- Can Muslim Terrorists Be Deradicalized? – Part I
Can Muslim Terrorists Be Deradicalized? – Part I
Authored by Denis McEoin via The Gatestone Institute,
On Friday November 29, 2019, an Islamist terror attack took place in London. Two young people, both recent Cambridge University graduates, Jack Merritt (25) and Saskia Jones (23), were stabbed and killed by a single attacker. It was a terrible and unnecessary loss of life.
The special irony about Jack and Saskia’s deaths is that they (and a colleague) had been involved with Cambridge University’s Learning Together prison-rehabilitation program, similar to the US version known as Inside-Out, both of which bring prison inmates together with students to learn together. The British programme is run by Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, from which both Merritt and Jones had received M.Phils in criminology.
On that Friday, the fifth anniversary of the program, they were attending a conference on offender rehabilitation. The event, dedicated to work on reintegrating prisoners after their release, took place in the stately Fishmongers’ Hall at the north end of London Bridge. It was attended by a mix of academics, students, graduates and former prisoners, some with tags.
Just after lunch, at 12.58 p.m., the conference erupted into chaos when one of the participants threatened to blow it up. A man, later identified as Usman Khan, revealed that he was wearing what appeared to be a suicide vest. It is not clear what he planned to do, given that the vest was a fake and could not have served in any attack. However, he did have two knives taped to his wrists. When he left the Hall and went down to the bridge, it was indeed with these weapons that he killed Merritt and Jones and injured several others, some badly.
Remarkably, instead of running for their lives, many of the conference participants, including some prisoners, tackled Khan. One was a convicted murderer on day release. Two of these heroes were Merritt and Jones, who paid for their bravery with their own lives.
That Khan was there at all almost beggars belief. He was out on licence from prison, where he had served just half of a 16-year prison sentence for engaging with others in plans for what could have led to a major terrorist atrocity. He was at the conference because it was believed he was working towards his own deradicalization. Quite obviously, he had not been deradicalized.
Nine years earlier, when he was 19, Khan had been a leading member of a terrorist outfit inspired by al-Qa’ida. The members were arrested and put on trial in 2012, when Khan and two others were handed undetermined sentences; Khan was classified as never to be released. They had never carried out an attack, but they had ambitious plans, distributing letter bombs in the post, and setting off pipe bombs in toilets and pubs. There was also a handwritten target list belonging to the group which listed the names and addresses of the then London mayor, Boris Johnson, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, two rabbis, the US embassy in London and the stock exchange.
There were nine accused in all, but Khan and two others were described by the judge who sentenced them, Justice Alan Wilkie, to have been “more serious jihadis than the others.” Wilkie had also warned that Khan should not be released from prison early:
In my judgment, these offenders would remain, even after a lengthy term of imprisonment, of such a significant risk that the public could not be adequately protected by their being managed on licence in the community, subject to conditions, by reference to a preordained release date.
That warning was not heeded when it came to a reconsideration of Khan’s situation.
At an appeal hearing in 2013, Khan was given a determinate sentence of 16 years in gaol. He had served about five years of this when he was released on licence while wearing a GPS ankle bracelet. According to a BBC investigation:
During his time in prison, Khan completed a course for people convicted of extremism offences and after his release went on a scheme to address the root causes of terrorism.
The first course Khan went on, the Healthy Identity Intervention Programme, was piloted from 2010 and is now the main rehabilitation scheme for prisoners convicted of offences linked to extremism.
There was, however, a flaw in these schemes: they had not been fully tested or evaluated. The BBC’s home affairs correspondent, Danny Shaw, remarked:
Last year, the Ministry of Justice published the findings of research into the pilot project which found it was “viewed positively” by a sample of those who attended and ran the course.
However, the department has not completed any work to test whether the scheme prevents reoffending or successfully tackles extremist behaviour.
There has also been no evaluation of the impact of the Desistance and Disengagement Programme, which Khan took part in after his release last year.
It need hardly be said that Khan’s attack is evidence that such schemes are inherently unstable and, in a certain percentage of cases, likely to fail.
Actually, the failure rate had already been predicted by Ian Acheson, a British expert on prisons who is currently a senior advisor to the US-based Counter Extremism Project. In 2015, Britain’s Justice Secretary, Michael Gove, appointed Acheson, aided by a small expert team, to conduct an independent review of Islamist extremism in the prisons and probation system in England and Wales. A summary of the main findings of Acheson’s final report has been made available online by the UK government.
On December 1, however, Acheson himself wrote an article for the London Times entitled “London Bridge attack: I told ministers we were treating terrorist prisoners with jaw-dropping naivety. Did they listen?”
In it, he revealed that his survey was originally opposed by the CEO of Britain’s Prison and Probation Service, who had to be overruled by Gove. He goes on to write that “What we found was so shockingly bad that I had to agree to the language in the original report being toned down. With hindsight, I’m not sure that was the right decision.” He continues with a deeply worrying account of what he and his team found:
There were serious deficiencies in almost every aspect of the management of terrorist offenders through the system that are relevant to Usman Khan. Frontline prison staff were vulnerable to attack and were ill-equipped to counter hateful extremism on prison landings for fear of being accused of racism. Prison imams did not possess the tools, and sometimes the will, to combat Islamist ideology. The prison service’s intelligence-gathering system was hopelessly fractured and ineffectual.
