- The Covidian Cult (Part III): There's Reality & There's "Reality"
The Covidian Cult (Part III): There’s Reality & There’s “Reality”
Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,
In The Covidian Cult (Part I) and (Part II), I characterized the so-called “New Normal” as a “global totalitarian ideological movement.” Since I published those essays, more and more people have come to see it for what it is, not “insanity” or “an overreaction,” but, in fact, a new form of totalitarianism, a globalized, pathologized, depoliticized form, which is being systematically implemented under the guise of “protecting the public health.”
In order to oppose this new form of totalitarianism, we need to understand how it both resembles and differs from earlier totalitarian systems. The similarities are fairly obvious — the suspension of constitutional rights, governments ruling by decree, official propaganda, public loyalty rituals, the outlawing of political opposition, censorship, social segregation, goon squads terrorizing the public, and so on — but the differences are not obvious.
Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism (i.e., the form most people are generally familiar with) was more or less national and overtly political, New Normal totalitarianism is supranational, and its ideology is much more subtle. The New Normal is not Nazism or Stalinism. It is global-capitalist totalitarianism, and global capitalism doesn’t have an ideology, technically, or, rather, its ideology is “reality.” When you are an unrivaled global ideological hegemon, as global capitalism has been for the last 30 years or so, your ideology automatically becomes “reality,” because there are no competing ideologies. Actually, there is no ideology at all … there is only “reality” and “unreality,” “normality” and “deviations from the norm.”
Yes, I know, reality is reality … that’s why I’m putting all these terms in scare quotes, so, please, spare me the lengthy emails conclusively proving the reality of reality and try to understand how this works.
There is reality (whatever you believe it is), and there is “reality,” which dictates how our societies function. “Reality” is constructed (i.e., simulated), collectively, according to the ideology of whatever system controls society. In the past, “reality” was openly ideological, regardless of which “reality” you lived in, because there were other competing “realities” out there. There aren’t anymore. There is only the one “reality,” because the entire planet — yes, including China, Russia, North Korea, and wherever — is controlled by one globally hegemonic system.
A globally hegemonic system has no need for ideology, because it doesn’t have to compete with rival ideologies. So it erases ideology and replaces it with “reality.” Reality (whatever you personally believe it is, which of course is what it really is) is not actually erased. It just doesn’t matter, because you do not get to dictate “reality.” Global capitalism gets to dictate “reality,” or, more accurately, it simulates “reality,” and in so doing simulates the opposite of “reality,” which is equally if not more important.
This global-capitalist-manufactured “reality” is a depoliticized, ahistorical “reality,” which forms an invisible ideological boundary establishing the limits of what is “real.” In this way, global capitalism (a) conceals its ideological nature, and (b) renders any and all ideological opposition automatically illegitimate, or, more accurately, non-existent. Ideology as we knew it disappears. Political, ethical, and moral arguments are reduced to the question of what is “real” or “factual,” which the GloboCap “experts” and “fact checkers” dictate.
Also, because this “reality” is not a cohesive ideological system with fundamental values, core principles, and so on, it can be drastically revised or completely replaced more or less at a moment’s notice. Global capitalism has no fundamental values — other than exchange value, of course — and thus it is free to manufacture any kind of “reality” it wants, and replace one “reality” with a new “reality” any time that serves its purposes, like stagehands changing a theatrical set.
For example, the “Global War on Terror,” which was the official “reality” from 2001 until it was canceled in the Summer of 2016, when the “War on Populism” was officially launched. Or, now, the “New Normal,” which replaced the “War on Populism” in the Spring of 2020. Each of which new simulations of “reality” was rolled out abruptly, clumsily even, like that scene in 1984 where the Party switches official enemies right in the middle of a Hate Week speech.
Seriously, think about where we are currently, 18 months into our new “reality,” then go back and review how GloboCap blatantly rolled out the New Normal in the Spring of 2020 … and the majority of the masses didn’t even blink. They seamlessly transitioned to the new “reality” in which a virus, rather than “white supremacists,” or “Russian agents,” or “Islamic terrorists,” had become the new official enemy. They put away the scripts they had been reciting verbatim from for the previous four years, and the scripts they had been reciting from for the previous 15 years before that, and started frantically jabbering Covid cult-speak like they were auditioning for an over-the-top Orwell parody.
Which brings us to the problem of the Covidian cult … how to get through to them, which, make no mistake, we have to do, one way or another, or the New Normal will become our permanent “reality.”
I called the New Normals a “Covidian Cult,” not to gratuitously insult or mock them, but because that is what totalitarianism is … a cult writ large, on a societal scale. Anyone who has tried to get through to them can confirm the accuracy of that analogy. You can show them the facts until you’re blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. You think you are having a debate over facts, but you are not. You are threatening their new “reality.” You think you are struggling to get them to think rationally. You are not. What you are is a heretic, an agent of demonic forces, an enemy of all that is “real” and “true.”
The Scientologists would label you a “suppressive person.” The New Normals call you a “conspiracy theorist,” an “anti-vaxxer,” or a “virus denier.” The specific epithets don’t really matter. They are just labels that cult members and totalitarians use to demonize those they perceive as “enemies” … anyone challenging the “reality” of the cult, or the “reality” of the totalitarian system.
The simple fact of the matter is, you can’t talk people out of a cult, and you can’t talk them out of totalitarianism. Usually, what you do, in the case of a cult, is, you get the person out of the cult. You kidnap them, take them to a safehouse or wherever, surround them with a lot of non-cult members, and deprogram them gradually over the course of several days. You do this because, while they are still inside the cult, you cannot get through to them. They cannot hear you. A cult is a collective, self-contained “reality.” Its power flows from the social organism composed of the cult leaders and the other cult members. You cannot “talk” this power away. You have to physically remove the person from it before you can begin to reason with them.
Unfortunately, we do not have this option. The New Normal is a global totalitarian system. There is no “outside” of the system to retreat to. We can’t kidnap everyone and take them to Sweden. As I noted in Part I of this series, the cult/society paradigm has been inverted. The cult has become the dominant society, and those of us who have not been converted have become a collection of isolated islands existing, not outside, but within the cult.
So we need to adopt a different strategy. We need to make the monster show itself, not to those of us who can already see it, but to the New Normal masses, the Covidian cultists. We need to make Jim Jones drop the peace-and-love crap, move into the jungle, and break out the Kool-Aid. We need to make Charles Manson put down his guitar, cancel orgy-time, and go homicidal hippie. This is how you take down a cult from within. You do not try to thwart its progress; you push it toward its logical conclusion. You make it manifest its full expression, because that it when it implodes, and dies. You do not do that by being polite, conciliatory, or avoiding conflict. You do that by generating as much internal conflict within the cult as you can.
In other words, we need make GloboCap (and its minions) go openly totalitarian … because it can’t. If it could, it would have done so already. Global capitalism cannot function that way. Going openly totalitarian will cause it to implode … no, not global capitalism itself, but this totalitarian version of it. In fact, this is starting to happen already. It needs the simulation of “reality,” and “democracy,” and “normality,” to keep the masses docile. So we need to attack that simulation. We need to hammer on it until it cracks, and the monster hiding within in appears.
That is the weakness of the system … the New Normal totalitarianism will not work if the masses perceive it as totalitarianism, as a political/ideological program, rather than as “a response to a deadly pandemic.” So we need to make it visible as totalitarianism. We need to force the New Normals to see it as what it is. I do not mean that we need to explain it to them. They are beyond the reach of explanations. I mean that we need to make them see it, feel it, tangibly, inescapably, until they recognize what they are collaborating with.
Stop arguing with them on their terms, and instead directly attack their “reality.” When they start jabbering about the virus, the variants, the “vaccines,” and all the other Covid cult-speak, do not get sucked into their narrative. Do not respond as if they were rational. Respond as if they were talking about “Xenu,” “body thetans,” “Helter Skelter,” or any other cultoid nonsense, because that it is exactly what it is. Same goes for their rules and restrictions, the “face coverings,” the “social distancing,” and so on. Stop arguing against them on the grounds that they don’t work. Of course they don’t work, but that is not the point (and arguing that way sucks you into their “reality”). Oppose them because of what they are, a collection of bizarre compliance rituals performed to cement allegiance to the cult and create a general atmosphere of “deadly pandemic.”
There are many ways to go about doing this, i.e., generating internal conflict. I have been doing it my way, others are doing it theirs. If you’re one of them, thank you. If you’re not, start. Do it however and wherever you can. Make the New Normals face the monster, the monster they are feeding … the monster they have become.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 23:40 - Meanwhile In Canada, Rural Shack Sells For 37% Above Asking Within Days
Meanwhile In Canada, Rural Shack Sells For 37% Above Asking Within Days
Canada’s housing crisis worsens as bidding wars become more intense as shortages persist. A combination of people leaving cities and seeking rural properties mixed with a housing shortage has resulted in skyrocketing prices that are not sustainable.
According to The Globe and Mail, home prices in Canada surged 22% over the past year, and the median home price is at record highs. Cheap loans from the Bank of Canada (BoC), housing shortages, and people exiting cities have resulted in bidding wars.
