrontational atmosphere in the Asia-Pacific region.”
At the same time the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet, which is headquartered in Japan, has issued statements praising and welcoming the impending deal.
- Winding Up Americans
Winding Up Americans
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 23:00Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,
For the last four years, Americans have become increasingly polarised – divided between Democrat crusaders who are determined to save America from becoming a racist, sexist Nazi dictatorship under Donald Trump, versus Republican crusaders who are determined to save America from becoming a liberal Marxist state under a Democratic reign.
This fervour has become so extreme that families can no longer meet for the holidays without a conversational blow-up. No longer are people “entitled to their opinions.” This has become a crusade between Good and Evil. (“I’m good. You’re evil.”)
The absurd nature of this dichotomy has reached the point that even Dr. Phil is increasing his viewership by featuring disputes between siblings who are on opposite sides of the political divide and are no longer speaking to each other.
At this point, all that remains to be done by the networks would be to air a Red versus Blue television game show in which contestants compete with their own family members to “Win the White House.”
Until November, the great majority of Americans appear to have been hoping that the November election would end this strife one way or the other.
My take on this has been that the opposite would happen after 3rd November. The fireworks would increase exponentially after the election. The election would be hotly contested by whomever was the apparent loser.
This should easily have been foreseen, as the media on the right have insisted for months that the Democrat encouragement for mail-in ballots was a precursor to election fraud.
Similarly, the media on the left have insisted for months that Donald Trump’s suggestion that he may not accept the election results meant that he was planning a coup after he (presumably inevitably) lost the election.
And now, the battle has been met.
It’s been estimated that 93% of all Fox watchers are Republicans and 95% of MSNBC watchers are Democrats. Since neither side watches the other’s news programme, each side is cognizant of only its own team’s heavily slanted rhetoric.
The conservative media is awash with details of voter fraud by Democrats, whilst the liberal media states with equal conviction that Mister Trump and his lawyers have provided no details whatever.
Therefore, those who voted Republican will conclude by watching their own “unbiased” news channel that Democrats have tried to steal the election and thereby steal control of the country.
And those who voted Democrat will conclude by watching their own “unbiased” news channel that Republicans have tried to steal the election and thereby steal control of the country.
But how did this get to be so bad? Americans have not been so wound up – nor so polarised – since 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War.
Indeed, the post-election fervour is as strong as though Fort Sumter had just been fired upon.
More importantly, what will be the outcome?
Will the courts rule against the claims of Mister Trump?
If so, that decision will enrage an already angry right-wing crowd, refusing to vacate the White House and defending it against the pinko mob.
Or will the courts rule in favour of Mister Trump?
If so, that decision will unleash nationwide riots, intent on bringing down the evil dictator.
Either way, we can anticipate that the US will be in flames. If for any reason the level of strife is insufficient, those with deep pockets will hire squads of shills as mercenary soldiers.
The populace will be in terror. Republican voters will beg the federal government to bring in the troops to contain Antifa and the BLM mob.
Democratic voters will beg the federal government to bring in the troops to quell the Republican militias.
In such an upheaval, the one thing both sides will have in common is that they will both beg for the creation of a police state.
And the federal government will answer that call. Martial law would be declared, possibly as a “temporary measure,” until normalcy has returned.
But what if normalcy does not return? What if pockets of violence continue to pop up all over the map with regularity?
If that occurs, martial law would need to continue for as long as it was deemed necessary, which would be likely to translate into a permanent police state.
At one time, the media was for the most part impartial and benign, but in recent decades it has been bought out by four large corporations. And some of those corporations own and direct both liberal and conservative networks, which would seem to be at odds with each other.
However, they are not. Today, the objective of the media is not to offer news. It is to create strife – to pit one half of the electorate against the other. In doing so, the ruling elite have the justification to lock down the entire USA under martial law.
Once that has been accomplished, the elite may do as they please. As in all countries where a police state has been achieved – such as Nazi Germany, Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia – once military control has been put into place nationwide, meaningful protest ends.
In each of the above cases, the populace was whipped up into a frenzy of hate and violence against the Jews or the aristocracy or whatever other demon had been invented. But the real objective and the result were the subjugation of the populace.
The American populace has been programmed like windup toys, with the ruling elite winding up the keys on their backs as tightly as they will go. When the levers are released, Americans will act dramatically and, in many cases, blindly.
At this point, it’s not too late for people to stand back, take a deep breath and ask themselves if they’re not being conned into their own subjugation. But it would appear that they’ve been wound up so tightly that such objectivity is unlikely to occur.
However, if they do not, they risk losing what remains of their once-proud democracy.
* * *
Economically, politically, and socially, the United States seems to be headed down a path that’s not only inconsistent with the founding principles of the country, but accelerating quickly toward boundless decay. In the years ahead, there will likely be much less stability of any kind. That’s exactly why New York Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions for the Raging 2020s.
- Knoxville Embryo Reanimated After Quarter-Century On Ice For Record-Breaking Live Birth
Knoxville Embryo Reanimated After Quarter-Century On Ice For Record-Breaking Live Birth
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 22:40A family in Knoxville, Tennessee is celebrating the birth of a baby girl – 27 years – almost to the day – after her embryo was frozen, according to WVLT.
The birth of Molly Everette Gibson broke a world record for the longest an embryo had been frozen before birth – a record previously held by Molly’s sister, Emma Wren Gibson.
Molly was frozen on October 14, 1992, then thawed by National Embryo Donation Center Lab Director & Embryologist Carol Sommerfelt on February 10, 2020 and transferred to Tina’s uterus by NEDC President & Medical Director Dr. Jeffrey Keenan on February 12, 2020. –WVLT
“I think this is proof positive that no embryo should ever be discarded, certainly not because it is ‘old!” said Dr. Keenan, adding “This is also a testament to the excellent embryology work of Carol Sommerfelt. She is perhaps the preeminent embryologist in the country when it comes to thawing frozen embryos. And of course, it’s a testament to how good God is, and to His infinite goodness and love.”
According to the report, Molly and Emma are full genetic siblings.
“When Tina and Ben returned for their sibling transfer, I was thrilled that the remaining two embryos from the donor that resulted in Emma Wren’s birth survived the thaw and developed into two very good quality embryos for their transfer,” according to Sommerfelt. “It was even more thrilling to learn 11 days later that Tina was pregnant. I rejoiced with Tina and Ben as we all anxiously waited for the arrival of their second child … When Molly Everette was born on October 26, she was already 28 years old from the standpoint of the time the embryos had been frozen. This definitely reflects on the technology used all those years ago and its ability to preserve the embryos for future use under an indefinite time frame. It also shows the reason the NEDC mission is so important, giving all donated embryos the best chance for life.”
Located in Knoxville, the NEDC receives embryos from all over the United States, and serves couples seeking to become pregnant from all over the world.
- The Real Source Of America's Frustrations
The Real Source Of America’s Frustrations
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 22:20Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via The Daily Reckoning,
It’s easy to lay America’s visible frustrations at the feet of Covid lockdowns or political polarization, but this conveniently ignores the real driver: systemic unfairness.
The status quo has been increasingly rigged to benefit insiders and elites as the powers of central banks and governments have picked the winners (cronies, insiders, cartels and monopolies) and shifted the losses and risks onto the losers (the rest of us).
We now live in the world the 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat so aptly described:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Ours is a two-tier society and economy with a broken ladder of social mobility for those trying to reach the security of the technocrat class.
As Bastiat observed, those rigging the system to benefit themselves always create a legal system that lets them off scot-free and a PR scheme that glorifies their predation as well-deserved rewards from their enormous appetite for hard work and innovation.
Embezzling a couple billion dollars also earns you a get out of jail free card: none of the perps in Wall Street’s skims, scams and frauds ever gets indicted, much less convicted, and none of Wall Street’s legalized looters ever goes to prison.
And this is a fair and just system? Uh, right.
The Roulette Wheel Is Rigged
Meanwhile, the reality is the roulette wheel is rigged, and only chumps believe it’s a fair game. Those who know it’s rigged have essentially zero agency (control/power) or capital to demand an unrigged game or finagle their way into the elite class doing the skimming.