The rest of the article should be read in full, for it is a damning indictment of the way Islamic extremism and deradicalization of terrorists are handled within the UK’s prison network. At one point, he writes:
What has this got to do with Khan? Many of the recommendations I made related to what I saw as serious gaps in the management of terrorist offenders into custody and “through the gate”. There was a lack of expertise and appropriateness in the arrangements for probation supervision of these most potentially lethal offenders.
The questions Acheson proceeds to ask are detailed and well informed. Perhaps the government agencies responsible for incarceration and deradicalization of terrorists and would-be jihadists will listen to him and others who are deeply informed about the problem and will introduce some at least of the many reforms he calls for.
Tragically, that may not happen. As he himself admits, he is likely to be persona non grata within the service and perhaps the Ministry of Justice:
Moreover, there are legitimate questions to ask about the qualifications of the key people in this highly sensitive role and how they were appointed. HM Prison and Probation Service, where I spent nearly a decade working, is a notoriously closed shop when it comes to the advancement of its senior leadership, whatever the public relations person says.
To make life even harder for prison officials at every level, a study published by the Ministry of Justice in May 2019, has revealed that radical Muslims in gaol in the UK are almost out of control to the point where they rule prisons. Entitled “Exploring the Nature of Muslim Groups and Related Gang Activity in Three High Security Prisons: Findings from Qualitative Research”, the study paints a disturbing picture that could have been a script for a violent TV drama.
There is a useful summary of the UK situation by Patrick Dunleavy, a former Inspector General for the New York State Department of Corrections. Dunleavy has testified as an expert witness before the House Committee on Homeland Security about the threat of Islamic Radicalization in the U.S. prison system.
In his summary dated June 19, 2019, Dunleavy identifies a group of radicalized Muslims who function as a gang in UK prisons, taking control of territory and exercising influence over existing and new Muslim prisoners, even where the latter do not enter gaol as extremists or terrorist supporters. Dunleavy sums up the influence of this broad “gang”:
Obedience is achieved by violence and intimidation carried out by members of the group known as enforcers. “Those who had committed terrorist crimes often held more senior roles in the gang,” the study found, “facilitated by the respect some younger prisoners gave them.”
Leadership gives the orders for all acts of violence. No member acts on his own. If he does, one inmate said, he is taken aside by a leader….
The study described the leaders as manipulative, dominating, and outspoken and yet found they were able to portray themselves to prison staff as compliant and polite. In other words, “jail wise.”
A similar situation exists in the United States, where Muslim radicals also form gang-like structures of mutual reinforcement and coercion. Dunleavy draws on his own direct experience of US prisons:
I was assigned to “Operation Hades” at the time, a multifaceted investigative group of federal, state, and local agents, analysts, and law enforcement officers tasked with exploring the level of radical Islamic recruitment in the prison system.
The study found that terrorist groups such as al-Qaida did not see prison as an obstacle. Quite the opposite, they viewed it as an opportunity to organize and expand.
In prison, terrorists designed an organizational structure providing specific roles for each member, roles identical to what was just found in the UK; leaders, recruiters, enforcers, foot soldiers. The intelligence report also said that terrorists would operate their group in prison like a “brotherhood,” and that recruitment would thrive because they had a large “pool of vulnerable people” from which to draw.
However, in Dunleavy’s opinion, American prison and counter-terrorism authorities have handled these matters better than their counterparts in the UK:
The United States seems to have fared better curbing radical Islamic groups organizing in the prison system than our UK and EU counterparts. This may be due in part to the Correctional Intelligence Initiative program operated by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), which continues to build on the recommendations of the 2002 report.
If there is one shortcoming, it is in the area of post-release supervision of convicted terrorists.
As we have previously reported, more terrorists are being released from custody with no viable de-radicalization program or monitoring system in place.
Where they live or work, as well as any social media involvement after their release, needs to be strictly monitored. Any important intelligence gleaned from this should be shared across the board with participating agencies. International travel should also be restricted.
Usman Khan’s trajectory confirms Dunleavy’s uneasy concern about the “post-release supervision of convicted terrorists”. Is any form of deradicalization possible at all? It is no secret that hundreds of former Islamic State/Da’esh fighters may have returned or hope yet to return to their countries of origin in Europe:
Jürgen Stock, Interpol’s chief, who is also a criminologist and law enforcement officer from Germany, said: “We could soon be facing a second wave of other Islamic State linked or radicalised individuals that you might call Isis 2.0.”
“A lot of these are suspected terrorists or those who are linked to terrorist groups as supporters who are facing maybe two to five years in jail. Because they were not convicted of a concrete terrorist attack but only support for terrorist activities, their sentences are perhaps not so heavy.”
Many such fighters are already in custody under Turkish control. A recent report from Ankara indicates that the Islamist Turkish government is threatening to release them and send them into Europe. If that happens, handling such an influx could become an intense and possibly irresoluble headache for the prison, security, and counter-terrorism authorities everywhere.
In Part II, we shall examine what the Western states will have to do and should already be doing to quash this menace.
* * *
Postscript. Just as this article finished editing, a grim event, once more in London, took place in an eerie replica of Usman Khan’s November terrorist attack on London Bridge. On February 2, a young Muslim, Sudesh Amman, stabbed two passers-by in Streatham, a London district. Ten days earlier, he had, like Khan, been released from prison halfway through his sentence for terror offences in 2018. He too was shot dead by armed police, and in his case neither of his victims died.