Take, for example, Palgrave, a small town 31 miles northwest of Toronto. A rancher built in the 1970s had an asking price of $998,000 in June and sold later that month for $1,365,000. Just days on the market, a fierce bidding war broke out with 13 bidders who ultimately bid up the price 37% above list.
“There wasn’t a lot of inventory, and there was another property that had sold recently in multiple offers, so we wanted to take advantage of any leftover buyers,” Toronto-based agent Luisa Piccirilli said.
The house is nothing special and appears to be a typical rancher with 3,000 square feet and a three-car garage. But what attracted bidders is the backyard, a solid 2.4 acres.
Piccirilli described the bidding war mainly between those who wanted to escape city life and wanted a backyard.
“There’s an exodus of people leaving the city and wanting more property and land,” Piccirilli said.
As we noted over the summer, the housing investment boom was one of the biggest in years but has since cooled from its March peak as property prices are expected to come off the highs next year.
This means the Bank of Canada might not be “eager to raise interest rates” should a slowdown in housing activity continue, said Stephen Brown, senior Canadian economist at Capital Economics
For the year-over-year change in new home prices, the current levels are typically associated with periods of instability. In other words, the growth rate of prices cannot be maintained.
BMO’s Doug Porter told clients in July Canada is one of the largest housing bubbles in the world.
Meanwhile, Canadian liberal leader Justin Trudeau has promised: “to put an end to speculative housing growth.”
Trudeau said Canada’s real estate market had fallen victim to “instability” and “uncertainty,” which have led to “soaring prices, bidding wars, rampant speculation, and too many vacant properties.”
If Trudeau were really up for the task to “fix” his country’s housing bubble, then a price correction would weigh on GDP. In 2Q, residential construction was around 10% GDP.
So any intervention by Trudeau to tame housing prices is unlikely ahead of the Canadian federal election later this month.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 23:20 - Luongo: Breaking The Empire Means Breaking With The Saudis
Luongo: Breaking The Empire Means Breaking With The Saudis
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
To say that Saudi Arabia has been the lynchpin to U.S. foreign policy objectives in the Middle East and central Asia is to engage in massive understatement.
For more than fifty years the Saudis have helped prop up U.S. foreign policy by exporting their oil to the world and taking only dollars in return.
Their currency, the Riyal, has been pegged to the U.S. dollar since then Secretary of State under President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, brokered that deal that built the so-called petrodollar system.
Now, in the intervening decades the petrodollar has been a buzzword thrown around by many, including myself, to explain the architecture of the U.S.’s imperial ambitions. In many ways, it has served a crucial part of that, at times. But, it was most needed during the early years of the dollar reserve standard, helping to legitimize this new currency regime and provide a market for U.S. debt around the world to replace gold.
After that it was just one aspect of a much bigger game built on the ever-expanding Ponzi scheme of fake funny money. In reality, the eurodollar shadow banking system is just a lot bigger than the petrodollar.
That said, I don’t discount it completely, as I understand this is real money changing hands for real goods, rather than the vast quantities of dollars out there supporting an increasingly creaky financialized system. Real trade matters and what currency that trade occurs in, also matters.
The U.S. closely defended the petrodollar famously going to war with any country that dared to offer oil on international markets in any currency other than the dollar, c.f. Iraq under Saddam Hussein. But, times change and so do the structure of capital markets.
So, when evaluating the health of the petrodollar system and its importance today it’s important to realize that the oil market is far more fragmented in payment terms than its been since the early 1970’s.
As a system, the petrodollar was always going to die a death of a thousand cuts. To my reckoning the first inklings of this began in late 2012 after President Obama finally used the financial nuclear weapon, expulsion from the SWIFT payment system, on Iran for pretty much no reason.
Earlier this year I wrote a piece describing why in negotiations you never go nuclear and how Obama made the biggest strategic blunder, possibly in U.S. history, by first threatening the Swiss over bank secrecy and then Iran.
The fact that the Obama administration politicized SWIFT when it did ended an era of international finance. The world financial system ended any illusions it had over who was in charge and who dictated what terms.
The problem with that is once you go there, there’s no going back, which was {Jim} Sinclair’s point over a decade ago.
Threatening Switzerland with SWIFT expulsion wasn’t a sign of strength, however, it was a sign of weakness. Only weak people bully their friends into submission. It showed that the U.S. had no leverage over than the Swiss other than SWIFT, a clear sign of desperation.
And that’s what the U.S. did when it pushed the big red ‘history eraser’ button.
The Swiss knuckled under. Its vaunted banking privacy is now a part of history.
Iran, however, in 2012, facing a similar threat from Obama, didn’t knuckle under and forced Obama to make good on his threat. Once you uncork the nuclear weapon you can’t threaten with lesser weapons, they have no sway. This is a lesson Donald Trump would learn the hard way since 2018.
Iran bucked the petrodollar to sell its oil by making a goods-for-oil swap arrangement with India. Iran was laughed at by U.S. foreign policy wonks at the time. Then we found out that Turkey was laundering oil sales for Iran through its banks using gold.
Its currency, the Rial, since then has been under constant attack by the U.S., most viciously under President Trump who sought to do what Obama couldn’t do, drive Iran’s oil exports to zero. The goal was regime change.
I chronicled this in detail, over these past four years, saying explicitly that the strategy was stupid and short-sighted. It didn’t work. It couldn’t work.
Iran’s resistance to Trump’s bullying only further entrenched the existing power structures there and hardened the Iranian people to become more disagreeable, more disdainful of America and, likely, Americans.
All it did was force Iran to develop alternate plans and find new markets. Those alternatives meant courting better relations with China, Russia and Turkey, which the U.S. tried hard to sabotage. As long as Iran was as good as its word, supplying oil and acting as a reliable partner in diplomacy, eventually deals would come to them.
Last year’s $400 billion, 20-year investment from China is the culmination of that resistance and ingenuity. That’s the whirlwind wrought by Trump’s pro-Israel, anti-Iran and confused Syria/Afghanistan policies.
In the intervening years, the U.S. sanctioned Russia who sells their oil, a lot of it, in a number of different currencies, some of which are still dollars. China began a yuan-denominated oil futures contract a few years ago, which is ultimately convertible to gold in Shanghai.
The U.S. still trades with China and Russia and yet no one who called for the death of the petrodollar then was right. These things are a process, not a step-function. The point being that the petrodollar isn’t dependent on it being a monopsony in oil trading. The system has been leaking for nearly a decade now.
Iran is an example of why Davos will fail to pull off anything more than the most limited form of their Great Reset. So is Russia. Necessity is the mother of innovation. Putin makes this point all the time. And he, like the Mullahs in Iran, were laughed at by the U.S. foreign policy wonks on K Street.
But, this article isn’t about Iran or Russia or China. It’s about Saudi Arabia.
Now that Afghanistan is all but settled in the geopolitical sense now the question is all about the fallout from it. For years we’ve seen the coalition that intended to atomize Syria splinter, bit by bit. First it was Qatar, who defied Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), who was isolated just like Iran. Qatar survived.
Then it was Turkey, constantly flipping and flopping around under President Erdogan trying to fill the power voids left as Russia’s military successes in Syria and diplomatic successes around the region frustrated U.S., NATO and Israeli plans there.
Slowly, bit by bit, Russia and China moved into those spaces while Erdogan tried and failed…. over and over and over again.
So, with the U.S.’s presence in Afghanistan now, officially, part of history, big changes are coming to the entire region fast and furious.
And the biggest one was the vague but significant defense coordination deal between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Because now, after having wormed its way into control over the marginal barrel of oil produced globally Russia controls OPEC+. It’s a nominal power-sharing agreement with the Saudis, but ultimately, with Trump out of the picture, the Saudis realized they have very few, if any, friends left in the world.
I went on this history lesson to remind you that this moment didn’t just happen. It was built over a decade of U.S. foreign policy mistakes. Mistakes that tried to extend the benefits and the narrative of the petrodollar for far longer than it should have.
The system should have died years ago. But it’s limped along indulging MbS’s bloodlust in Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. Rather than subsidizing U.S. foreign policy goals, it subsidized the Saudi Royal family’s continued delusion that it was a global power broker.
That continued until Trump was overthrown and Biden was installed. Since then MbS and the rest of the House of Saud understood what their future looked like and in whose hands it was.
Russia’s.
We’ve seen negotiations behind the scenes between Riyadh and Tehran, between Riyadh and Damascus. Syria is coming back into the Arab League. Iran and the Saudis are winding down the disastrous conflict in Yemen.
The time to sue for peace was at hand and to find a way forward that ensured relative stability. So, how does the petrodollar fit into this?
For now it doesn’t. Those thinking that the petrodollar is dead because of this deal are getting way ahead of themselves. With oil prices in the $70’s (Brent crude) there is no immediate threat to the future of the Saudi government. They can handle a mild budget deficit at these prices for a long time. There is no pressure on the Riyal peg at these prices.
What they cannot handle is oil in the $30’s or $40’s for any length of time. That is what blows out the budget deficit.