The net result is soaring frustration with a patently unfair system that’s touted as the fairest in the entire world.
The key takeaway, in my view, is that the unfairness isn’t limited to the economy, society or politics — it’s manifesting in all three realms. It isn’t just frustration with domestic issues — the global economic order is also a source of unfairness and powerlessness.
These are the dynamics that are tearing apart our social cohesion and that will soon start destabilizing the economy — regardless of how much “money” the Federal Reserve prints.
How divided is America?
Two Americas
There is a map, courtesy of the Brookings Institute, showing the roughly 500 counties Biden won and the roughly 2,500 counties Trump won.
This might seem like a chart of political polarization, and superficially that’s clear, but the real polarization is economic-financial: there are two economies in America, and there’s very little commonality in the two economies.
70% of America’s economy is generated in fewer than 500 counties; the other 2,500 counties are left with the remaining 30%.
The nation’s productive capital is even more concentrated in a few hands and regions, and since income and political power flow to capital, the financial disparity/inequality far exceeds the 70/30 split depicted in the political map.
Ownership of capital is concentrated in the hands of the top 10%, but the concentration is actually much more limited: the top 0.1% control so much wealth/capital that they “own” virtually all the power.
I hope it’s not a big surprise that America is now a rigidly two-tier society and economy. If you’re an executive at a big Wall Street investment bank, you can rig markets or embezzle billions, and you’ll never face any personal legal consequences such as being indicted for fraud and being imprisoned.
But try being an employee at a local credit union and embezzle $5,000 — a prison sentence is very predictable.
If you’re one of the 500,000+ people busted for possessing cannabis in the U.S. every year, then you’re not rich and powerful, because when the spoiled-rotten child of the rich and powerful get busted, the charges are quietly dropped, or cut to a modest fine and a misdemeanor, etc.
“Justice”
“Justice” is for sale in the U.S., along with rigged markets, political power, healthcare and everything else. Why should we be surprised that the economy is also two-tiered?
The lower tier of the U.S. economy has been decapitalized: debt has been substituted for capital. Capital only flows into the increasingly centralized top-tier, which owns and profits from the rising tide of debt that’s been keeping the second tier afloat for the past 20 years.
The saying “follow the money” is only half-right — more importantly, follow the capital because income and power flow to capital. As a RAND report documents, $50 trillion has been siphoned from labor and the lower tier of the economy to the top-tier elites who own the vast majority of the capital.
What’s missing from the political map is the staggering percentage of residents in the wealthiest 500 counties who are precariously living paycheck to paycheck, the ALICE Americans: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.
Gand financialization has richly rewarded the top 0.1% and the top 5% technocrat class that serves the elites’ interests. These elites and their capital are concentrated in urban counties, and the feedback loops are self-reinforcing: the capital in the urban counties attracts more capital and talent (skilled labor), bleeding the other 2,500 counties of skilled labor and capital.
Where’s the Leadership?
America has no plan to reverse this destructive tide. Our leadership’s “plan” is benign neglect: just send a monthly stipend of bread and circuses to all the disempowered, decapitalized households, urban and rural, so they can stay out of trouble and not bother the elites’ continued pillaging.
There’s a lot of big talk about rebuilding infrastructure and the Green New Deal, but our first question must always be: cui bono, to whose benefit?
How much of the spending will actually be devoted to changing the rising imbalances between the haves and the have-nots, the ever-richer who profit from rising debt and the ever more decapitalized debt-serfs who are further impoverished by rising debt?
People don’t want to just get by, they want an opportunity to acquire capital in all its forms, an opportunity to contribute to their communities, to make a difference, to earn respect and pride.
That our “leadership” reckons bread and circuses is what the strip-mined bottom 90% want is beyond pathetic. How that plays out is anyone’s guess, but the pendulum swing to an extreme at the other end of the spectrum is already baked in.
I just hope it doesn’t end in disaster.
- LA County Mayor Says Not Wearing A Mask Is "Act Of Domestic Terrorism"
LA County Mayor Says Not Wearing A Mask Is “Act Of Domestic Terrorism”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 22:00A Los Angeles County public official was quoted by the Los Angeles Daily News as saying those who defy the public health order to wear a mask in public in response to the virus pandemic are guilty of an “act of domestic terrorism.”
“If it were up to me, anybody not wearing a mask when they are out in public would be arrested … That’s an act of domestic terrorism and should be treated like one,” Lancaster, California, Mayor Rex Parris, recently said.
Parris’ comment comes as his small town of 156,000, located in northern Los Angeles County, is in a county where cases on Monday recorded the worst day thus far of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s perfectly understood for Parris to be frustrated considering the virus pandemic is ravaging the county, though equating non-compliant folks as domestic terrorism is absurd.
Parris’ attitude should come as no surprise to readers as the county; nevertheless, the state, has enforced strict restrictions in recent weeks.
Public Health to Add Additional Safety Modifications to Health Officer Order – Targeted Safer at Home Order Comes After 5-Day Average of New Cases is 4,751. View https://t.co/CfWbZdkIZH pic.twitter.com/RAZRpJUcxK
— LA Public Health (@lapublichealth) November 27, 2020
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… so, by definition, California Governor Gavin Newsom is a domestic terrorist?
As a reminder to readers, a “revolutionary” study was published last week that demonstrates mask-wearing does very little to mitigate the spread of the virus.
- "This Gives Some Hope" – Japanese Study Finds 98% Of COVID Patients Still Have Antibodies 6 Months Later
“This Gives Some Hope” – Japanese Study Finds 98% Of COVID Patients Still Have Antibodies 6 Months Later
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 21:40In another example of how COVID-19 research has painted a complex, and sometimes conflicting, picture of the virus and the ability of the human immune system to fight it off, a team of researchers at Japan’s Yokohama City University published research showing that antibodies in COVID-19 patients persist for six months or more, even amid a preponderance of reports warning about the risk of reinfection for many particularly vulnerable patients.
A Japanese research team said Wednesday that it has detected neutralizing antibodies in 98% of people six months after they were infected with SARS-CoV-2. Another study performed in the UK found that antibodies found evidence that antibody levels start to degrade within six months.
The team, led by Yokohama City University professor Takeharu Yamanaka, is already planning to conduct a follow-up study to see whether these people will still have such antibodies a year after their infections.
But in the survey data released Wednesday, researcher checked blood samples from 376 people who had already recovered – the largest study of its type in Japan. The samples were collected six months after the patients were infected.
According to a report on the study published by Nippon, Yamanaka said that “in general, people with neutralizing antibodies are believed to carry a low risk of reinfection…This gives some hope” for the effectiveness of the vaccines that are soon to be delivered to the public.
As the west prepares to roll out the first wave of COVID-19 vaccinations, scientists will be watching closely for more data to try an ascertain whether COVID-19 can truly be defeated, or whether it might morph into a flu-like seasonal infection.
- Russia Deploys Missiles To Islands Claimed By Japan After Tense US Navy Standoff
Russia Deploys Missiles To Islands Claimed By Japan After Tense US Navy Standoff
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 21:20Last week there was a somewhat under-reported but major incident in the Sea of Japan wherein the Russian Navy formally charged a US destroyer with violating the sovereign waters of the Russian Federation. The incident involved a Russian warship ‘chasing’ the destroyer off while threating to ram the vessel. But the US denied that its USS John McCain violated Russian waters, noting that it doesn’t recognize the Kremlin’s expansionist interpretation of waters in and near Peter the Great Bay, where the encounter happened.
“We warn the US not to repeat the violation. We reserve the right to respond in the future,” a Russian Foreign Ministry statement vowed last Friday. The Kremlin’s latest dramatic announcement of a new missile deployment to the region appears related and by design meant to further the threat against the United States.
“The Russian military on Tuesday announced the deployment of state-of-the-art air defense missiles to the Pacific islands claimed by Japan,” the Associated Press reports.
A settlement called Gorny on the island of Iturup, part of the Kuril Islands. Image source: TASS/Moscow Times “Russia’s Eastern Military District said in a statement that the S-300V4 air defense missile systems have entered combat duty on the Kuril Islands, adding punch to the shorter range Tor M2 missile systems deployed there earlier,” it details.