Amman was one of the top five terrorist risk people in the country and was known still to possess extremist views, yet his parole board did not assess him before setting him free to go onto the street, take a knife from a shop, and attack two innocent people. This, despite the fact, as we shall see in part two, that the government had earlier announced plans to tighten up sentencing and end halfway release for terrorist prisoners.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/06/2020 – 00:05 - Just A Little Sloppy Record-Keeping? The Pentagon's $35 Trillion 'Accounting Black Hole'
Just A Little Sloppy Record-Keeping? The Pentagon’s $35 Trillion ‘Accounting Black Hole’
Over the past two weeks of coronavirus headlines and heightened global anxiety, along with impeachment coverage and after over the Super Bowl weekend Americans huddled in living rooms in blissful oblivion, a story which in more normal times would be front and center has gone largely unnoticed. To be sure, the Pentagon couldn’t be happier that this bombshell has taken a back burner in global headlines:
The Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments last year alone — a total that’s larger than the entire U.S. economy and underscores the Defense Department’s continuing difficulty in balancing its books.
The latest estimate is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017, the first year adjustments were tracked in a concerted way, according to Pentagon figures and a lawmaker who’s pursued the accounting morass.
It sounds more appropriately news out of The Onion or Babylon Bee given this is *Trillions* and not just billions — though that itself would have been remarkable enough. Naturally, the first and only question we should start with is: how is this even possible?
After all, $35 trillion is about one-and-a-half times the size of the entire US economy. Not to mention that the figure easily dwarfs the GDP of the entire combined nations of the European continent. Consider too that the current actual US budge for defense-related funding is $738 billion.
“Within that $30 trillion is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts,” Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Bloomberg in a recent report.
But are we really to believe that mere “combined errors, shorthand, and sloppy record-keeping by DoD accountants” — as another analyst was quoted as saying — can explain a $35 Trillion accounting black hole?
According to the DoD, there’s nothing to see here…
The Defense Department acknowledged that it failed its first-ever audit in 2018 and then again last year, when it reviewed $2.7 trillion in assets and $2.6 trillion in liabilities. While auditors found no evidence of fraud in the review of finances that Congress required, they flagged a laundry list of problems, including accounting adjustments.
With tax season now fast approaching, it’s not too comforting to know the Pentagon enjoys over half of all discretionary domestic spending for its global war machine in maintenance of
our humble RepublicEmpire .Bloomberg attempted to get a handle on it further in explaining, “The military services make adjustments, some automatic and some manual, on a monthly and quarterly basis, and those actions are consolidated by the Pentagon’s primary finance and accounting service and submitted to the Treasury.”
“There were 546,433 adjustments in fiscal 2017 and 562,568 in 2018, according to figures provided by Representative Jackie Speier, who asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate,” the report added.
Spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s inspector general, Dwrena Allen, downplayed what to most Americans will sound like the makings of an explosive scandal. “In layman’s terms, this means that the DoD made adjustments to accounting records without having documentation to support the need or amount for the adjustment,” she said.
And for further perspective on the DoD’s “defense” of the beggars belief figure:
“It means money that DoD moved from one part of the budget to another,” Clark explained to Task & Purpose. “So, like in your household budget: It would be like moving money from checking, to savings, to your 401K, to your credit card, and then back.”
However, $35 trillion is close to 50-times the size of the Pentagon’s 2019 budget, so that means every dollar the Defense Department received from Congress was moved up to 50 times before it was actually spent, Clark said.
“Trillions” explained away by a little benign neglect of simple documentation?
Of course, in the real world outside the halls of government and of largely unchecked power, a mere single trillion would be enough send people to jail. Here we’re talking $30+ trillion and it appears this gaping accounting black hole bigger that most of the world’s past and future economies will itself be memory holed and explained away as being but the minor errors of some DoD pencil-pushers, apparently.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 23:45 - The Pornification Of America: How Young Girls Are Being Groomed By Sexual Predators
The Pornification Of America: How Young Girls Are Being Groomed By Sexual Predators
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“The brutal reality is that a predator doesn’t have to be in the same room, building, or even country to abuse a child. And that’s what they’re doing – subjecting children to psychological and sexual abuse.”
– “I’m a 37-Year-Old Mom & I Spent Seven Days Online as an 11-Year-Old Girl. Here’s What I Learned,” Medium
What can we do to protect America’s young people from sexual predators?
That’s the question I keep getting asked by people who, having read my article on the growing danger of young boys and girls (some as young as 9 years old) being bought and sold for sex, want to do something proactive to stop these monsters in their tracks.
It is estimated that the number of children who are at risk of being trafficked or have already been sold into the sex trade would fill 1300 school buses.
While those who seek to buy young children for sex come from all backgrounds, races, ages and work forces, they do have one thing in common: 99% of them are men.
This is not a problem with an easy fix.
That so many children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
Sure, there are things that can be done to catch those who trade in young flesh: police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers, and educating parents and young people about the dangers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.
However, these are reactive responses to a menace that grows more sophisticated by the day.
We need to be preemptive and proactive in our understanding of the threats and smarter and more sophisticated in our responses, as well.
What we are dealing with is a culture that is grooming these young children, especially young girls, to be preyed upon by men.
As Jami Nesbitt writes for Bark, “Grooming is the process by which someone befriends and gains the trust of a child (and sometimes the child’s friends and family) in order to take advantage of the child for sexual purposes.”