So, for now, as long as the U.S. doesn’t further antagonize MbS there is no reason why what’s left of the petrodollar can’t remain in place.
to that end, that bane of Davos’ existence, Southfront.org whose distribution is heavily censored by Big Tech, is speculating that the U.S. could sanction Saudi Arabia for this agreement with Russia.
The United States is urging its allies to avoid major defense deals with Russia, a State Department spokesman said, commenting on the signing of a military cooperation agreement between Russia and Saudi Arabia.
“We continue to urge all our partners and allies to avoid major new deals with the Russian defense sector, which we have made clear with … the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA),” the spokesman told Russian state outlet RIA.
While this is speculation, it is on target however, because this statement from the State Dept. came before the Saudis sat down and signed an agreement with the Russians during the height of the U.S.’s shameful and shambolic retreat from Kabul.
As insults go in geopolitics, this was a pretty big one.
So, that will be the next shoe to drop here. If I’m right and the goal of those behind the Biden Administration (itself with a use-by date similar to that of the petrodollar) is to dismantle the U.S. as much as possible, then we will see Lindsey Graham and others wring their blood-soaked hands in grief lamenting the necessity of sanctioning our long-term friends in Saudi Arabia.
It will be as nauseating as it is predictable.
And that will be a willful act of destruction of a still-significant portion of foreign demand for the U.S. dollar. This, of course, plays directly into the hands of Davos who are actively undermining confidence in the U.S. politically, economically, culturally and socially. Because the minute the U.S. does this MbS’s only rational move is to break the Riyal’s peg to the dollar and allow it to float freely.
At $70 per barrel the effect on the Riyal will be minimal.
That said, it would allow for a sharp drop in oil prices internationally as the Saudis, who have needed a strong oil price to fund its domestic welfare state, will no longer need as many dollars for its oil to do that. So, expect Davos to try to help this along. Well, they already tried when the UAE tried to torpedo OPEC+’s solidarity a few weeks back.
If oil were to drop sharply, say into the $40’s, it would create massive inflation in Saudi Arabia due to a sharp drop in the now-exposed-to-market-forces Riyal. And the Saudis would then have to go through the same painful adjustment that Russia went through in 2015-17, when it finally ended its strong ruble policy.
This is why Biden is told to beg publicly for lower oil prices. It has nothing to do with helping American consumers and has everything to do with baiting out the Arab countries to de-peg their currencies from the petrodollar and hope to crash oil prices in the confusion.
So, cue the Mu variant of COVID-9/11.
The Saudis, however, for their part have learned the lessons well what happens when you get into a price war with Russia. You lose. So, instead of fighting Russia for market share, they’ve decided to coordinate production for the big win-win for everyone while the U.S. continues to grapple with the reality that its empire is not only crumbling, but being actively dismantled from within.
And given where we’re headed, I’d say that the ones laughing now aren’t at the State Department.
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Fri, 09/03/2021 – 23:00 - Chinese Regulators Close VIE Loophole That Allows Domestic Firms To IPO In US, Hong Kong
Chinese Regulators Close VIE Loophole That Allows Domestic Firms To IPO In US, Hong Kong
The prospect for future Chinese IPOs in the US just grew even more dim on Friday when Chinese officials in Shanghai followed through on their promise to close a popular route for bringing domestic firms public on foreign exchanges.
Startups that have recently applied to Shanghai’s National Development and Reform Commission for permission to inject money into affiliated shell companies incorporated in places like the Cayman Islands are being turned away by Chinese regulators, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources familiar with the issue. Injecting money into these entities is typically the first step toward setting up a Variable Interest Entity, which are used to facilitate IPOs of Chinese firms in the US, Hong Kong and elsewhere (since Chinese law forbids foreign ownership of any Chinese assets).
The shutdown isn’t a complete surprise. Beijing has quietly chafed as the biggest and most successful Chinese firms have sought to list on foreign exchanges. And a few weeks ago we reported that Beijing was changing the rules, requiring firms to get permission from regulators before trying to form their own VIEs. It was all part of a broader crackdown that could mean the end of Chinese firms listing in the US. For now, at least, no Chinese firms are planning to go public in the US.
On the US side, the SEC has frozen applications for Chinese firms looking to list in the US over demands for more stringent auditing standards, which Beijing is loathe to agree with.
You will find more infographics at StatistaAmerican analysts and investors have long been wary of the VIE structure, which received a lot of skeptical press coverage in the US back in 2014 ahead of Alibaba’s historic public offering. As Globescan explains, almost every listed Chinese company trading outside of China is listed through a VIE structure. The structure ensures that investors – many of whom don’t realize what’s going on – don’t actually own any part of the underlying Chinese company. While that might sound ridiculous, sadly its true. Investors who buy shares in Chinese stocks such as JD.com, Alibaba, Tencent, etc do not technically have any ownership of the underlying business whatsoever.
Globescan continues:
The reason is that under Chinese law, foreign ownership in certain (most) Chinese industries is prohibited. As a result, it is illegal for Chinese companies like JD.com and Alibaba to have any non-Chinese shareholders. Back in the early 2000s, as the China growth engine was really beginning, Chinese companies growing quickly looked longingly at the huge amounts of capital available in the US and wanted to access it. At the same time, US investors and Wall Street firms looked longingly at the huge growth rates in China and wanted to access that. But Chinese law prevented them both from doing so. So, a structure was developed to circumvent Chinese law: the VIE (Variable Interest Entity). This is a structure that has been around for decades, first popularized here in the US by Enron to obfuscate assets and liabilities on its balance sheet (there is the first alarm bell…). The VIE structure achieves the dual purpose of giving Chinese companies access to Western capital, whilst simultaneously allowing Western investors access to Chinese stocks. It does so by effectively saying two different things to each side: the VIE says to the Chinese regulator that the company in question is wholly owned by Chinese nationals, while the same VIE simultaneously tells the Western shareholders that they legitimately own that Chinese company.
To explain exactly how the VIE structure works, Globescan offered Tencent as an example:
We will use Tencent as an example to explain the basic structure of a VIE. Tencent operates in a sector on the ‘restricted list’ issued by the government. This list outlines which sectors are prohibited from having any foreign ownership. It is a very broad list, with general wording such that in reality the majority of Chinese companies are barred from any outside ownership.
So as a result, Tencent cannot sell its shares to any non-Chinese investors. But it can circumvent this law using that VIE structure. Without getting into complex legalities, the VIE works as follows; Tencent creates a Cayman Islands listed shell company (no real business, no office, no employees), which it also calls Tencent. (For simplicity from here onwards we will refer to the actual Tencent as ‘Real Tencent’, and the Caymans shell company as ‘Fake Tencent’) Once Fake Tencent has been setup, Real Tencent then creates a complex web of legal agreements that serve to give Fake Tencent a claim on the profits and control of the assets that belong to Real Tencent.
(Note that there is no recognition of any actual ownership, just a claim on the profits and indication of an element of control)
Fake Tencent now owns as its only asset these contracts and agreements. Fake Tencent then lists itself as a company on the NYSE, selling shares to investors under the name ‘Tencent’. Wall Street banks take in millions of dollars in fees to list Fake Tencent, and hundreds of investment firms and investors invest billions of dollars into buying shares of Fake Tencent. Bear in mind, the whole time the Western investors are buying stock in a company called ‘Tencent’ that appears to simply be the Chinese company. Fake Tencent appears to have control over the assets and a right to the profits of the real Tencent in China, even though in reality it is just a shell company with no real assets or business.
Since Chinese first discovered the loophole, it has been technically illegal in China. But a loophole embraced by regulators allowed firms to continue to list in the US using the structure. Now, Beijing is looking to close that loophole after Chinese firms raised $76 billion via new offerings in the US over the last decade.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 22:40 - No Path For Confirmation To ATF For Chipman? Biden Admin: "Not Over 'Till It's Over!"
No Path For Confirmation To ATF For Chipman? Biden Admin: “Not Over ‘Till It’s Over!”
Op-Ed via The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN).
In late May, Biden’s pick to head the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, David Chipman, sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was questioned why his nomination should move forward to the Senate for a full vote to confirm him to lead the agency.
During this, Chipman spoke on his willingness to ban average semi-automatic sporting rifles that are in common use. He was also questioned about his time as a lobbyist for most of the major anti-gun organizations.
Since that hearing took place in late May, Chipman’s nomination has worked itself out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a contentious party-line vote. But since being out of committee, there has not yet been a full senate vote on Chipman, and we’re now at the beginning of September.
It seems like a long time to wait for a vote. There’s a reason for it, though. David Chipman is an anti-gun activist who’s been tapped to lead the agency that focuses on America’s gun laws. Think of it like this: An inverse would be a Republican president nominating Wayne LaPierre (the head of the NRA) to lead the ATF.
In fact, David Chipman’s nomination is so controversial that some moderate Democrats won’t vote for him. Specifically, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Angus King of Maine.
All these Senators are under significant pressure from pro-gun groups nationally and local ones and their constituents. With the midterms coming up, many are worried that a vote for Chipman could be the action that loses them their seat.
The most telling thing over time has been the attitude of the corporate media. In July, headlines read: “David Chipman is the Right Choice for ATF,” but as time passed, even CNN has had to admit that “Biden’s ATF Pick faces grim confirmation prospects.”