Specifically the deployment is said to be on Iturup, which is among the four southernmost Kuril islands which the Soviet Union annexed during the final days of WWII. Japan, however, refers to them as part of its Northern Territories. The status of ownership of the islands, which Russia de facto currently controls, is still unresolved after 75 years following the Russo-Japanese war and as a treaty regarding their status is still being negotiated with President Putin.
The island has already been subject to military build-up with small operational bases, but the deployment of surface-to-air missiles is considered a major new provocation. There’s little doubt it’s in relation to the US Navy’s “freedom of navigation” operations in the area, which Russia says are intent on violating its maritime rights.
Meanwhile Japan’s Foreign Ministry has protested the new development, saying in a statement Wednesday: “We are constantly gathering information about the Russian military’s actions in the Northern Territories,” according to TASS.
“On December 1, the Japanese Embassy in Russia lodged a protest with the Russian Foreign Ministry, noting that such actions can reinforce Russian military capabilities and are incompatible with our country’s position on these islands,” the ministry said.
- Biden's COVID "Supply Commander" Is Bad Medicine
Biden’s COVID “Supply Commander” Is Bad Medicine
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 21:00Authored by Bradley Thomas via The Mises Institute,
Included in his plans to fight the coronavirus, presumptive president-elect Joe Biden has pledged to appoint “a fully empowered supply commander in charge of filling in the gaps” in the production and supply of “essential” items needed to fight the virus.
On his website, Biden elaborates on his plan, declaring that his “supply commander” would “take command of the national supply chain for essential equipment, medications, and protective gear.”
This very Soviet-sounding position is necessary, Biden insists, because “We can no longer leave this to the private sector.”
Leaving aside Biden & Company’s laughable assertion that America’s medical industry reflects any sort of unfettered laissez-faire operation, his proposal for a centralized, command-driven medical “supply chain” under the direction of a government commander betrays a stunning ignorance of the complex and interconnected patterns of production and exchange that make up the economy.
As George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux explained in an April 2020 article published by the American Institute for Economic Research, “The first reality is that, in our modern economy nearly every productive enterprise is connected to every other productive enterprise. This connectedness is the phenomenon alluded to by the term ‘supply chain.'”
But this term, however, is “highly misleading,” Boudreaux wrote. “Today’s economy is not a series of supply chains running side by side with each other, each largely distinct from, and independent of, the others.”
“Instead of a collection of distinct supply chains,” he continued, “our modern economy is a single globe-spanning web of interconnectedness. Within this web every output is the product of countless inputs and each kind of input typically is used to produce countless different kinds of outputs.”
The complex nature of this process of deploying a dizzying array of scarce resources with alternative uses for use in different finished products does not occur in cleanly separated and hermetically sealed “supply chains.”
“This web of interconnectedness—the complexity of which is beyond human comprehension—is indispensable for our modern mass prosperity. Yet its existence—its ‘everything-is-connected-in-some-way-to-everything-else’ reality—means that there are no objective and clear lines separating ‘critical supplies’ from ‘uncritical’ ones,” Boudreaux added.
To help clarify the interconnectedness of our economy, Leonard Read’s classic 1958 essay “I, Pencil” can prove instructive.
When asking what will be considered “essential equipment, medications, and protective gear,” we must further examine the inputs required to produce these items.
Read highlighted how the pencil requires cedar wood from Oregon, which in turn requires saws and trucks and ropes to transport the raw wood to the sawmill in California, which itself requires steel for its equipment along with electricity, land, concrete, and countless other inputs. And that is just the tip of the iceberg for the wood. The lead itself, the rubber for the eraser, and the lacquer for the finish each likewise require many inputs from around the world, all necessary in order to complete the pencil.
Now imagine just how complex the processes are for producing medications, medical equipment, and protective gear. And the inputs required to produce these items will also require other inputs. If we trace back the process far enough for items like medicine and medical equipment, the list of raw materials, capital goods, labor, etc. that need to be diverted from other uses, the list would become unfathomable—certainly so for any single “supply commander.”
Moreover, not just the production process itself, but also the distribution and storage of such “essential” goods to hundreds of millions of people and healthcare workers across the nation will require substantial resources.
Importantly, nearly every resource directed to the production and distribution of these “essential” items will have alternative uses for which they will no longer be available. The result is that the “supply chains” for each and every one of these alternative products and inputs will be impacted, for instance in the form of shortages or inflated prices.
How many of these impacted items would also be considered “essential,” but for noncovid purposes? For instance, other lifesaving medicines or critical medical supplies, or food supplies? And to what degree?
No central authority could possibly know this; indeed, the top-down “supply commander” model could end up doing more harm than good.
Too often, progressives and other interventionists view an unhampered market as “chaos,” something needing to be reined in under the direction of a wise central planner, or “commander.””
However, the impulse to default to centralizing economic decision-making over such a complex ecosystem as the economy is a threat not just to our liberty, but to our well-being. The need for market prices based on private property to freely function and efficiently direct scarce resources to where they are needed most becomes even more critical in times of emergency.
- Americans Panic Bought Guns On Black Friday
Americans Panic Bought Guns On Black Friday
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 20:40Americans panic bought guns during the Thanksgiving Day weekend, gun-related background checks on Black Friday posted the fourth-highest total on record, according to FBI data.
The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) showed while 186,645 checks were completed the day after Thanksgiving, recording the fourth-highest total on record, it was down about 8% from 2019.
Black Friday is usually one of the busiest days of the year for gun stores, but the rush to buy weapons and ammo was sparked earlier this year following the coronavirus pandemic, civil unrest, and the prospects of a Biden presidency – translating into more than 32 million background checks so far this year.
- Gun shops sue to keep record sales going amid coronavirus surge
- FBI Background Checks Blow Past Annual Record As Guns Fly Off Shelves
- Gun Sales Surge In October As 2020 Dems Unveil Gun Control Proposals
Internet searches for “black Friday gun sales” soared on Nov. 27.
Searches for “gun sales” surged ahead of Nov. 27.
Last month, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) released a report that indicated October saw the most gun purchases of any October on record.
Mark Oliva, a spokesman for NSFF, told the Washington Free Beacon that Biden’s election performance triggered the last buying binge of weapons even after unprecedented demand surges in March and June.
“I think that people are looking at the Biden gun-control plan, at what he said he wants to do,” Oliva said. “People are concerned and they’re buying firearms and want to buy while they can still buy them.”
He said Biden’s plan to ban weapons online sales and his gun-registration-and-tax-scheme had motivated buyers to purchase now and ask questions later.
While Americans flocked to brick-and-mortar guns stores on Black Friday, they avoided other retailers as visits to physical stores fell 52.1% from last year.
- The Attack Of The Watermelons
The Attack Of The Watermelons
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 20:20Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,
It’s been said that some environmental activists are like watermelons – green on the outside, but red on the inside.
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Red, meaning communism.
That’s probably true in some cases, but I don’t want to tar the overall environmental movement. Most simply want a clean future that their kids and grandkids can live in. We all do.
The wealthier a society becomes, the more it can afford to focus on issues like the environment. Much of the world is too busy trying to survive.
In important respects, environmentalism is largely vanity. It’s the wealthy who obsess about it. But as you’ll see shortly, the science doesn’t support climate alarmism.
In important respects, environmentalism is largely vanity. It’s the wealthy who obsess about it.
The hue and cry to ban fossil fuels and end fracking is nonetheless in full swing. A Biden administration would only amplify it.
A Climate “Czar”
The Biden team has already named Establishment figure John Kerry its climate change “czar.”
That’s fine, it’s mostly politics. The Democratic Party is committed to the politics of climate change.
But once you ban fossil fuels (or make major strides in that direction), one is immediately confronted with the need for alternative sources of energy.
The obvious choices are solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind and nuclear.
To be clear, all of those alternatives involve proven technology. I have visited the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington. It generates a lot of electricity.
Meanwhile, I have a large solar panel array on the farm.
My main residence is not far from the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire. All those systems avoid fossil fuels, but they work well and produce power.
That’s not the issue. The issue is: Are these energy alternatives scalable, feasible and politically popular enough to power the United States?
The short answer is no.