There are usually six stages to grooming by a sexual predator: friendship (targeting and gaining trust); relationship (filling the child’s needs); gauging the level of protection surrounding the child; exclusivity (isolating the child from others); sexualization (desensitizing the child to sex talk and activities); and abuse.
All of those screen devices being passed along to children at ever-younger ages? They have become the sexual predator’s primary means of gaining access to young people, and it’s primarily happening online. As The New York Times reports:
“Sexual predators have found an easy access point into the lives of young people: They are meeting them online through multiplayer video games and chat apps, making virtual connections right in their victims’ homes. Many of the interactions lead to crimes of ‘sextortion,’ in which children are coerced into sending explicit imagery of themselves.”
Indeed, video games such as Minecraft and Fortnite, social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram, and online chat forums have become “hunting grounds” for sexual predators.
Again from The New York Times:
“Criminals strike up a conversation and gradually build trust. Often they pose as children, confiding in their victims with false stories of hardship or self-loathing. Their goal, typically, is to dupe children into sharing sexually explicit photos and videos of themselves — which they use as blackmail for more imagery, much of it increasingly graphic and violent. Reports of abuse are emerging with unprecedented frequency around the country, with some perpetrators grooming hundreds and even thousands of victims.”
One Bark investigator, Sloane Ryan, a 37-year-old woman who poses as an 11-year-old girl online in order to better understand predation and help those who are fighting it, wrote a chilling account of the kinds of solicitations she received after merely uploading a generic photo (of her 11-year-old self) to Instagram.
“By the end of two-and-a-half hours, I’ve had seven video calls, ignored another two dozen of them, text-chatted with 17 men (some who had messaged her before, gearing back up in hopes for more interaction), and seen the genitalia of 11 of those,” notes Ryan.
This is the new face of how predators are grooming young girls (and boys) to be trafficked, molested and raped. However, it starts much earlier, with a culture that has brainwashed itself into believing that sexual freedom amounts to a Super Bowl half-time show in which barely-clad women spend 20 minutes twerking, gyrating (some of it on a stripper pole) and showing off sexually provocative dance moves.
This is part and parcel of the pornification of American culture.
As commentator Dixie Laite writes for Bust magazine:
Sex sells. Madonna knew it when she crawled the VMA stage very much not “Like a Virgin”. Rihanna, Beyonce, Britney and countless others have climbed that ladder to fame… Last time I looked, we as a nation absolutely adored this so-called slutty behavior. I see people voting with their dollars and their attention to Playboy’s Bunnies, Victoria’s Secrets, strippers, people who dress like strippers, and girls who’ve gone wild.
“Pop culture and porn culture have become part of the same seamless continuum,” explains theatre historian and University of Illinois professor Mardia Bishop. “As these images become pervasive in popular culture, they become normalized… and… accepted.”
This foray into porn culture—the increasing acceptability and pervasiveness of sexualized imagery in mainstream media—is where pop culture takes a dark turn. “Visual images and narratives of music videos clearly have more potential to form attitudes, values, or perceptions of social reality than does the music alone,” notes author Douglas A. Gentile in his book Media Violence and Children. In fact, music videos are among the worst culprits constantly bombarding young people today with sexual images and references.
Screen time has become the primary culprit for the oversexualization of young people.
Little wonder when 8-to-12-year-olds spend almost 5 hours daily on screen media (teens rack up nearly 8 hours on screen devices) and that does not include time spent using those devices for school or homework.
A good chunk of that screen time is gobbled up by YouTube, which has been repeatedly red flagged by watchdog groups for peddling violent imagery, drug references, racist language and sexually suggestive content at young viewers.
Music videos overwhelmingly contain sexually suggestive materials, and with the advent of portable technology, children’s television and music are often unmonitored by parents or guardians. In fact, one study found that more than 80% of parents have caught young children repeating offensive lyrics or copying “porn-style” dance moves after being exposed to explicit pop music.
Numerous studies have found that exposure to sexual content in music, movies, television, and magazines accelerate adolescent sexual behavior: this is how young people are being groomed for sex by a predator culture.
As Jessica Bennett notes in “The Pornification of a Generation” for Newsweek:
“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives. Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms… All it takes is one look at [social media] photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere. Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school… Celebrities, too, have become amateur porn stars. They show up in sex tapes (Colin Farrell, Kim Kardashian), hire porn producers to shoot their videos (Britney Spears) or produce porn outright (Snoop Dogg). Actual porn stars and call girls, meanwhile, have become celebs. Ron Jeremy regularly takes cameos in movies and on TV, while adult star Jenna Jameson is a best-selling author.”
How we got to this place in time, where children are sexualized at an early age and trotted out as easy targets for all manner of predators is not really all that hard to decipher, but it requires a certain amount of candor.
First, there is nothing sexually liberating about young women—young girls—reducing themselves to little more than sex objects and prancing about like prostitutes.
Second, this is a dangerous game that can only end in tragic consequences: there are sexual predators out there only too eager to take advantage of any innuendo-laced sexual “invitations” being put out there, intentional or not.
Third, if it looks like porn, sounds like porn and imitates porn, it is porn, and it is devastating on every front, turning women into objects for male aggression.
Fourth, no matter what its champions might say about the First Amendment and women’s liberation, pornography in all its forms—whether overtly packaged as skin flicks and mags or more subtly disguised by pop culture as trendy music videos and precocious clothing—is about one thing only: money.