Most recently, anti-gun activists have urged Biden to bypass Congress and create an office on gun violence, giving Chipman a job without having the Senate confirm him. Earlier this year, we saw a similar situation when Neera Tanden, who was up to be Biden’s budget director, withdrew her nomination after combative tweets about lawmakers in both parties resurfaced. Two months after she withdrew her nomination, Biden appointed her to a senior adviser position.
This is becoming likely as Chipman’s nomination becomes more imperiled as the days go by. Most recently, Sen. Angus King signaled to the Biden administration that he is not supportive of Chipman.
Only time will tell what will happen with Chipman, but now more than ever, it is essential for gun owners to keep calling their Senators and making their voices heard. If Chipman makes it into the ATF, it pushes us all one step closer to the goal of the anti-gun lobby, total disarmament of the population.
TMGN’s Steph Krop explains it’s looking like the hard work of gun owners is paying off with media and news reports since David Chipman’s confirmation hearing becoming increasingly agitated and negative. She provides a recap of the last few months of what’s been going on with the nomination of Chipman to head the ATF.
* * *
… and if readers want to learn more about possible future gun policy via TMGN, they’ve laid out the “puzzle pieces” of how the ATF has plans to classify semi-automatic rifles, such as the AR-15, as “machine guns.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 22:20 - China Decrees No 'Sissy Men' Allowed On TV
China Decrees No ‘Sissy Men’ Allowed On TV
China’s ongoing battle with feminized men has accelerated – with Beijing recently restricting access to online video games, and trying to discourage ‘unhealthy’ attention towards celebrities after President Xi Jinping called for a “national rejuvenation.”
Now, China’s government has banned effeminate men on TV, and told broadcasters on Thursday to instead promote “revolutionary culture” across all aspects of Chinese culture, according to the Associated Press.
Broadcasters must “resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics,” the TV regulator said, using an insulting slang term for effeminate men — “niang pao,” or literally, “girlie guns.”
That reflects official concern that Chinese pop stars, influenced by the sleek, girlish look of some South Korean and Japanese singers and actors, are failing to encourage China’s young men to be masculine enough. -AP
In January, China’s education ministry called for more physical education as an antidote to male feminization – vowing to recruit better gym teachers and introduce fitness-based incentives such as free college education.
The response came after a delegate of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a top political advisory body, had suggested that Chinese schoolboys are “weak, self-effacing, and timid,” and may be unduly influenced by so-called little fresh meats — handsome, well-groomed, delicate-featured celebrities in the vein of K-pop stars. The proposal also described the feminization of Chinese boys as “a threat to the development and survival of our nation.” -Sixth Tone
“Finally, the education ministry does something right,” wrote one user on Weibo who claimed to be a teacher. “Boys now are in dire need of more exercise so they can be manlier. They’re too gentle these days.”
China is also promoting masculinity within their military ranks, as opposed to the USA’s more ‘inclusive’ approach.
On Saturday, China ‘unpersoned‘ billionaire actress Zhao Wei – removing her content from streaming platforms without explanation. Her name was removed from all television series, films, short videos and promotional materials from platforms including Tencent Video, iQiyi and Youku.
Per SCMP, Zhao shot to fame for her role in My Fair Princess, one of the most successful Chinese television shows of all time. It ran from 1998 to 1999.
The West, meanwhile, is ‘terrified‘ at images of Chinese schoolchildren undergoing mortar training, while preadolescent boys twerking for adult men is simply… progressive.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 22:00 - Fitful 48 Hours For Americans, Afghans Trying To Escape
Fitful 48 Hours For Americans, Afghans Trying To Escape
Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics.com,
One of several private charter planes carrying dozens of U.S. citizens, at-risk religious minorities and Afghan allies was granted State Department clearance to leave Afghanistan early Friday morning after an unsettling 48 hours in limbo as those desperately trying to leave waited for the U.S. government to sign off on the evacuation, according to knowledgeable sources on Capitol Hill and Washington’s foreign policy community.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican who served on a SEAL team in Afghanistan, issued a flurry of tweets over the last 24 hours blaming the State Department for keeping multiple private chartered planes grounded in Afghanistan, a charge the department has publicly denied without specifically mentioning Crenshaw’s assertions.
Late Thursday night, Crenshaw tweeted about a breakthrough.
“Good news, just got word that State Department now helped us get clearance for at least one of these private efforts to land in a nearby country,” he tweeted.
In several previous tweets, Crenshaw angrily lashed out at department officials, blaming them for blocking an effort “to get a plane of U.S. citizens and allies out of Afghanistan.”
“They need @SecBlinken to help get clearance for the plane to land in a nearby country,” he tweeted Thursday.
“Biden’s State Department is refusing to actively assist.”
In previous Thursday tweets, Crenshaw provided only limited details about his interactions with State and negotiations with third-party countries to accept the passengers. His office did not respond to requests for elaboration on why the department had a role to play in a private flight to a third-country destination. Other unconfirmed reports have indicated that the private organizations funding the travel were working to secure landing commitments from nearby countries.
“Even worse, State Department agreed to give me the contact info for US embassies in these countries so we could go point to point,” Crenshaw tweeted.
“That was hours ago. I’ve followed up multiple times, and they’ve provided nothing.”
A source with first-hand knowledge of the grounded planes said American citizens and Afghan allies waiting to depart experienced a chaotic 48 hours, especially the last 24, when a State Department official gave a verbal okay for the plane to leave without providing the necessary written authorization, then rescinded the clearance just hours later.
Several other planes in the same group – each carrying at least a dozen American citizens – are still awaiting an okay from U.S. officials to leave, the source said. RealClearPolitics is not reporting where the planes are located in Afghanistan and which third-party country or countries they are trying to reach because of security concerns.
The State Department on Thursday denied playing a role in preventing private chartered planes from leaving Afghanistan. Spokesman Ned Price told reporters that before the Aug. 31 deadline for American withdrawal, the U.S. government “facilitated the evacuation of thousands” of U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and at-risk Afghans aboard chartered aircraft leaving Kabul airport.
But now, Price said, “we’re in a different phase,” one in which the U.S. has no assets in Afghanistan and therefore cannot control the airspace – in that country or elsewhere in the region. Still, he said, State is trying to expedite and facilitate landings in third-party countries, although he insisted it’s not something the American government can control.
“The idea that we could prevent a charter flight from taking off is simply not true,” he said. Still, he indicated that State is preventing private flights from heading to U.S. military installations out of concerns for the security of personnel who work there, as well as the security of Afghan refugees already airlifted to those locations.
“We know that ISIS-K, as we have seen of late, has a keen interest in attacks and a keen interest in attacks against aviation targets,” Price told reporters.
The apparently new concern about allowing passage of planes with American citizens and unvetted Afghans on them has some members of Congress scratching their heads. Since the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan three days ago, the Biden administration has boasted about its historic airlift operation that evacuated more than 120,000 people since mid-August.
But State Department officials have not fully explained why agency officials have maintained that the evacuation efforts have been aimed at helping U.S. citizens and Afghans who assisted in the war effort — and are eligible for a special visa — but have allowed the vast majority of Afghan evacuees to be brought to U.S. military bases under a status known as parole. The homeland security secretary can provide instant parole status as a blanket way to admit people by considering humanitarian concerns or reasons benefiting the U.S. national interest. Normally, achieving a Special Immigration Visa, or SIV, can take 18 to 24 months.
Some 20,000 Afghans were airlifted to military installations in the United States in recent weeks while another 43,000 were evacuated to overseas U.S. bases in hopes of eventual resettlement in the U.S., according to Pentagon officials.
Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican and longtime human rights champion, spent Thursday touring the Afghan refugee facilities at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in his district, along with U.S. Northern Command Gen. Glen VanHerck. Smith lauded the compassion and dedication that servicemen and women have displayed in assisting the thousands of Afghan refugees who have arrived there this week.
“There is both a compelling need and moral obligation to provide immediate safe haven and humanitarian aid to those who have fled unspeakable cruelty, violence and terrorism perpetrated by the Taliban and ISIS-K,” he said.
But Smith also expressed deep concerns about the vetting process, or lack thereof, which he said allowed 70% of those being housed at the base to arrive here on parole without documentation that they ever assisted U.S. in Afghanistan. The congressman, who has served in the House for 40 years, found the statistic particularly troubling considering news that the majority of interpreters and other visa applicants were left behind in Afghanistan, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
“While we welcome them as we should — these are people who have suffered so much — we have to make sure they are who they say they are to the best of our ability,” he said, stressing the importance of protecting those who work on the base, as well as other refugees now housed there, from a terrorist attack or other criminal behavior.
Smith recalled an incident during the war in Kosovo when he was on hand at the same New Jersey base to welcome 4,400 refugees. One of those refugees, Agron Abdullah, was apprehended years later and sent to jail in 2008 for supplying guns and ammunition to the “Fort Dix 4” – a group of terrorists who were imprisoned for plotting to kill American soldiers at the installation.
“Despite the vetting process used then, he was missed,” Smith told RCP.