Too Many Obstacles
The Grand Coulee Dam is a monumental and inspiring work of engineering and construction genius. But, the idea of building new dams on rivers is environmentally objectionable and politically incorrect. The trend today is to remove existing dams, not build new ones.
The same can be said for nuclear power. The move is toward closing and disassembling existing nuclear plants, not building new ones.
Geothermal generation is feasible, but not scalable. That leaves wind and solar. The growth potential there is likewise limited for reasons explained below…
A significant flaw in the solar power narrative is the idea of climate change and the increasing use of solar power as a non-carbon alternative.
Climate Change Is Real, But…
Don’t get me wrong, climate change is real.
I lived on Long Island Sound for eleven years. It’s a beautiful body of water with a rocky shoreline on the Connecticut side. The reason it’s rocky is because it was a glacier in the last Ice Age, which ended about 11,700 years ago.
Going from a glacier to a place you can swim is climate change. But, it took millennia. It did not happen in ten years.
Climatology is one of the most complex and difficult branches of science. If ever there was a field that called for humility in forecasting, this is it.
But the propaganda is relentless.
Is the Earth Actually Cooling?
Most serious scientists understand that the rhetoric and the data don’t match. Privately they say that the earth may not be warming right now; it may actually be cooling.
They also say that the causes of any change probably have nothing to do with CO2 emissions, but are more likely related to solar cycles and possibly volcanic activity.
The alarmism springs from climate models that reflect the biases of their programmers. They bear little relation to the actual record. There’s no scientific basis for the alarmism that elites and the media have been pushing.
The legitimate science of climate change has been hijacked by globalists aided and abetted by contributors like George Soros and an army of paid-off scientific lackeys and corrupt journalists as a means to pursue global governance, global taxation and global regulation.
I know that sounds conspiratorial. But if you follow the evidence, you’ll find that it’s legitimate.
Clean Energy Means Dirty Energy
At the end of the day, the idea that wind, solar and hydro energy are “carbon free” is nonsense.
For example, Tesla electric vehicle batteries are charged using electricity from utilities that burn coal in many cases. Large wind generators are constructed of tubular steel and fiberglass, both of which are carbon intensive in their manufacture.
Hydroelectric dams are massive construction projects involving square miles of excavation and millions of cubic yards of concrete with steel reinforcement. Solar panels are made using poisonous chemicals.
These are not reasons to oppose these technologies. They are reasons to doubt the “carbon free” mantra of their supporters.
I have practical experience with solar energy. I built the largest non-commercial off-grid solar panel array in New England on my farm there. I’m obviously not against solar.
But a system like that is quite expensive and almost completely non-economic. My solar array is a lot more expensive than the local power company when all costs are considered.
It’s true I get “free” electricity (if you ignore capital costs and occasional maintenance costs), but I won’t live long enough to recoup my investment relative to commercial electricity rates.
Solar power is a “use it or lose it” energy source.
If you’re not in a desert climate, good luck with the weather. Solar output drops to zero when the weather is rainy, snowy or even densely clouded. Oh, by the way, there’s no solar power at night.
The reason I built the solar power system had to do with the possibility of the power grid going out. It was not about economics; it was about survival.
Natural gas is carbon-based but is relatively cheap and clean. It’s a good alternative for those worried about carbon-emissions but not ready to embrace the Green New Deal.
Green Energy: A Luxury Good
“Green” energy is increasingly a luxury good in a world of cheap oil. It’s a luxury of the rich who can afford to endure its inefficiencies. It’s moral preening. But most people can’t afford its costs.
I’m not saying that green energy is bogus or that it doesn’t have a future. It does. But right now it’s more of a niche than a mass market phenomena with high-growth potential. It’s essentially a fetish of the richer nations.
Bottom line, be skeptical about the Green New Deal. And be wary of rich people who do push it. It’s a lot more about these people advertising their virtue than actual science.
- US Offers $5 Million For Info On China's 'Flagrant' N.Korea Sanctions Violations
US Offers $5 Million For Info On China’s ‘Flagrant’ N.Korea Sanctions Violations
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 20:00The Trump administration has with only weeks to go till Biden’s inauguration in January launched a new sanctions enforcement related initiative regarding North Korea that allows individuals or officials to report violations for a monetary reward.
The State Department published its new website DPRKrewards.com on Tuesday which offers up to $5 million for specific information leading to the “disruption” of “persons engaged in certain activities that support North Korea.”
Via NK state media With such a large sum it appears they are certainly hoping to attract potential internal regime whistleblowers or even intentioned defectors. But the whole project is squarely aimed at Beijing as part of Trump’s pressure campaign.
Upon unveiling the violations reporting website, the State Department blasted China for multiple major sanctions violations regarding the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK. It was pointed out that China continues to host at least 20,000 North Korean workers in contravention of UN resolutions.
“Lifting sanctions and pumping more revenue into the DPRK while its missile and nuclear production facilities continue to hum is something we will never do,” a State Dept. official for North Korea said.
Rewards Up To $5 Million!
North Korea engages in illegal cyber hacks against the U.S. as well as evasion of sanctions to fund its illegal nuclear weapons program.
Submit info on these illicit activities and you may be eligible for a reward. Visit https://t.co/iBs0DwXTpi pic.twitter.com/bsOOtosSCl
— Rewards for Justice (@RFJ_USA) December 1, 2020
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The statement described specifically:
“The examples of this chronic failure are numerous, growing and worrying.”
He said that US vessels provided information to Beijing 46 times since 2019 about North Korean fuel-smuggling in Chinese waters, and in the past year observed 555 cases of North Korean shipments of coal of other sanctioned exports to China.
“On none of these occasions did the Chinese authorities act to stop these illicit imports. Not once,” the US official added.
The new website identifies potential violations as including “…money laundering, exportation of luxury goods to North Korea, specified cyber-activity and actions that support WMD proliferation.
This lashing out at China for its enabling and ‘looking the other way’ on North Korea comes as the Trump White House has promised to keep up the pressure on Beijing down to the last days before the presidential transition.
- Post-George Floyd, A Wave Of "Anti-Racist" Teaching Sweeps K-12 Schools Targeting "Whiteness"
Post-George Floyd, A Wave Of “Anti-Racist” Teaching Sweeps K-12 Schools Targeting “Whiteness”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 19:40By John Murawski of RealClearInvestigations
The notices to parents began arriving fast and furious in the weeks after the death of George Floyd in late May.
Megyn Kelly: The former Fox News anchor, who now has her own podcast, says she’s pulling her three kids from their New York City schools. “It’s out of control, on so many levels. They have gone off the deep end.” In dramatic, urgent language, K-12 schools across the country – both public and private – professed solidarity with Black Lives Matter and vowed to dismantle white supremacy, as they scrambled to introduce anti-racist courses and remake themselves into racism-free zones.
The president of the Lower Merion School Board on Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line declared to families: “We need to eradicate white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in all of our institutions.”
In Maine, a coastal public school district where 3.7% of the 2,100 students are African American or Hispanic, the superintendent declared war on “the intentional barriers white people have built to harm Black people.” The top administrator added: “We grieve for all of the Black lives taken by white supremacy.”
Educators at the prestigious Brentwood College School in Los Angeles, have made more changes to the curriculum this year than any other in the private school’s nearly five decade history. Teachers are introducing critical race theory, which views U.S. history through the prism of racial conflict, and assigning readings from Ibram X. Kendi, the academic and author who contends race-neutral policies are the bulwark of the “White ethnostate.”
As part of the makeover, Brentwood School leaders have rolled out a fresh theme this year for fifth graders: “Identity and Power.”
“While some view these recent shifts as indoctrination, we see them as opportunities for engagement,” Brentwood’s head of school, Mike Riera, wrote to families this fall, acknowledging the growing resistance from some parents. “Will we overstep in some areas? Possibly. Will we understep in others? Possibly.”
The nation’s K-12 schools have been incrementally adopting multiculturalism and ethnic studies for decades, but such courses have been the exception rather than the rule. This summer’s Black Lives Matter protests have sparked new level of commitment, a newfound urgency, and a new trend: anti-racist pedagogy.