Fifth, parents: turn off your cell phones for a change and tune into what your kids are watching, reading, listening to, and whom they are emulating.
And finally, remember that the sexualization of young children is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from sexualized entertainment, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture, and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc., and ends with these same young people being bought and sold for sex. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
That this issue continues to be treated with a shrug, especially by those who claim to care about the state of our freedoms, is not only surprising and unnerving but also dangerously oblivious.
Like so many of the evils in our midst, sex trafficking (and the sexualization of young people) is a cultural disease that is rooted in the American police state’s heart of darkness. It speaks to a sordid, far-reaching corruption that stretches from the highest seats of power (governmental and corporate) down to the most hidden corners and relies on our silence and our complicity to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.
You don’t have to be a parent to care about what’s happening to our young people. Likewise, you shouldn’t have to subscribe to any particular political viewpoint to recognize and be alarmed by the authoritarian trajectory of the nation.
Those concerned about the emerging police state in America, which I detail in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, should be equally concerned about the sex trafficking of young girls (and boys) and the pornification of America: they are two sides of the same coin.
As Aldous Huxley explains in his introduction to Brave New World:
As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 23:25 - States That Tax The Most Are Getting The Worst Results Per Dollar
States That Tax The Most Are Getting The Worst Results Per Dollar
Today in “more definitive proof that the government can’t spend your capital as well as you can” news, it should come as no surprise that states who spend less in taxes are getting better results, per dollar, than similarly sized states who collect far more in tax revenue.
At least that was the result of looking at the country’s four largest states: California, Texas, Florida and New York.
Aside from being the same size, the states differ greatly in politics and governance, the NY Post notes. California and New York are liberal hot beds dominated by Democrats who have put the nation’s highest and sixth highest marginal income tax rates.
Texas and Florida are the opposite: both states have been run by conservatives for years and offer the benefits of no income tax on workers while keeping spending on social programs much lower.
An analysis of these states reveals some stark differences, but mainly tells the tale that lower taxed states have excelled, on a per dollar basis, past those with heavy tax burdens in a number of areas.
Blue states show little ability to improve academic outcomes of their kids, while red states have been able to “foster more upward mobility and trust in government,” the Post writes.
New York spends about $23,000 per pupil on education – about twice the national average of $12,000. Florida and Texas spend about $9,000 per pupil. And the difference in outputs has been almost unnoticeable.
In 2017, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that students in New York and Texas both scored around the national average in fourth and eighth grades, as did Floridians in eighth. Florida students in fourth grade scored above the national average, while California students in both grades scored below the national average.
In addition, minority students in Florida scored highest in the nation across the board. Black students scored 240 out of 500 on an average of the four tests used, which bests a 234 score average nationally. In New York, minority students scored above or around the national average of 236 for black students and 237 for hispanic students.
California and New York spend tons more on their anti-poverty programs than Texas and Florida. For instance, inclusive of Medicaid, California spent about $19,000 per person under the poverty line in 2017. New York spent over $21,000. Florida spent just $9,000 and Texas spent under $8,000.
But there’s no evidence that the extra spending is helping. The poverty rate fell 3% in California and 1.3% in New York from 2010 to 2018, while it fell 3% in Texas and 2.8% in Florida.
New York spends the most out of the four states on transportation, at $538 per capita. The national average is $476 while Florida, Texas and California spend $427, $399 and $339, respectively.
Per highway mile, Florida spends $241,000 and New York spends $215,000. This compares to $125,000 in California and $73,000 in Texas.
But the numbers find that there’s “no evidence” New York’s extra spending provides value to the people living there. Road quality in the state is ranked at 26th in the nation by the Federal Highway Administration, bridge quality is 37th and overall value of highways was 45th.
Florida is getting the better value for its dollar, yet again. Its roads rank 7th in the nation and its bridges rank 3rd. The Reason foundation has reported that overall, Texas taxpayers get the better value for their highways than the three other states.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 23:05 - Matt Gaetz Files Ethics Complaint, Criminal Referral Request Against Nancy Pelosi For Tearing Up SOTU Speech
Matt Gaetz Files Ethics Complaint, Criminal Referral Request Against Nancy Pelosi For Tearing Up SOTU Speech
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has written a letter to the House Ethics Committee requesting an investigation into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to tear up a copy of President Trump’s State of the Union address, arguing that “Her unseemly behavior certainly warrants censure.”
Gaetz has also requested a criminal referral for Pelosi’s potential violation of 18 U.S. Code § 2071 (Concealment, removal, or mutilation of documents).
Pelosi, still steaming after House Democrats’ impeachment gambit only drove President Trump’s approval ratings to all time highs, sat through Trump’s Tuesday night address staring daggers into the back of Trump’s head and mumbling to herself – only to test, pre-rip, and then tear up her copy of Trump’s SOTU speech.
Here’s Pelosi testing to see if she could rip the speech before the speech even started. She was planning to do it from the start. pic.twitter.com/1gEMlYrNB7
— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) February 5, 2020
According to Gaetz, President Trump delivered remarks “which received overwhelming (and frequently bipartisan) support,” that were an “uplifting celebration of the diversity of the American experience and the triumph of the American Spirit.”
Pelosi’s theatrics were “utterly dismissive of the President’s achievements, and, more importantly, the achievements of the American People.”