“We cannot allow that failure to happen again.”
The Washington Times reported Wednesday that a previously convicted rapist who was deported from the U.S. in 2017 was among the Afghan refugees who recently landed at Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C. The man was flagged by border officials at Dulles and then sent to a detention facility in Bowling Green, Va.
Smith, one of the most ardent human rights champions in Congress, also said he recently tried to push senior Biden administration officials to establish humanitarian corridors in Afghanistan, with NATO allies’ support, as a way to continue the evacuation of both U.S. citizens and Afghans who assisted the U.S. government. Such safe havens also could help provide shelter, food and health care to displaced Afghans and those seeking to leave. Smith said senior U.S. officials rebuffed him without explaining why it couldn’t be done.
Smith is not the only one with deep concerns about the chaotic and deadly exit from Afghanistan. He and several other current and former members of Congress argue there’s little evidence so far that the State Department prioritized the evacuation of religious minorities, such as Christian converts, Sikhs, Shiites and other sects who are facing death sentences from the Taliban and ISIS.
Sam Brownback, the former senator and governor of Kansas who served as ambassador for religious freedom during the Trump administration, is part of a loose cadre, including Christian charities, veterans and former special operators, trying to secure safe passage out of Afghanistan for thousands of religious minorities who remain in hiding after the U.S. troop withdrawal.
“I’ve got a list of hundreds of individuals desperate to get out … now being hunted by the Taliban or other groups,” Brownback told RCP in an interview earlier this week.
The Nazarene Fund, an organization founded by Glenn Beck that seeks to help persecuted Christians abroad, has said it has successfully rescued 5,100 Christians and other at-risk people from Afghanistan. The fund has managed to raise some $30 million in recent weeks in response to the crisis.
So far, Brownback says, there have been no firm commitments from the State Department to make evacuating religious minorities a priority despite recent history in Iraq demonstrating the need to protect these communities. In fact, it was the ISIS slaughter of Christians and Yazidis in northern Iraq seven years ago that forced President Obama to send thousands of U.S. troops back into the region after pulling all troops out of Iraq in 2011. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry declared the ISIS slayings a genocide in 2016.
“This is not a new phenomenon to us,” Brownback said. “Most genocides happen to religious minorities.”
A State Department spokesperson pushed back at Brownback’s assertions.
“Our commitment to individuals at-risk in Afghanistan will not end,” the spokesperson told RCP in a statement Thursday.
“The United States is working vigorously with the international community to explore all options to support vulnerable populations in Afghanistan, including — but not limited to — women, children, journalists, persons with disabilities, and members of ethnic and religious minority groups and other extremely at-risk populations, as well as additional movements of persons who wish to leave Afghanistan in the coming weeks and months.”
A bipartisan group of senior foreign policy leaders on Capitol Hill is questioning that commitment after the U.S. was unable to evacuate journalists working for the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Many of the 500 members of that group, including their Afghan families, were turned away at the gates of Kabul airport before the withdrawal deadline even though senior Biden administration officials had told top USAGM official that the journalists would make it through.
“It is absolutely disgraceful the U.S. State Department claimed they evacuated their local employees when in reality they abandoned hundreds of USAGM journalists and their families. Some of these journalists were given express assurances by the Biden Administration that they would be treated as locally employed staff – but were not,” Rep. Michael McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Former Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, predicted a “very dark period ahead” for America’s credibility on human rights if the U.S. doesn’t fulfil its commitment to evacuate all at-risk Afghans. Wolf spent more than three decades in Congress advocating for human rights, fighting for persecuted religious minorities and warning about the terrorist threat emanating from the Middle East before 9/11.
Wolf pointed to Blinken’s remarks in late March, in which the new Cabinet secretary took issue with the Trump administration for what he said was an “unbalanced” emphasis on religious liberty over other concerns, such as victims of human trafficking, treatment of LGBTQ individuals abroad and women’s access to abortion, birth control and other reproductive options.
“Human rights are also co-equal. There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others,” Blinken said at an event unveiling the State Department’s 45th annual report on the status of human rights around the world.
“… At my confirmation hearing, I promised that the Biden-Harris administration would repudiate those unbalanced views. We do so decisively today.”
If the U.S. doesn’t shift gears and make evacuating religious minorities a top priority, Wolf says it could not only spur a new genocide but also destroy U.S. credibility in condemning other countries’ persecution of ethnic and religious groups. Wolf specifically mentioned the U.S. ability to call out China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, the longtime persecution of Christians in Iran, the slaughter of Christians by Boko Haram and other Nigerian terrorist groups, as well as the efforts to help rebuild Christian and Yazidi areas in northern Iraq decimated by ISIS.
“It will be a disaster for America, not only in Afghanistan. … America’s credibility has been devastated worldwide,” Wolf told RCP Thursday evening. “I’ve never seen American look so weak and ineffective.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 21:40 - Binance Told It Is "Required To Cease Providing Payment Services" In Singapore
Binance Told It Is “Required To Cease Providing Payment Services” In Singapore
In the latest chapter in the ongoing Binance saga, Singapore’s Central Bank has told the cryptocurrency exchange that it “could be in breach of local laws” and needs to stop providing services to Singapore’s residents.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said this week: “MAS has reviewed Binance.com’s operations and is of the view that Binance, the operator of Binance.com, may be in breach of the Payment Services Act.”
It continued: “Binance is required to cease providing payment services … to Singapore residents and cease soliciting such business from Singapore residents.”
The MAS has also placed Binance.com on its “Investor Alert List”, according to the South China Morning Post. The list alerts local consumers that Binance is not allowed to provide payment services in the country.
Binance Singapore told the SCMP that its “Singapore operations are conducted by a separate legal entity from Binance.com, with its own local executive and management team”.
Binance Asia Services has applied for a license is “is currently exempted from holding a license for the provision of digital payment token services,” according to the MAS. The application remains under review.
Recall, this past summer, Binance was banned in the UK when Britain’s financial watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, imposed stringent requirements against it.
“A significantly high number of cryptoasset businesses are not meeting the required standards under the money laundering regulations, which has resulted in an unprecedented number of businesses withdrawing their applications,” an FCA spokesperson said at the time. Of the firms assessed, more than 90% had withdrawn applications following the FCA’s intervention.
The move represented the UK’s most substantial regulatory crackdown on the cryptocurrency sector amid concerns about its potential involvement in money laundering and fraud. Binance withdrew an application related to the 5MLD – an anti-laundering directive – on May 17 following “intensive engagement from the FCA,” according to the watchdog, which said the action had been in train for some time.
Binance is one of the most important operators in the fast-emerging crypto market, offering a wide range of services to customers around the world, including trading in dozens of digital coins, futures, options, stock tokens, as well as savings accounts and lending.
As the FT reminded us, Germany’s financial watchdog also warned investors in April that Binance had probably violated securities rules over its launch of trading in stock tokens, something the exchange tried unsuccessfully to appeal against.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 21:20 - Taliban Says China Will Be Afghanistan's "Most Important Partner"
Taliban Says China Will Be Afghanistan’s “Most Important Partner”
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a recent interview that China will be Afghanistan’s “most important partner” as the new Taliban-led government is seeking infrastructure investments.
“China is our most important partner and represents a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity for us, because it is ready to invest and rebuild our country,” Mujahid told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
Taliban’s Mullah Abdul Ghani Barader with Chinese FM Wang Yi, via Xinhua News Agency Mujahid said there are “rich copper mines in the country, which, thanks to the Chinese, can be put back into operation and modernized. In addition, China is our pass to markets all over the world.”
Afghanistan faces a potential economic crisis, and the new government is strapped for cash. After 20 years of waging war in the country, the US is now withholding billions in Afghan reserves to use as leverage over the Taliban.
With the US using its control over the global financial system as a weapon against the Taliban, China is an obvious partner for them to turn to. China is a regional country and is seeking to expand its global infrastructure project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative.
One of China’s few requests of the Taliban is that they cut ties with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a Uyghur Muslim group Beijing accuses of carrying out terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.
Defunct Afghan copper mine, via TheThirdPole.net But Beijing appears to be ready to recognize the new Taliban government and has kept its embassy open in Kabul.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 21:00 - Amazon Air Delivery Now Runs 164 Flights A Day Despite 'Commitment' To Carbon Neutrality
Amazon Air Delivery Now Runs 164 Flights A Day Despite ‘Commitment’ To Carbon Neutrality
If you want more proof that corporate America’s promises about achieving carbon neutrality are just more empty virtue signaling, take a look at this.
As Amazon works to bring the entire delivery process from warehouse to doorstep under its control, allowing it to wrest business away from FedEx, UPS and USPS while gearing up to launch its own delivery service, the e-commerce giant is increasingly relying on its private fleet of cargo planes to shuffle packages across the country quickly. According to an FT report, Amazon’s presence in the skies has continued to grow rapidly since the start of the pandemic, according to a new report. Recently, Amazon was running 164 flights a day in the US.
This represents a 17% increase over the prior year. What’s more, the report found that 70% of Americans now live within 100 miles of an airport with an Amazon Air presence, up from 54% just over a year ago. Amazon Air now has a fully operational fleet of more than 70 planes, and in the wake of the COVID pandemic, it’s taking air transport more seriously.