Fabienne Doucet: “What’s really different now – and this has been decades in coming – is talking explicitly about whiteness,” the advocate says. “Sometimes you need to go too far to get there or else we might not go far enough.” If administrators deliver on their promises, the sweeping changes underway will introduce new courses, shift hiring priorities, rebalance student demographics, redirect stipends and scholarships, revise conduct standards – in many ways modeling K-12 educational philosophy on the social justice values endorsed by many universities and, increasingly, corporations.
The changes come at an unprecedented time when many schools are struggling to offer basic instruction under covid restrictions.
Fabienne Doucet, a New York University professor of early childhood education and urban education, said this momentum has been building for decades and the culture now appears primed to understand race in America from the moral perspective of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“What’s really different now – and this has been decades in coming – is talking explicitly about whiteness,” Doucet said, citing a term that academics and activists use to critique the cultural, political and economic dominance exercised by Europeans and their descendants.
Doucet, who’s on leave from NYU and working as a program officer at the William T. Grant Foundation in New York, acknowledged that some of the content of anti-racist pedagogy may seem militant to those hearing it for the first time. But, she said, it serves an important purpose: chronicling the nation’s history from all perspectives, even if those perspectives conflict with one another.
“Sometimes you need to go too far to get there or else we might not go far enough,” Doucet said. “I’m less anxious about overshooting than not ever getting there because the stakes are so high.”
The rapid and radical changes in public and private schools have triggered a backlash among some parents who find the anti-racist message to be anti-white and anti-American, and those who say it’s historically inaccurate, inflammatory and divisive.
From the website of No Left Turn in Education, which is seeking to mobilize parents around the country to reverse the woke juggernaut. Parents are forming Instagram sites, and at least one group calling itself No Left Turn in Education is seeking to mobilize parents around the country to reverse the woke juggernaut. The parents swap examples from their schools, but many are keeping incognito for fear of being accused of racism or other repercussions; indeed, several parents interviewed for this article didn’t want their names to be used.
Their concern is that the edgy, new educational materials indoctrinate pupils with identity politics and leftist ideology, and leave no room for discussion.
“They are using very positive words like diversity, equity and inclusivity to mislead you, but the message behind these words is horrifying,” said Elana Yaron Fishbein, a suburban Philadelphia mom who created the No Left Turn in Education organization. “They are grouping and stereotyping human beings by skin color, and they are attributing characteristics to your personality based on skin color.”
Some parents say that immersing students in the concepts of white privilege, structural racism and whiteness should be balanced out with “viewpoint diversity.” They want their kids not only to be exposed to multiple perspectives but also to be able to freely critique anti-racist materials, and to form their own opinions
Elana Yaron Fishbein of No Left Turn in Education: “They are grouping and stereotyping human beings by skin color, and they are attributing characteristics to your personality based on skin color.” Jerome Eisenberg, a Los Angeles developer of apartments whose middle-school daughter attends the Brentwood School, said it’s irresponsible to introduce American history to uninformed students from the single perspective of race.
“It’s just wrong to present this [material] as true to children who have no other background in U.S. history,” Eisenberg said. “It causes me consternation that bright line American heroes like Jefferson and Lincoln are cast as bad guys.”
Among the protesting parents: Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor who now has her own podcast. On a recent episode, she said she was so put off by what she saw as a radical turn in K-12 education that she’s pulling her three kids from their schools in New York City.
“It’s out of control, on so many levels,” Kelly said. “They have gone off the deep end.”
She read from an article that she said was circulated among the school diversity group, which included Kelly and other parents, and was recommended by the group to be circulated to all the faculty.
“I’m tired of White people reveling in their state-sanctioned depravity, snuffing out Black life with no consequences,” Kelly read, quoting a June piece by Nahliah Webber, the executive director of the Orleans Public Education Network. “They gleefully soak in their White-washed history that downplays the holocaust of Indigenous, Native peoples and Africans in the Americas. They happily believe their all-White spaces exist as a matter of personal effort and willingly use violence against Black bodies to keep those spaces white.”
Advocates of anti-racist pedagogy say that the insistence on viewpoint diversity rings hollow to activists who have been trying to diversify the curriculum for decades.
“How is it that when you’re talking about a Eurocentric curriculum, there isn’t this request that the story of Christopher Columbus be presented through multiple lenses?” said Julia Jordan-Zachery, the chair of the Africana Studies Department at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. “It begs the question of why do we now insist on viewpoint diversity?”
Nahliah Webber, Orleans Public Education Network: “I’m tired of White people reveling in their state-sanctioned depravity, snuffing out Black life with no consequences. They gleefully soak in their White-washed history that downplays the holocaust of Indigenous, Native peoples and Africans in the Americas.”
opennola.org/about/
Educators are overwhelmingly progressive on social justice issues. This summer the EdWeek Research Center found that 81% of the nation’s teachers, principals and district leaders support the Black Lives Matter movement, compared to 67% of the general population as surveyed separately by the Pew Research Center. The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ labor union, was among the numerous professional educator organizations that issued a statement in support of Black Lives Matter in response to “the crisis of anti-Blackness.”
The K-12 changes are already taking shape. Some institutions, such as Hopkins School in Connecticut and Princeton Day School in New Jersey, are segregating faculty and staff into “affinity groups” – such as Latinx or “White Consciousness” – while holding discussions about racism and white privilege. Others, such as Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, are spending nearly half-a-million dollars for “anti-racist system audits” conducted by outside consultants.
The $46,300-a-year Hopkins School, the third oldest independent school in the United States, is revamping its courses “to incorporate a social justice lens, de-center Anglo-European voices,” focus instruction on race and identity, fund student activism and projects, and add a stand-alone course on social justice.
Buffalo Public Schools, where whites account for 22% of enrolled students, this fall adopted Black Lives Matter-themed lessons plans that ask students in grades 2-4 if there are any similarities between the coronavirus epidemic today and the supposedly intentional spread of smallpox to the Native Americans, described as an 18th-century form of “biological warfare.” Middle and high schoolers are taught to think of Western justice as “punitive” and the justice meted out in traditional societies as “restorative/empathetic.” One of the included documents for instructors states: “All white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism.”
While some urban public school districts, including those in Chicago, New York City and Washington D.C., have been integrating social justice and anti-racism into their core curricula for years, at many schools administrators and teachers are new to the game and playing catch-up. To fill the need, professional educator organizations and advocacy groups are posting K-12 teaching materials online for teachers to use in their classrooms.
The National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union, has posted an entire page of BLM teaching resources, while Black Lives Matter is also disseminating educational materials.
From the National Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action Starter Kit Anti-racist materials present a mix of themes – an emphasis on liberation and resistance movements, critiques of whiteness and systemic racism that come from critical race theory, and an introduction to other social justice causes. At times, the readings and lessons can take an unapologetic, even confrontational, stance toward America’s past and present. But unlike Black History Month, there are few if any mentions of African Americans who defied the color barrier as athletes, artists, inventors, scientists or soldiers.
The NEA teaching themes include Justice for George [Floyd] Day, Transgender Day of Remembrance, Globalism and Collective Value, Queer Organizing Behind the Scenes, Unapologetically Black Day and Student Activist Day. A link to social justice math used in Seattle Public Schools teaches data analysis and mathematical modeling through examples of police brutality and excessive use of force.
“Racism is perpetuated by silence – and silence is complicity,” one NEA teacher instruction reads. “Being ‘colorblind’ often serves as a pretense to downplay the significance of race, deny the existence of racism, and erase the experience of students of color.”
The BLM materials starting at the early childhood level are rooted in such guiding principles as empathy, loving engagement and diversity, as well as trans affirming, queer affirming and disrupting the Western nuclear family societal norm to celebrate extended families, nontraditional families and villages that “collective care for one another.” Elementary school activities introduce kids to community activism, the visual symbols of the LGBT movement, advocating for people with physical disabilities, and a creating a communal activism mural.
An elementary school-level proposed activity called “Match the Action” teaches children to identify different forms of resistance: boycotts, protests, rallies, marches, sit-ins, walkouts, petitions, etc. A proposed activity for middle schoolers reads: “Think about the names of people who are no longer with us who you wish you could talk to. Activists, leaders, elders, people who have been murdered by police.”