Gaetz argues that Pelosi’s actions appear to violate clauses 1 and 2 of House Rule XXIII, and does not “reflect creditably on the House,” or follow “the spirit and the letter of the Rules of the House.”
BREAKING: I’m filing an ethics complaint against @SpeakerPelosi for destroying @realDonaldTrump‘s State of the Union speech.
Her conduct was beneath the dignity of the House, and a potential violation of law (18 USC 2071).
Nobody is above the law. She must be held accountable. pic.twitter.com/dXPPWQNtI8
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) February 6, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 22:45 - US Army Developing Uniforms That Destroy Bioweapons In Minutes
US Army Developing Uniforms That Destroy Bioweapons In Minutes
Chemists working with the US Army are developing new uniforms that can quickly break down toxic substances, protecting troops from bioweapons, according to Wired.
Omar Farha’s lab at Northwestern University is testing a fabric that can neutralize nerve agents.
The new fabric is part of a collaborative effort between the college and the Army, which might take upwards of a decade to test and then commissioned as the next-generation battle uniform.
The fabric can destroy nerve agents VX, soman, and sarin. These dangerous chemicals can be made in a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory (BSL-4), like the one found in Wuhan, China.
The Wired noted, the Army already has uniforms to protect troops from nerve agents, but there are no uniforms that can also destroy the toxins.
Jared DeCoste, a researcher with the Army who isn’t involved in the project, said the military has been searching for uniforms that can shield troops from bioweapons and, at the same time, destroy the chemicals.
According to Farha, the important ingredient in the new fabric is a crumpled crystalline molecule called MOF-808:
“This molecule essentially harvests water from ambient air. Water vapor likes to condense onto MOF-808 molecules because of their shape and chemical properties. When MOF-808 makes contact with a nerve agent, the water attached to the molecule breaks down the toxin, while zirconium atoms that recur throughout MOF-808’s crystal serve as the catalyst, accelerating the nerve agent’s breakdown. As long as the fabric is worn in a place where the humidity level is at least 30 percent, it can collect enough water to break down nerve agents in minutes.”
Dr. Francis Boyle, the man who drafted the Biological Weapons Act, recently said in an explosive interview that the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan likely came from a BSL-4 in the city.
He believes the virus is potentially lethal and an offensive biological warfare weapon or dual-use biowarfare weapons agent genetically modified with a gain of function properties.
The threats of biological warfare in the 2020s is undoubtedly a concerning matter for the Army, perhaps that’s why next-generational suits to repel and neutralize toxins will be standard issue by the end of the decade.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 22:25 - George Soros' Hypocrisy About Facebook And Much Else
George Soros’ Hypocrisy About Facebook And Much Else
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The investor George Soros objects that Facebook is doing what the U.S. Government allows it to do, but he doesn’t object to the U.S. Government’s allowing it. Yet, he claims to be opposing the Republican Government of Donald Trump, while he demands that the leadership of Facebook be replaced — supposedly for violating a law that the Trump Administration maybe isn’t enforcing. Is Soros really that incoherent? Or is there an ulterior motive here?
He headlined an op-ed in the January 31st New York Times, “Mark Zuckerberg Should Not Be in Control of Facebook”, and he closed there by saying,
“I repeat and reaffirm my accusation against Facebook under the leadership of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg. They follow only one guiding principle: maximize profits irrespective of the consequences. One way or another, they should not be left in control of Facebook.”
He cited, for blame in this, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows passive online media – media that exercise no editorial control over what their users post online – to be not responsible for, and not subject to lawsuits for, whatever is posted to their sites.*
Soros noted that Facebook is not censoring posts to its site in a way that will help Democratic candidates, but instead in a way that will help Republican candidates. He apparently wants censorship, but it must be his type of censorship, not theirs.
He is clear about his support for some sort of censorship. But is he proposing that the Government will somehow force this change from a Republican Facebook to a Democratic Facebook, or instead that Facebook’s stockholders will, somehow, do this — get rid of their founder and two top leaders? Soros doesn’t respect his readers enough to so much as even just touch on that basic question in his presentation — is the Government to get rid of Zuckerberg and Sandberg, or are the stockholders supposed to do it?
Soros is addressing his commentary only to fools who don’t care about what case he’s trying to persuade them to believe. If his article were, at all, serious, it would have been less holier-than-thou against businesses that supposedly adhere to “only one guiding principle: maximize profits irrespective of the consequences,” and it would have outlined a proposal — and not just asserted “One way or another, they should not be left in control of Facebook.” But why shouldn’t they? He really doesn’t say. He doesn’t cite even a single concrete example. He presents no case, at all.
He didn’t object that by Facebook’s doing any censorship at all, Facebook doesn’t actually fit into Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and Facebook is instead serving as an online publisher (a member of the press) and therefore is supposed to be legally responsible for what is being posted to their site — responsible for it in just the same way that the New York Times and Washington Post and NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, are responsible for what they publish (responsible, that is, to civil suits, but not to any criminal laws). Soros isn’t hiring lawyers to present such a case against Facebook, which would be a serious case to present, holding Facebook liable for any libels that it has published; he is instead trying to smear the leaders of Facebook, without supplying facts, or, really, any case, at all.
He is not objecting to the Trump Administration’s prejudicially granting this non-enforcement to Facebook, the publisher — the Trump Administration’s treating them as if they weren’t being publishers, but just passive information-providers; treating them as if Facebook weren’t selecting what to transmit and what not to transmit on their networks, to their audience.