Source: FT
Eventually, it could fill a niche as the third competitor in the package delivery space – with itself as its biggest customer.
“There is no sign of Amazon slowing down their gearing up for expanded next-day delivery,” said the report’s lead author, Professor Joseph Schwieterman, from the Chaddick Institute at DePaul University. “There’s demand, by lots of businesses, to have more than two options for package delivery, with the US Postal Service seeming to be receding in the past few years,” the report said. Such a move “could change the landscape of a sector long dominated by FedEx, UPS, and USPS.”
Since February, Amazon Air has added services to and from seven additional airports, bringing the total number of airports hosting Amazon flights to 42. It has a major 800K sq foot hub in Cincinnati, and a 700K sq ft facility at San Bernardino airport, near Los Angeles, has become Amazon Air’s hub on the West Coast. Some groups have accused Amazon of racism for setting up these hubs in areas with large minority populations.
Such developments have proved controversial, with campaign groups accusing Amazon of engaging in “environmental racism” by placing its hubs in areas where surrounding communities are predominantly made up of people of colour. A proposal to investigate the impact of such developments was voted down at Amazon’s most recent shareholders’ meeting in May.
It’s also not exactly compatible with Amazon’s pledge to achieve “net zero carbon emissions” by 2040.
Amazon has pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040, a task complicated by its van delivery fleet and its aircraft roster, which contains mostly older aircraft. In July 2020, Amazon announced it had bought 6m gallons of biofuel, which it said would reduce emissions from its old fleet by 20%.
Nevertheless, Amazon is pushing ahead with Amazon Air’s international expansion, which centers around its European hub in Liepzig.
On top of this, researchers said, were more than a dozen active international locations, though air traffic at a proposed European hub in Leipzig had been quieter than anticipated. In Europe, said Schwieterman, Amazon was “quietly growing without revealing their long range intentions”. “It could be just a matter of time before Leipzig becomes a hotspot for Amazon.”
The first big test for Amazon Air will be the coming holiday season, as the company seeks to reliably offer two-day, next-day and same-day delivery, Amazon Air is forming the backbone of the strategy.
Eventually, the company will likely need to hire more pilots. Let’s hope they don’t take their own advice to hire potheads.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 20:40 - 7 Examples That Show How Completely And Utterly Insane Our Society Has Become
7 Examples That Show How Completely And Utterly Insane Our Society Has Become
Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,
Reading the news has become like going to a freak show. You never know what you are going to see each day, but it is almost certainly going to be nutty. Some of the things that I am going to share with you in this article are weird, others are infuriating, but they all point to the same conclusion. From the very top to the very bottom, America is going crazy. And I mean that in the worst way possible. We truly have become an “idiocracy”, and it seems like those that are the most incompetent of all are often rewarded by being elevated to the top of the food chain. Meanwhile, those of us that still try to approach things rationally are increasingly being pushed to the fringes of society.
If you don’t understand the point that I am trying to make, hopefully things will become clearer by the time you complete this article.
The following are 7 examples that show how completely and utterly insane our society has become…
#1 At a time when global food supplies are getting tighter and tighter, Joe Biden wants to pay farmers to not grow anything in order to fight climate change…
President Joe Biden wants to combat climate change by paying more farmers not to farm. But he’s already finding it’s hard to make that work.
His Agriculture Department is far behind its goal for enrolling new land in one program that has that goal, with participation being the lowest it’s been in more than three decades.
Thankfully, relatively few farmers are grabbing the cash that Biden is offering, because prices for agricultural commodities have soared as global supplies have tightened.
So in a desperate attempt to get more farmers to sign up, the Biden administration has “more than doubled key incentive payments”…
Even though the USDA this summer more than doubled key incentive payments for the program that encourages farmers and ranchers to leave land idle, high commodity prices are keeping it more worthwhile for growers to raise crops.
On top of that, the plan, known as the Conservation Reserve Program, takes land out of production for only 10 to 15 years — so those acres could release carbon into the atmosphere if the land is planted again and thus cancel out its environmental benefit.
Considering where global trends are heading, paying farmers not to produce food is one of the stupidest things that our government could possibly be doing at this moment.
#2 We are now learning that the chaotic evacuation in Afghanistan could have been conducted much, much differently. According to the Washington Post, the Taliban actually offered a deal to the Biden administration that would have allowed the U.S. to secure the entire city of Kabul…
In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha – including McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command – spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban’s political wing.
“We have a problem,” Baradar said, according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”
Can you imagine how much more orderly the evacuation of Americans and allied Afghans could have gone if U.S. forces had actually secured all of Kabul?
Needless to say, ISIS forces would have likely never gotten close enough to bomb the airport.
But instead of accepting the opportunity to secure all of Kabul, U.S. officials decided to hand Kabul to the Taliban and crowd everyone that needed to be evacuated into the airport…
On the spot, an understanding was reached, according to two other U.S. officials: The United States could have the airport until Aug. 31. But the Taliban would control the city.
It is hard to believe that our officials could actually be this incompetent, but nobody will even be held accountable for this decision because we really do live in an “idiocracy”.
#3 One of the hottest new social media trends is to show off the fact that your body is inhabited by multiple “beings”…
Several TikTok and YouTube accounts of such broken people, who refer to themselves as a “host” or “system” of multiple beings, have millions of online followers. They exhibit their various personalities for online notoriety in the guise of “educating” and “promoting awareness.”
One TikToker who says she has DID explains in a Q&A about her personalities, “I can’t force anyone [inside me] to come out but I can communicate very well within the system and ask someone to come out, but sometimes it’s very involuntary.”
Why in the world would “millions of online followers” want to watch these people manifest their various “personalities”?
And can’t most of those “followers” actually understand what is really going on with these people?
#4 A 43-year-old man took his parents to court after they threw out his porn collection. Instead of laughing the case out of court, a judge in Michigan has awarded him more than $30,000 in damages…
A judge has ordered a western Michigan couple to pay $30,441 to their son for getting rid of his pornography collection. U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney’s decision this week came eight months after David Werking, 43, won a lawsuit against his parents.
According to NBCDFW, He said they had no right to throw out his collection of films, magazines, and other items. Werking had lived at their Grand Haven home for 10 months after a divorce before moving to Muncie, Indiana. The judge followed the value set by an expert, MLive.com reported.
The value of the collection was “set by an expert”?
What kind of sick credentials does someone need to become “an expert” in that field?
#5 After denying a transgender student the ability to use a particular bathroom, a school board in Virginia has been forced to pay out over 1.3 million dollars…
A Virginia school board will pay more than $1.3 million to the American Civil Liberties Union after losing a court battle involving a transgender student who sued the school over its bathroom policy.
According to the Virginian-Pilot, the Gloucester County School Board on Thursday agreed to pay the ACLU the full amount of costs and fees associated with its representation of one of its former students, Gavin Grimm, marking the end of a lengthy six-year legal fight.
As word of this case spreads around, schools all over the nation will be deathly afraid to ever tell anyone what bathrooms they can or cannot use.
Nobody will want to be the next victim to get hit with a million dollar lawsuit, and it probably won’t be too long before the “boys” and “girls” signs on school bathrooms disappear entirely.
#6 When I was growing up, the American flag was proudly displayed in our classrooms and we said the Pledge of Allegiance every day.
But today the American flag is being taken down in classrooms all over America, and one public school teacher in California is urging her students to pledge allegiance to a new flag…
A Southern California public school teacher was caught admitting to encouraging her students to pledge allegiance to the LGBT pride flag as an alternative to the American flag, bragging of the indoctrination on her own TikTok account.
The teacher, identified as Kristin Pitzen of Newport Mesa School District in Orange County, recounts taking down the American flag, an then pointing to the LGBT flag as an alternative.
“We do have a flag in the class that you can pledge allegiance to,” said Pitzen when a student asked about the American flag that she had removed from the classroom “because of COVID.”
#7 In recent days, Joe Biden has been encouraging officials all over the country to impose extremely strict vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is insisting that “no one should be forced to get a jab”…
“Vaccination is the main weapon against the spread of the virus. Importantly, no one should be forced to get a jab. Pressure, where people may lose their jobs, is even less acceptable. People must be convinced of the need to get the vaccine,” he said.
When even Vladimir Putin is significantly less tyrannical than the guy that is running your country, you have got a major problem on your hands.
When I was growing up, people would risk everything to flee the Soviet Union so that they could experience true freedom in the western world.
Could we soon get to a point where Americans are actually fleeing to Russia so that they can “live free”?
It seems like such a bizarre question to ask, but this is how bad things have gotten in the United States.
We live in a society where up is now down, good is now bad, and lies are now truth.
Our nation has become a giant circus, and the crazies are running the show. It will be entertaining to watch for a little while, but it won’t be too long before the entire thing comes crashing down on top of all of us.
* * *
It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 20:20 - Taliban To Announce "Inclusive" Government Saturday, With 'Commander Of The Faithful' On Top
Taliban To Announce “Inclusive” Government Saturday, With ‘Commander Of The Faithful’ On Top
The Taliban is expected to announce its new government on Saturday, Sept.4, after postponing the announcement from Friday, according to a spokesman.