Fatima Morrell: An “emancipation pedagogy” that empowers black pupils by “problematizing the Eurocentric perspective.” Fatima Morrell, an associate superintendent at Buffalo Public Schools, describes her district’s approach to education as an “emancipation pedagogy” that empowers black pupils by “problematizing the Eurocentric perspective” and by authentically representing the African American experience, which allows black students see themselves reflected in the curriculum and realize their human potential.
Buffalo’s schools have been incorporating these concepts for the past five years, she said, but the introduction of Black Lives Matter-themed lessons this fall alarmed some parents. Morrell said she talked to concerned parents by phone, and Buffalo school officials held a virtual town hall via Zoom in September; school district officials plan to hold three more town halls to address concerns and explain changes to the curriculum, she said.
Morrell, who oversees the district’s Office of Culturally & Linguistically Responsive Initiatives, said many parents wrongly assumed that Buffalo schools were advocating for defunding the police. Some of the parental anger, she said, came from a “historically dark place.”
“When you teach from a black or brown voice about the legacy of enslavement, it has a very different tone and tenor,” Morrell explained during the Zoom virtual town hall. “One of the misconceptions is that this is about white hate, and it couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
Buffalo students learn about the BLM movement, and focus on such themes as “I Love My Hair,” “Unapologetically Black,” “Understanding My Family’s History,” “What Is Community?” and “Mass Incarceration.” They learn about the late civil rights giant John Lewis and the concept of making a positive difference through protest and activism. And they complete a Jim Crow-era literacy test administered to black voters in Alabama.
They also learn about the concepts of racist, not racist, and antiracist, as defined by Kendi, who is quoted: “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle. … The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism.”
One of the lessons for students in grades seven and eight, based on The New York Times’ 1619 Project, asks: “Why isn’t slavery considered/or included as a cause to the American Revolution? Possible Responses: our founding is pure/righteous, protect the narrative.”
In grades 11 and 12, students are asked to pick an assignment for their final project. One option is to write a rap about police brutality, compose a poem on inequality, draft a prose piece on systemic racism, or “Create a collage on a poster board that connects to any specific example related to the Black/Brown Genocide.”
This pedagogy runs counter to the educational philosophy of Ian Rowe, who has run single-sex charter schools in New York City for the past decade and is the co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, which is opening charter schools in the South Bronx in 2022 that will primarily attract black and Hispanic students.
Rowe, who is also a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that anti-racist pedagogy glosses over inconvenient facts, like Africans’ role in the global slave trade, and promotes a defeatist philosophy fixated on racial oppression, subjugation and injustice.
“It taps into white guilt and black people’s sense that someone else is responsible for these problems that I have,” Rowe said. “The way this stuff plays out, if you are a low-income black kid, after a while you really start to believe it. You develop a very skewed version of the country, where you believe everyone is hostile to your efforts and that white supremacy is so strong that you don’t have the ability to control your own destiny.”
Jeff Porter: Urges white families in his Maine school district to open their minds and consider how they contribute to structures of oppression. Some of today’s most vocal converts to anti-racist pedagogy previously regarded the nation’s racial reckoning from the perspective of their whiteness, before they experienced an epiphany. That’s what happened to Jeff Porter, the superintendent of Maine School Administrative District #51, which serves the towns of Cumberland and North Yarmouth, after he went through mandatory diversity and equity training this past summer with an outside organization called Community Change, Inc.
“I also recognize that some of the terminology may have felt confrontational, such as ‘white majority’ and ‘white supremacy,’” Porter wrote to parents this summer. “When I first went through training on this subject I was very much taken aback by this language as well and felt personally attacked as a racist.”
Porter described himself as a “life-long Mainer” whose family’s farming roots in Aroostook County go back to his great-great-grandfather.
“To think because I am white and have always lived here would mean that I somehow contribute to a ‘white supremecist’ [sic] culture was deeply troubling and insulting,” Porter wrote. “I had never before considered myself in this way.”
But Porter urged the white families in the school district to open their minds and consider how they contribute to structures of oppression.
“However, I now fully understand that this language is an accurate (and necessary) depiction of the long historical reality of race in this country, whether we want to accept it or not,” Porter declared. “The facts speak for themselves: America has a 400-year-old history of discrimination and oppression of African-Americans that must be acknowledged if we are ever to truly live up to the ideals to which our nation was founded.”
- Defunding Police Backfires In Minneapolis As Shootings, Homicides, And Carjackings Surge
Defunding Police Backfires In Minneapolis As Shootings, Homicides, And Carjackings Surge
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 19:20Minneapolis has transformed into an inner-city warzone in six months, just like Baltimore and Detroit, with violent crime surging to levels not seen in decades after millions of dollars in police budget cuts.
Minneapolis, or as some say, “Murderapolis,” has witnessed an explosion in homicides and carjacking this year as a severe shortage of police officers has resulted in dwindling patrols.
Minneapolis City Council members defunded the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) back in June, with council members on Monday planning to cut an additional $8 million in police funding and transfer it to other services, a move that could undermine public safety.
In November, more than 500 people were shot this year across the dangerous metro area, the most in 15 years, the local Star Tribune reported. Homicides have also erupted to levels not seen since the 1990s.
Source: Star Tribune Minneapolis enjoyed years of falling crime rates, that all changed in May after the police killing of George Floyd, which triggered violent protests across the city and nationwide. Police data shows shootings and homicides jumped 64% this year compared with the four-year average. So far, 74 homicides have been recorded, the third-highest total in the city’s history.
“The streak of violence since the summer stretched across the city, but as ever, Black and Latino neighborhoods have borne the brunt of the suffering.
The increase this year is mainly driven by an increase in the number of adult victims — especially Black men, who account for roughly 40% of all gunshot victims. But it’s young people who continue to make up a disproportionate share of the victims, and some of the suspects. Through Oct. 13, the last date for which reliable data are available, the number of young gunshot victims was up about 44% compared with the four-year average. The city has also recorded 22 fatal shootings of victims under age 25, twice as many as all of last year.” – Star Tribune
And while the pandemic has led to widespread job losses among the inner-city communities – the latest surge of violent crime, besides shootings and homicides, that is, violent carjackings has seen an unprecedented 537% surge in November over last year, the local Star Tribune pointed out in a separate report.
“The numbers are staggering,” a Minneapolis police spokesperson told the paper. “It defies all civility and any shred of common human decency.”
Police have blamed the latest wave in carjackings on “small groups of marauding teens” but said adults had been arrested as well for the car theft.
As violent crime spirals out of control across the metro, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Medaria Arradondo have criticized City Council members for their move to defund police.
Frey called the latest plan by council members to defund the police “irresponsible and untenable,” adding that he supports alternative forms of policing in inner-city communities. He said slashing the number of officers on the street would be disastrous for public safety.
Who could have seen that coming?
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) December 2, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
And there it is, cutting police budgets appears to be backfiring for this liberal-run city.
- Democratic Austin Mayor Urged Citizens "Not To Relax… Stay Home" While Vacationing In Cabo
Democratic Austin Mayor Urged Citizens “Not To Relax… Stay Home” While Vacationing In Cabo
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 19:00George Orwell’s Animal Farm gave us the useful phrase “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
That book was written as an allegorical warning against communism, but, as PJMedia’s Bryan Preston details below, since COVID struck Democrats tend to use it as a how-to.
The latest case in point is Austin Mayor Steve Adler. Back in November, he told Austin to stay home to stay safe. But he wasn’t at home at all when he said this.
Statesman.com’s Tony Plohetski reports the details that in early November, as health officials warned of a impending COVID-19 spike, Austin Mayor Steve Adler hosted an outdoor wedding and reception with 20 guests for his daughter at a trendy hotel near downtown.
The next morning, Adler and seven other wedding attendees boarded a private jet bound for Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where they vacationed for a week at a family timeshare.
One night into the trip, Adler addressed Austin residents in a Facebook video:
“We need to stay home if you can. This is not the time to relax. We are going to be looking really closely. … We may have to close things down if we are not careful.”
In hosting the wedding and traveling internationally, Adler said he broke neither his own order or those established by Gov. Greg Abbott.