(Facebook, and other online media such as Twitter, don’t even hide the fact that they exercise censorship, while they claim to be only “passive” media and thus protected by Section 230. Like I said: this case against Facebook would be serious, if it were brought, because these online platforms really do censor-out whatever they wish to censor-out.)
Why did Soros object to Facebook’s controllers, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, instead of object to Donald Trump — who is granting this prejudicial treatment, to that publisher (allowing it to be treated in accord with the Section 230 exemption)? Is it because Soros is too stupid to know better, or to understand the difference?
Soros knows enough to be expressing his viewpoint in a partisan manner, as a Democrat who spends tens of millions of dollars each election-cycle in order to support conservative Democrats against progressive Democrats.
(For example: in the 2016 Democratic Presidential primaries, between the conservative liberal Hillary Clinton and the progressive Bernie Sanders, Soros’s spokesman said that “Soros is supporting pro-Clinton super PACs because ‘Mr. Soros believes Hillary Clinton is the most qualified candidate to be president.’ He said this after Hillary’s disastrous record as Secretary of State, such as on Libya, “We came, we saw, he died, ha ha ha!!”)
And, then, in the general election, Soros supports conservative Democrats (such as that same conservative liberal Clinton) against sometimes even more conservative Republican Party nominees, for the given federal office. (The idea that Soros pumps about himself, that he’s progressive, is one big fat lie: he’s nothing of the sort.)
Why would he not be objecting to Trump here — the Republican who will soon be running against whomever the Democratic Party chooses to be its nominee?
The reason is that Trump isn’t really his target here: this is not the season during which the President will be chosen, but is instead the season in which each Party is to be selecting its nominee to then run against the other Parties’ nominees. And, since Soros is addressing, really (and only), fellow Democrats, his agenda could reasonably be viewed as being to affect whom they will be voting for in the present primaries.
In other words, George Soros wants as free a hand as possible, as a Democratic Party mega-donor, in order to determine whom the Democratic Party’s nominee will be. He wants Facebook to be censoring his way, not their way. Then, later, if that nominee suits his purposes, Soros will donate funds proportionately, to that Democratic Party nominee, against Donald Trump. Perhaps right now Soros is using the opinion-page of the Democratic Party’s New York Times in order to warn Facebook to avoid using its censorship so as to favor and oppose ‘the wrong’ Democratic Party candidates. And, maybe, that newspaper favors and opposes the same candidates that Soros does, and so perhaps that’s why they published his tripe here, rather than higher-quality submissions they could have chosen instead to publish.
Google, during the 2016 election-cycle, was slanting its ‘news’ to favor conservative Democrats against progressive Democrats, and then to favor the Democratic Party nominees against the Republican Party’s nominees, whereas Facebook was slanting its ‘news’ to favor Republican Party nominees against Democratic Party nominees. Twitter censors-out whatever neither Party wants the public to know, such as that Julian Assange is being tortured awaiting his extradition to the U.S. — for a trial that will likely never happen — all of these years of his imprisonment, lately in solitary confinement moreover, and never once being tried in a court of law, for anything, at all.
Since George Soros is a Democratic Party billionaire, he is objecting against Facebook instead of against Google. Similarly, Republican Party billionaires (and the ‘news’-media that they control) attack Google and other pro-Democratic-Party media.
Thus, Soros says:
“Facebook can post deliberately misleading or false statements by candidates for public office and others, and take no responsibility for them”
instead of:
“President Trump is not enforcing federal laws that hold publishers liable for lies they publish.”
After all: Soros himself was – along with the U.S. Government and the Netherlands Government – one of the top three funders of a television station in Kiev Ukraine that promoted ethnic cleansing against the predominantly ethnic Russian residents in far eastern Ukraine where 90% of the population had voted for the democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, whom America’s Democratic Party President Barack Obama had just overthrown in a very bloody coup that was covered-over by ‘popular demonstrations’ which had actually been organized inside the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine and which had aimed at creating in Ukraine a rabidly anti-Russian government on Russia’s doorstep. Obama had even been planning by no later than June 2013 to install in Crimea a U.S. naval base to replace Russia’s largest naval base, which was (and remains) located there, in Crimea. The ‘popular demonstrations’ against Yanukovych didn’t even start until 21 November 2013, and they were organized starting on 1 March 2013 inside America’s Ukraine Embassy. The organizing for them started by no later than June 2011. The ethnic cleansing was acknowledged by Ukrainian officials and was very effective, but Soros wanted yet more of it to be done, and he urged an additional $50 billion for it to be publicly financed as an ‘investment’ in ‘democracy’.
So, Soros knows, and understands, a thing or two about propaganda. And, of course, he knows that Julian Assange is his enemy, just as much as Assange is, say, an enemy of Google’s Eric Schmidt, and of Cambridge Analytica’s Peter Thiel (who supported Trump).
This is just a game that virtually all of the billionaires play, against democracy itself. They want to control the country. Ever since around 1980, they have been accustomed to doing so.