“The movement’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, is expected to have ultimate power over a new governing council, with a president below him, Taliban officials have said,” according to The Guardian. The hardline cleric Akhundzada would exercises total control over all spiritual and temporal affairs as ‘Commander of the Faithful’ over the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ – akin to the Ayatollah in Iran.
Abdul Ghani Baradar, front, via Reuters The president, however, is expected to handle the day to day affairs. Taliban sources are being widely cited as saying the president will be Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
Baradar has been generally seen in the West as a relatively “moderate” figure when compared to the ‘alternatives’. He was the Taliban’s chief negotiator in Doha stretching back into the Trump administration.
Since easily conquering Kabul a couple weeks ago, Taliban has been in intense deliberations over who will govern and has now reached a consensus, a spokesman said earlier in the week.
The Taliban has previously floated the word “inclusive” government, perhaps as some sort of soft trolling aimed at mocking the West. Here’s what “inclusive” is going to look like, apparently:
Haibatullah, a religious scholar from Kandahar whose son was a suicide bomber, is expected to play a theocratic role similar to that played by Iran’s supreme leader. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder and deputy leader of the movement who was imprisoned in Pakistan, is likely to be appointed head of government.
Other Taliban officials expected to hold senior positions include Sirajuddin Haqqani, another deputy leader, and Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of the Taliban’s founder Mullah Muhammad Omar, who died in 2013.
It remains that some Taliban officials are actually still on America’s designated terror list, with bounties on their heads.
As Taliban leaders in Kabul worked to form a government, humanitarian organizations have warned of impending catastrophe as many Afghans struggle to feed their families amid severe drought https://t.co/BrHu05J8Bw pic.twitter.com/EjFRusql3D
— Reuters (@Reuters) September 3, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The new Afghan government will immediately face multiple crises: “The UN has warned of a looming humanitarian catastrophe across the country of 40 million people amid a severe drought, growing food insecurity and the upheavals of a 20-year war that forced thousands of families to flee their homes,” The Guardian writes.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 20:00 - Florida To Fine Businesses $5,000 For Violations Of Vaccine Passport Ban
Florida To Fine Businesses $5,000 For Violations Of Vaccine Passport Ban
By Tom Ozimek of The Epoch Times
The Florida Department of Health has issued a notice indicating it will start issuing $5,000 fines to businesses, schools, and government agencies that require Floridians to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
The health department rule, which goes into effect on Sept. 16, details the penalties that businesses and other entities, including nonprofits, face for violating section 381.00316 of the 2021 Florida Statutes, which prohibits them from requiring customers or patrons to provide any documentation certifying COVID-19 vaccination or postinfection recovery in order to gain access to their premises or services.
“Each violation of Section 381.00316, F.S., will result in the imposition of a $5,000 fine per individual and separate violation against the business, governmental entity or the educational institution. Fines imposed are due and payable to the Department within 30 days of entry of the final order unless otherwise stated in the final order,” reads the Florida Department of Health notice.
Health care providers are exempt from the fine, which also does not apply to vaccine requirements businesses or other entities impose on their own employees. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order in April that banned vaccine passports.
“No COVID-19 vaccine is required by law,” the governor’s order stated, adding that “vaccination records are private health information” that shouldn’t be shared via a mandate. The passports, DeSantis said at the time, would infringe on personal liberties and harm patient privacy.
“A requirement to show a passport to take part in everyday life such as a sporting event, going to a restaurant or going to a movie theater would ‘create two classes of citizens,’” DeSantis stated.
Reacting to the Florida health department’s announcement that it would start imposing fines on entities demanding patrons show proof of vaccination, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, the state’s only statewide elected Democrat and a candidate hoping to challenge DeSantis for governor next year, was critical.
“Governor DeSantis is retaliating against Floridians who are trying to protect themselves and their communities from COVID-19,” Fried told The Associated Press in an emailed statement. “This not only goes against common sense—it’s also an insult to the free market principles that he claims to champion.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 19:40 - Don't Expect An Easy Life And Be Ready To Struggle, China's Xi Warns Officials
Don’t Expect An Easy Life And Be Ready To Struggle, China’s Xi Warns Officials
China’s president-for-life (so technically dictator) warned party officials to “discard their illusions” about having an easy life and “dare to struggle” to protect the country’s sovereignty and security
“The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has entered a key phase, and risks and challenges we face are conspicuously increasing,” Xi said, according to state news agency Xinhua, in words that ominously hint at a coming military conflict. “It’s unrealistic to always expect easy days and not want to struggle.”
He told an event on Wednesday to mark the new semester at the Central Party School, where cadres are trained, that: “[We] must not yield an inch on issues of principle, and defend national sovereignty, security and development interests with an unprecedented quality of mind.”
Xi Jinping addressed an event at the party school. Photo: Xinhua His remarks to hundreds of mid-level cadres from around the country did not elaborate on the need to struggle but were made amid growing tension with the United States on a range of fronts, including geopolitics, the economy and technology, SCMP reported.
Beijing has reacted strongly to what it sees as provocations that touch on its core interests, including staging military drills near Taiwan last month in response to US expressions of support for the island. The growing international criticism of Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang, where it is accused of the use of mass detention and forced labor, have seen it exchanging sanctions with Washington, London and Brussels – freezing a trade deal with the European Union that had taken seven years to negotiate.
And yes, the military is involved too: senior Chinese officials and generals have signaled they expect the competition with the US to deepen, despite recent visits by senior White House officials such as deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman and special climate envoy John Kerry, a meeting which ended in embarrassment for the private-jet flying Heinz family heir after he was rebuffed by China.
According to SCMP, the party school curtain raiser has been used by Xi in the past to set the tone for training sessions for hundreds of cadres from across the country; here, in the past two years, he has called on officials to “struggle” against threats to China’s development.
The tone of his remarks have been consistent with Beijing’s messaging since last year, said Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor with Renmin University in Beijing. “China’s stance has been tough since the outbreak of Covid in the US last year and the tensions that followed,” he said and although it wasn’t clear if he explicitly blamed the US for starting the covid outbreak, it certainly wouldn’t be surprising. “Standing firm on China’s position in the competition with the US is never only the job of the foreign affairs departments, but something the entire country is mobilised to do,” he said. Shi added that the same tone is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
Xi has previously highlighted the need to struggle to ensure China’s rise. At the same event in 2019, he warned that this would continue until the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic in 2049, at which point supposedly China will have emerged victorious from World War III or the communist will have finally destroyed the US from within.
On Wednesday the Chinese leader urged all officials to stand firm on matters of principle, saying: “People who play the nice guy think only of themselves but not the public.” He added that failing to fight for matters of principle was letting down the people and may even be a crime.
Xi also told the cadres to toe the party line and said they should feel proud to be sent to work in remote parts of the country and tackle problems at the grass roots level.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 19:20 - Chase Bank Apologizes For Canceling Michael Flynn’s Credit Card, Claims It Was A Mistake
Chase Bank Apologizes For Canceling Michael Flynn’s Credit Card, Claims It Was A Mistake
In a move possibly triggered by news and social media pressures, Chase Bank has walked back its cancelation of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s credit card.
As previously reported by Human Events News, Flynn, former Trump National Security Adviser and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration, shared to Telegram a letter from Chase Bank notifying him that his credit cards will be cancelled.
“After careful consideration, we decided to close your credit cards on September 18, 2021 because continuing the relationship creates possible reputational risk to our company,” the update read.
“Chase Bank has gone full-blown woke!” Flynn posted.
Now, just days after Flynn let the internet know, Chase is walking their virtue-signaling move back, claiming the letter was sent by mistake. The account holder was Flynn’s wife, Lori, the Daily Mail reports.
“We’ve contacted our customer to let her know that we made an error,” a spokesperson for the bank said.
“And we apologized for any inconvenience this caused.”
Flynn addressed the situation again on Telegram Monday, per Yahoo News.
“I pray Chase Bank and all their cancel culture partners think twice about what they are doing to destroy the fabric of our constitution,” he wrote.
“Trust me, the heart and soul of America will NEVER be broken. We the people will prevail.”
As a reminder, the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was able to use his accounts with the same bank after he was convicted of soliciting child prostitutes.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 19:00 - Millions To Lose Benefits As Pandemic Jobless Aid Expires
Millions To Lose Benefits As Pandemic Jobless Aid Expires
When Congress passed the American Rescue Plan in March, extending pandemic-related unemployment aid until Labor Day, millions of Americans breathed a sigh of relief.
Back then, almost 14 million people depended on the emergency programs (and job openings continued to soar).
And while the labor market situation has improved significantly since then, Statista’s Felix Richter notes that the new cut-off date is almost here, leaving millions in doubt of what is possibly their only income.
You will find more infographics at Statista
In addition to the $300 weekly supplement to state unemployment benefits, both the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which is available to individuals who are self-employed or who otherwise would not qualify for regular unemployment compensation, and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which extends benefits by up to 24 weeks for those who have exhausted regular unemployment aid, are due to expire on September 6.