But at the time, the city was recommending people not gather in groups of more than 10, and the day after Adler’s departure, Austin’s health authority warned that “it’s important that we drive the (COVID-19) numbers down in advance of Thanksgiving.”
As he pressed the public to help stop the spread of the virus in recent weeks, Adler had not previously disclosed details of his private actions. He gave no indication in his Facebook video that he was outside the city as he discussed Austin’s rising number of cases and reviewed the number of hospital patients.
In an interview this week with the American-Statesman, the mayor said he and his family put hours of consideration into how to hold an intimate event and vacation as safely as possible. He said he consulted with interim health director Dr. Mark Escott prior to the wedding at the Hotel St. Cecilia, just east of South Congress Avenue, and established rules to ensure guests’ safety. The 20 attendees had to undergo a rapid COVID-19 test and maintain social distancing, he said.
Adler added that masks were distributed, although he acknowledged that guests were “probably not” wearing them all the time.
“At that point, I am with my family group and people who just tested,” he said. “It is not perfect. Obviously, there are infections that could happen, but I think all of us should be minimizing risks as best we can.”
In a media briefing the day after Adler’s party left for Cabo on Mexico’s Pacific coast, Escott told the public:
“If you’re going out to a restaurant, go out with your family, the people who live in your household, not with family and friends outside your household and start to decrease those travels outside of your home that are not necessary.”
A month later, City Hall insiders and political operatives have quietly started questioning the actions of Adler, a Democrat serving his second term, as officials across the country have been found breaking their own rules or recommendations.
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Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell, a Republican, paid a $1,000 fine for violating his stay-home order by visiting his grandson on his birthday after donning fire protection equipment.
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Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, a Democrat, issued a public apology after urging residents not to travel for Thanksgiving, then flying to Missisissippi to see his family.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, was recently caught at a posh restaurant at a large table without a mask.
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San Francisco Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, dined at the same posh restaurant the very next night with seven other people to celebrate socialite Gorretti Lo Lui’s 60th birthday.
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San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, also a Democrat, apologized on Tuesday for attending a thanksgiving dinner in violation of California health protocols.
The situation underscores the greater-than-normal scrutiny on public officials during the pandemic as they issue public pleas for people to take coronavirus precautions and balance other demands in their personal lives.
Political opponents often are standing guard to capitalize on any misstep or hint of hypocrisy.
Adler has been involved heavily in the city’s COVID-19 response, taking what many considered a bold and politically risky step in March of canceling the South by Southwest Festival, a premier event and economic boon for the city, days before the first local cases were confirmed. He has appeared on national TV cable shows discussing the city’s measures to help stop the spread of the virus.
Adler said his conduct is different from other officials because he did not behave in a way that was inconsistent with his message at the time. He added that his actions did not violate his regulations.
“Everyday since March, I repeat that being home is the safest place for people to be,” Adler said in a statement Wednesday. “Only at our most trying moments, like around Thanksgiving, have I asked people not to travel as part of extra precautions. It is safest to stay home. However, we aren’t asking people to never venture out. We ask everyone to be as safe as possible when they do.”
The rate of people testing positive in Austin was less than 4% but started climbing after Adler was in Mexico. New cases rose dramatically as Thanksgiving neared.
Adler said his daughter wanted a much larger wedding but, due to the pandemic, downsized to mostly parents and siblings, some of whom flew into Austin. The event also included a Seattle-based wedding photographer.
“She, like so many other brides, was having to make adjustments in order to stay compliant with the orders from the health director here in Austin and the orders I issued as mayor,” he said. “My daughter and my family are no exception.”
Under Texas Department of Health guidelines, wedding planners are urged to hold events outside but are not subject to an occupancy limit. Indoor weddings must have a 75% occupancy cap.
At the time, Austin was under Stage 3 recommendations, meaning that people should avoid gatherings of more than 10 people and only higher risk people were urged to avoid non-essential travel.
Adler said the eight people with whom he traveled to Mexico operated as a “COVID pod,” meaning that they had all agreed to the same safety guidelines.
“There was no recommendation for people not to travel during that period of time,” he said.
“Someone could look at me and say, ‘He traveled.’ But what they could not say is that I traveled at a time when I was telling other people not to travel.”
Adler said that he does not believe he took a test upon his return to Austin but “generally quarantined.”
The U.S. in March limited inbound land crossings from Mexico to essential travel, but the prohibition did not prevent citizens from returning home. And while the U.S. outbreak has prompted many countries, including much of Europe, to ban American travelers, air travel to Mexico has been allowed during the pandemic, making it one of the few countries that has continued to allow American tourists without stringent restrictions.
Days before Thanksgiving, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Americans to “avoid all travel to Mexico” because of the spiking coronavirus infections.
It seems, once again, that The Simpsons traveled in their time machine…
PJMedia’s Bryan Preston sums it all up perfectly: It’s leadership 101.
Don’t ask your folks to do anything you’re not willing to do yourself. Set the example and then live it. Basic. But how many elected Democrats have thrown this whole idea out and violated their own edicts while also shutting down churches and businesses but leaving other similar but politically-approved crowd-magnets open, and also by the way shutting down schools not because the kids there are at risk, but because the teachers’ unions demand the schools be shut down?
We’re gonna need a spreadsheet to keep track of all of ’em.
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- AI Just Solved A 50-Year-Old Mystery That Could "Dramatically" Change How We Fight Cancer
AI Just Solved A 50-Year-Old Mystery That Could “Dramatically” Change How We Fight Cancer
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 18:40On the day our technological AI overlords decide to finally end the human race, we will be able to tout the feather in our cap that at one point they helped us solve some of the world’s toughest mysteries.
Such was the case with a science problem that the medical and scientific community has been struggling with for more than 5 decades. The problem of “mapping the three-dimensional shapes of the proteins that are responsible for diseases from cancer to Covid-19” appears to now have a solution – thanks to AI.
Google’s Deepmind now says it has created a program called AlphaFold that can solve the mapping problems in “a matter of days”, according to a new report from The Independent. If it works as claimed, the solution will have arrived “decades” before it was expected, the piece notes.
Of the 200 million known proteins, only a small amount are understood. The task of figuring out how each individual protein works is time consuming and expensive. This development could dramatically move our understanding forward further, and faster.
DeepMind claims that “AlphaFold determined the shape of around two-thirds of the proteins with accuracy comparable to laboratory experiments.”
The 14th Community Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14) partnered with Google for the project. The group is comprised of scientists who have been working on a solution for protein mapping since 1994, more than 25 years.
Dr John Moult, chair of CASP14, commented: “Proteins are extremely complicated molecules, and their precise three-dimensional structure is key to the many roles they perform, for example the insulin that regulates sugar levels in our blood and the antibodies that help us fight infections.”
He continued: “Even tiny rearrangements of these vital molecules can have catastrophic effects on our health, so one of the most efficient ways to understand disease and find new treatments is to study the proteins involved. There are tens of thousands of human proteins and many billions in other species, including bacteria and viruses, but working out the shape of just one requires expensive equipment and can take years.”
Nobel Laureate and Professor Venki Ramakrishnan said: “This computational work represents a stunning advance on the protein-folding problem, a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology. It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted. It will be exciting to see the many ways in which it will fundamentally change biological research.”
The next step will be submitting a paper detailing the findings for peer-review.
- Creator Of The Bond VIX: It All Comes Crashing Down After 2025
Creator Of The Bond VIX: It All Comes Crashing Down After 2025
Tyler Durden
Wed, 12/02/2020 – 18:26By Harley Bassman, creator of the MOVE index, aka the “VIX for bonds”
The lack of (CPI) inflation should not distract anyone from recognizing that our financial economy is presently overwhelmed by too much debt, both public and private; and it is beneath the cloak of systemic risk management that the Federal Reserve (FED) flipped on their printing press to support an alphabet soup of asset purchase programs.
And while I do not begrudge most of the FEDs actions to offer relief from both the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID pandemic, what we all must recognize is that the financial remediation of these two crises have pulled forward the day of reckoning for how to fund the promise of Social Security and Medicare for the retiring Baby Boomer demographic.