According to data published by the U.S. Department of Labor this week, 12.19 million Americans still received unemployment benefits in the week ended August 14. And while the number of people receiving help through regular state programs has fallen to 2.8 million, from a peak of more than 22 million in May 2020, more than 9 million Americans still relied on aid provided through either of the two aforementioned programs, as many who lost their job during the first wave of the pandemic have exhausted their regular unemployment insurance benefits or never qualified in the first place.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 18:40 - There's A Problem In The Upper Reaches Of Our Military
There’s A Problem In The Upper Reaches Of Our Military
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,
It is the beginning of a never-ending bad dream. Joe Biden and the Pentagon have managed to birth a new terrorist haven, destroy much of U.S. strategic deterrence, and alienate our allies and much of the country.
In the hours after the horrific deaths of 13 service members, we have been reassured by our military that our partnership with the Taliban to provide security for our flights was wise. We were told that the terrorist victors share similar goals to ours in a hasty American retreat from Kabul. We were reminded that Afghan refugees (unlike U.S. soldiers) will not be forced to be vaccinated on arrival. Such statements are either untrue or absurd.
On the very day of the attack that killed American troops, the sergeant major of the U.S. Army reminded us in a tweet that diversity is our strength, commemorating not the dead but Women’s Equality Day. If so, then is the opposite of diversity — unity — our weakness? Will such wokeness ensure that we do not abandon the Bagram air base in the middle of the night without opposition?
The chief of staff at the Office of Naval Intelligence warned the ONI’s active duty and retired service members that they must not criticize Biden, their commander in chief, over the Afghanistan fiasco. The office correctly cited prohibitions found in the Uniform Code of Military Justice barring any disrespect shown to senior government leadership.
Indeed, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps was relieved of his command for posting a video accurately blaming military and civilian leadership for the Afghanistan nightmare.
Yet until Jan. 20, retired top brass had constantly smeared their elected commander in chief with impunity.
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Recently retired Gen. Michael Hayden retweeted a horrific suggestion that unvaccinated Trump supporters should be put on planes back to Afghanistan, where they presumably would be left to die.
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Other retired high-profile military officials variously called their president an emulator of Nazi tactics, a veritable Mussolini, a liar, and deserving of removal from office sooner than later. None of these retired four-stars faced the sort of repercussions that the Office of Naval Intelligence just warned about.
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Hayden earlier had compared Trump’s border facilities to Nazi death camps.
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More than 50 former intelligence officials on the eve of the November election signed a letter suggesting that incriminating emails found on Hunter Biden’s missing laptop might be “Russian disinformation.” They used their stature for political purposes to convince the American people that the story was a lie.
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Retired Gen. Joseph Dunford and retired Adm. Mike Mullen recently blasted retired brass who had questioned Biden’s cognitive ability. OK. But they should have issued a similar warning earlier, when the violations of fellow retired officers were even more egregious in election year 2020.
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Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apologized for doing a photo op with Trump, erroneously buying into the narrative that Trump had ordered rioters cleared from Lafayette Square for the staged picture. Worse, he leaked to journalists that he was so angry with Trump that he “considered” resigning. Think of the irony. If Milley considered a politicized resignation to rebuke Trump over the false charge, then surely he could consider a real resignation after overseeing the worst military disaster of the last half-century in Kabul.
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Milley had promised to root out white supremacy from the ranks while recommending that his soldiers read Ibram X. Kendi’s racialist diatribes.
Something is terribly wrong in the ranks of America’s top commanders that reflects something wrong with the country.
The Pentagon needs to stop virtue-signaling about diversity days and culturally sensitive food for Afghan refugees. Instead, can it just explain why the Bagram air base was abandoned by night, or why Taliban terrorists are our supposed “partners” in organizing our surrender and escape?
Which general allowed more than $85 billion in American weapons to fall to the Taliban — a sum equal to the price of seven new U.S. aircraft carriers?
Who turned over to the Taliban the lists of Americans and allied Afghans to be evacuated?
Who left behind biometric devices that the Taliban are now using to hunt down our former Afghan friends?
Somehow our new woke Pentagon is hell-bent on losing the trust of the American people — along with the wars it fights abroad.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 18:20 -
- Florida Chiropractor Signs Mask Exemption Slips For Hundreds Of Students
Florida Chiropractor Signs Mask Exemption Slips For Hundreds Of Students
In a sign of how desperate school children (and their parents) are to avoid being forced to wear masks all day while in school, one Florida chiropractor is doing so much business signing medical exemption forms for students seeking to circumvent the mask requirement that it has attracted media attention.
Dr. Dan Busch of Twin Palms, Fla. insisted in an interview with a local ABC News affiliate that he was only signing exemption slips for qualified patients. Though what those “qualifications” are exactly isn’t clear. Having a medical exemption form signed by a doctor is the only way students can opt out of wearing a mask under the current mandate in the Sarasota County School District.
“The people that I will sign exemptions for are the people that qualify for conditions within my scope of practice,” Dr. Dan Busch, a chiropractor with Twin Palms, told WWSB.
[…]
“The parent and child come in, we evaluate what their conditions are, see if they have a valid legitimate condition that would warrant a mask exemption,” Busch said. “If they do not, they have to go on their way.”
Parents of some of the children also spoke with the TV reporters, and told them that they believe their children should have a choice whether to mask up or not.
“Parents have every right to look at their child and say, ‘I don’t want that mask on my child, I know what it does to him or her,'” said parent Chad Dion.
Unfortunately for these kids, it looks like the media attention may have led to the closure of this loophole. Officials from the Sarasota school district say they are accepting these medical exemptions for now, but are looking into their legitimacy, and could revoke them in the future.
“When there’s suspicion behind them, we do have to do our due diligence in the end,” said Craig Maniglia, director of communications for the Sarasota County School District.
Add that to the list of duties that school administrators are now being forced to handle (in addition to their normal workloads) in the age of COVID: they’re tasked with deciding which medical conditions are “legitimate” enough to get around the mandate.
That’s not to say that the school district won’t recognize legitimate medical conditions: a district representative said the schools will promise to be sensitive to students’ needs, while at the same time doing everything in their power to prevent outbreaks.
Fortunately for them, school children aren’t especially vulnerable to COVID (In fact, it’s more like the opposite: they have much higher chances of being asymptomatic) while studies have shown that schools aren’t a locus of spread during community outbreaks.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 18:00 - Taliban No Longer Feels Washington's Love As Iran Gains US Ground Hardware
Taliban No Longer Feels Washington’s Love As Iran Gains US Ground Hardware
Submitted by South Front,
The feelings of betrayal in Afghanistan are all-encompassing and complete. Not a single person was likely left feeling un-abandoned, except for former President Ashraf Ghani who escaped with millions of dollars. Even the Taliban felt the terrible sting of being left behind.
To their disappointment, and even horror, Taliban fighters felt “angry” and “betrayed” after discovering that US troops had disabled dozens of aircraft before completing their withdrawal from the Afghan capital of Kabul.
In many other bases throughout Afghanistan, the Taliban was glad to find that the combat aircraft that had been left behind was perfectly serviceable. The issue is that the Taliban are lacking pilots, but a quick recruitment program throughout Afghanistan itself, as well as its allied countries could easily solve this.
Currently, at least 48 aircraft of the former Afghan Air Force (AAF) are now in the hands of the Taliban. Over the last few weeks, the Taliban was only able to operate few Russian Mi-8 and US UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.
The US had provided billions worth of military equipment, including modern counter-insurgency warplanes, to the AAF. Yet, it failed to stop the Taliban. Not only did it not succeed, but it even made it so the equipment wasn’t easily usable, truly despicable.
A large share of the US hardware, weaponry and warplanes ended up in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, but not all of it.Some of the ground hardware was spotted in Iran, so Tehran is also a winner from the US weaponry thrift store that Afghanistan has evidently become.
It is unknown if the Taliban can operate these assets by themselves. Russia could extend a “helping hand” or the US could partially return under the pretext of co-operation against ISIS in Central Asia.
After all, the Republicans and Democrats in Washington have shown that they cannot cooperate with one another, but can coordinate operations with the Taliban whom they deem as terrorists.
The Taliban currently need all the weaponry they can get their hands on, as the Northern Resistance Front (NRF) still occupies the Panjshir valley.The resistance pushed back several advances and according to reports the Taliban lost from 30 to 350 fighters in the clashes.Several rounds of negotiations have entirely failed, and the Taliban have attempted to capture the region by force, but to no avail.
Former Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh said that the resistance is “based in Panjshir” but it fights for all Afghans.The resistance held a military exercise as a show of force to the Taliban, with men carrying heavy logs on their shoulders crossing chest-deep icy rivers in heroic fashion.The NRF have set up machine gun nests, mortar and surveillance posts fortified with sandbags in anticipation of a Taliban assault.
It is unlikely that the resistance can hold Panjshir for long, as the Taliban swept over the entire country in less than two months. However, all the promises of a “different” governance come with the limitations that the Islamic movement needs to show restraint and handle situations such as these in a “civil manner”.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/03/2021 – 17:40
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