The political game of “kick the can” for managing the two largest strands of our social safety net has reached an end; about a decade sooner than hoped. We are at a crossroads where one path is well trodden by financial history, and the other newly paved by an economic Pied Piper. But her siren song has been too sweet, and we are turning to the perfidy of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
Here we consider the reason and consequence of this dangerous road.
Only Congress can legally “spend” money (Fiscal Policy), and since they would not offer sufficient support in response to the GFC, the FED stepped in with (Monetary Policy) Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAP), also known as Quantitative Easing (QE), as their most potent tool. These assets landed on the FED’s balance sheet.
While indeed much has changed over the past decade, sometimes to the point where facts do not exist, what has remained constant are the rules for double entry bookkeeping, where every asset must be paired with a liability.
Thus, the assets on the FED’s ledger are paid for by the creation of Money; an incongruity since by law the FED cannot “spend” money.
A Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) and QE were supposed to be interim measures that would be reversed upon an economic recovery; a progression always followed in the past. However, FED attempts at normalization were thwarted by the 2013 bond “taper tantrum” and the late 2018 equity tizzy.
The FED recognized that there are only two ways out of a debt crisis – either default or inflate with the caveat that inflation is simply a slow-motion default.
Since the market would not allow the FED to reduce its balance sheet via asset sales (or even the slow bleed of letting bonds mature), the alternate solution was to create inflation as a way to reduce the value of debt.
The FEDs dog-eared play book posited that if they increased the supply of Money (M2), and the economy held constant (Quantity), then Prices must rise (inflation) to keep the equation in balance.
GDP = Money * Velocity = Price * Quantity
Such a pity that Velocity collapsed, almost fully offsetting the increase (printing) of Money.
But do not toss out your economic textbooks just yet, as the seeming lack of inflation from the FEDs money-printing is a David Copperfield style illusion.
While CPI inflation barely registers a pulse, asset inflation is rampant. The Case-Shiller Index of residential housing is up 63% from its December 2011 low, and is 23% above its previous peak in June 2006. Gold kissed 2000 in August, an alltime high. And, of course, the S&P 500 is a five-bagger from early 2009.
Notice how much of our national wealth is held by the Top 1%. While a 3%-point increase over the previous peaks may seem small, let me assure you that 3% of a huge number is an extremely large number. Strangely, income distribution held steady. If FED policies favored the wealthy, and their share of wealth increased, why did their share of income not rise in a similar fashion ?
Wealth concentration increased despite a static distribution of income because the affluent do not spend additional income. The Velocity of money declined because the dollars the FED created went into asset purchases instead of hourly wages where those funds would be recycled back into the economy.
A recent FED study reported that nearly 40% of US households do not have cash on hand to cover a $400 emergency expense (car repair or broken appliance). Surely funds directed to these households would soon be spent (recycled). Velocity is a measure of recycled spending; financial asset purchases are static.
I am loath to offer the topic of politics on these pages, if only because half my readers would soon use a hardcopy version for lining their bird cage.
But as a public policy comment, middle-class citizens should be mad as hell that Government resources were directed at policies that widened the wealth gap. I will stipulate this was NOT the intention of the FED; and that Fiscal policies by both parties have been grossly insufficient.
Thus, the trumpets have blared for the salve of Modern Monetary Theory.
As a reminder, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) advocates suggest that Governments that create their own fiat currency can borrow so long as there is spare capacity in the economy. In a nutshell, deficits do not matter until debt capacity is reached, which will be signaled by rising inflation.
Never mind that nary an agency has created a predictive model for inflation; at best one can back test a few variables, but these models collapse in real time. Neither the FED, the CBO, nor the major Wall Street banks have successfully modeled inflation – as such, our policy makers will only dial back a debt binge after inflation occurs. This sort of risk management is akin to racing a car down a foggy lane and not hitting the brakes until after one slams into a tree.
But MMT has arrived as a confluence of events are making economic demands on the Government that cannot be denied by a political class whose priority is reelection. The combination of a COVID support package, perhaps Millennial relief of college debt, and most important, the promise to Baby Boomers to fund Social Security (SS) will draw bipartisan votes in favor of a MMT-fiscal expansion.
Let’s be clear, MMT was coming with or without COVID, no matter who was elected President, but recent events have accelerated the process.
The high-end for a COVID relief package is tagged at $3Tn, and the notion of forgiving all college debt would cost $1.68Tn. But this is my bar bill at the club compared to the funding gap to support Social Security.
The chart above borrows from a scholarly report by James Moore, PhD. It shows the total US Treasury debt outstanding while the lines are the projected Social Security deficit. From the Social Security Trustees (SST), the orange line is their base-case while the gray line represents the SST’s high-risk scenario. Both were calculated using historical assumptions for interest rates, inflation, and economic growth.
The red line is the result of using current market-based inputs for interest rates and inflation. Notice how this estimate was between the SSTs base-case and high-risk scenarios until 2010, but impact of the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) exploded the future liability.
In case I was too coy, let’s link these thoughts. The US Government has run a cumulative deficit over the past 100 years of $22.7Tn; in contrast, to fully fund Social Security using current metrics would cost an additional $45.6Tn. Unless eligibility or benefits are significantly altered, some form of debt issuance that rhymes with MMT will be required.
The chart from the CBO offers a similar outlook as a percent of GDP. Notice the steep increase from 2030 to 2050 starts near 100% of GDP instead of closer to 40% of GDP before the GFC and COVID. These two events accelerated an already challenging decision process.
Here is the main point: This past decade’s money printing was used to purchase assets; this next decade’s money printing will be used to fund an expansive Fiscal policy which will funnel money into the hands of people who will spend it. Thus, the Velocity of money will increase and produce inflation.
By 2026 all of the Baby Boomers will qualify for Social Security, and the Millennials will be the largest voting cohort. Both will demand Fiscal support which can only be funded via MMT budgeted borrowing. The most prescient bond bulls (Lacy Hunt, David Rosenberg, Albert Edwards) have noted that the FED’s money creation has been a self-defeating process that may reduce rates further, with the caveat that direct monetization of fiscal spending could lead to inflation. In other words, direct funding the US Treasury.
This is a quibble that deserves a push. In the same way that one “borrows beer” at a party, having the Treasury wash their issuance through Wall Street dealers to the FED’s QE balance sheet is still “money printing”. The key difference is how those funds are used. Presently the FED’s asset purchases have coincided with reduced Velocity which dampened inflation; this will change when Fiscal money is directed toward those who will spend it upon receipt.
Modern Monetary Theory is nonsense; the excessive creation of a fiat currency (eventually) leads to inflation. If it did not, I can assure you there would be a shelf of books detailing such miracles over the past five thousand years of recorded history. “Stop eating when you are fat” is not a healthy diet.
Not to go native on you, but don’t you wonder why the Old Testament called for a trumpet to be sounded on the tenth day of the seventh month every 50 years for a Jubilee where all debts were cancelled ?
While it may take longer than I expect for the final denouement, mark this as the moment our political class shirked their duty to make the hard decisions.
Investment advice:
Don’t panic (yet) as MMT will be terrific for the first number of years. There will be a “sugar high” as expansive Fiscal policy transfuses money to those who will spend it. Similar to how corporate earnings expanded with the 2017 tax cut, so too should earnings enjoy the tailwind from Fiscal support to those who tend to spend.
College debt relief will initially increase retail sales, but will ultimately migrate towards home sales as this is the household formation demographic.
Developed Market (DM) Equities should do well, especially when the dividend yield for most DM Indices exceeds their Central Bank controlled rate.
I love Mortgage REITs despite a nice rally; their dividend yield is still ~9%. This payout should be stable if the FED keeps its promise of ZIRP until 2023.
Other ways of riding the FEDs rate suppression coattails can be sourced via well-managed BDCs and Muni CEFs that employ financial leverage. For CEFs, pay particular attention to the Undistributed Net Investment Income (UNII) as a deficit here usually presages a distribution cut.
I think it’s “safe in the pool” until 2023-25, then it will be adult swim only. This is why I own long-dated options to protect against rising interest rates – a product outlined in “Pigs Can Fly” – January 28, 2020, and I will detail again soon.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it…the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie.” – Joseph Goebbels
You know my rejoinder: “It’s never different this time.”
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