* * *
* The U.S. Constitution, in its First Amendment, prohibited any type of governmentally imposed censorship but allowed censorship by members of the privately owned “press.” Section 230 was written to exclude passive online providers from being referred to as being “press” or a “publisher,” but it was poorly written, by lobbyists for corporations in the same category as Facebook and Google, and has yet to be revised by lobbyists for their print and broadcast competitors, who might define more precisely Section 230’s key phrase “interactive computer service” so as to state explicitly that only passive ones are being referred to by that phrase. Right now, even the New York Times online could conceivably qualify as being not a “publisher” and therefore not liable as publishers have been in the past. A corrupt government writes laws corruptly (such as Section 230 is) so that the laws reflect little else than the contending mega-corporate interests; and Section 230 is an example of this (as are most of our laws). With a big enough budget for its lawyering, any mega-corporation or association of large corporations can get the laws, in a corrupt country, written so as to serve its interests. Of course, such a country is no democracy. (But a corrupt country will have a corrupt press so that the public will think it’s a democracy.) Under such circumstances, judges make the final decision in particular cases. There already do exist some legal precedents for interpreting “interactive computer service” to apply only to passive ones. However, most billionaires are probably similar to Soros in wanting the internet to continue being used so as to propagandize the public — shape people’s attitudes and beliefs — instead of to inform the public (which entails no censorship whatsoever and is therefore overwhelmingly disfavored by billionaires and their corporations and their PACs and their lobbyists). Julian Assange is an example of the way a billionaires-controlled world treats leading anti-censorship activists. America is becoming a bastion of censorship, as one would expect of any dictatorship. This is certainly not what the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution had intended or even expected. After 9/11, it has become a seemingly permanent police-state. It’s what one would expect from a country that’s controlled by its billionaires. The 2020 U.S. elections should be about this problem, but, of course, are not.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 22:05 - Eerie Drone Footage Of Wuhan Reveals China's Real "Ghost City"
Eerie Drone Footage Of Wuhan Reveals China’s Real “Ghost City”
In its latest video on the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, the New York Times managed to fly a drone over the city of Wuhan, which has been under quarantine/lockdown orders from Beijing for more than a week.
The footage is haunting – like something out of an apocalyptic horror movie.
Roughly 80% of virus-related deaths have occurred in Wuhan since the outbreak began. But there’s reason to believe the death toll – particularly in Wuhan – might be much higher.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 21:45 - New 'Solar Panels' Harness The Energy Of Deep Space
New ‘Solar Panels’ Harness The Energy Of Deep Space
Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,
Solar power is cheaper than ever, it’s ultra-abundant, and it emits zero greenhouse gases. But it’s far from perfect–for now. One of the biggest limitations of solar energy (which applies to wind power as well) is that it is variable and is not dispatchable. Variability refers to the fact that solar power is dependent on a completely unreliable factor: the weather. Solar panels don’t generate energy if the sun isn’t shining, meaning that they don’t function for an entire half of every day and function far under capacity during overcast daylight hours. They also can’t be turned on and off according to the grid’s needs, known as dispatchability. Instead of being able to respond to the energy needs of the grid, the grid has to work around the productivity of the solar panels.
Researchers have been hard at work for years to address these two shortcomings with all different kinds of approaches.
The most predominant strategy, and the one that is furthest along in development and implementation, is energy storage. When solar panels create excess energy, that is, more than the grid can absorb, the energy will be stored for later use when the sun isn’t shining. Energy storage is extremely promising, but currently is simply too expensive to be applied across the industry at a scale large enough to compete with fossil fuels. In order to reach 100 percent renewable energy in the United States, energy storage needs to be cheaper–a lot cheaper.
“The answer is $20 per kilowatt hour in energy capacity costs. That’s how cheap storage would have to get for renewables to get to 100 percent,” reported Vox late last year based on findings from an MIT study.
“That’s around a 90 percent drop from today’s costs. While that is entirely within the realm of the possible, there is wide disagreement over when it might happen; few expect it by 2030.”
In the meantime, there are a few teams of scientists taking a very different approach: developing a solar panel that can derive energy from the night sky. Oilprice reported on one of these projects last year. While the article proclaimed that “this ‘Anti-Solar Panel’ Could Generate Power From Darkness,” however, calling it a solar panel is a bit of a misnomer. The process does not use photovoltaic cells but operates entirely based on changes in temperature. The study from Stanford, poetically called “Generating Light from Darkness” explains:
“We use a passive cooling mechanism known as radiative sky cooling to maintain the cold side of a thermoelectric generator several degrees below ambient. The surrounding air heats the warm side of the thermoelectric generator, with the ensuing temperature difference converted into usable electricity. We highlight pathways to improving performance from a demonstrated 25 mW/m2 to 0.5 W/m2. Finally, we demonstrate that even with the low-cost implementation demonstration here, enough power is produced to light a LED: generating light from darkness.”
Now, there is another new study that touts its own anti-solar panel technology. Not too far from the team in Palo Alto, another team of researchers from the University of California, Davis have published their own, even more poetically titled paper: “Nighttime Photovoltaic Cells: Electrical Power Generation by Optically Coupling with Deep Space.” A report from Popular Mechanics explains the study in layman’s terms.
“To turn even low-level heat into energy, scientists have to use a thermal cell instead of a photo cell. The materials must be able to absorb the lowest wavelengths of energy.”
The report continues, “In a thermal radiation cell, we reset the parameters so Earth is the new sun, and its even minimal accumulated heat dwarfs the cold, midnight black of outer space. Letting heat seep out of thermal cells at night, drawn out by the cold night sky, could let scientists capture the energy as it goes out the same way we capture the sun’s energy as it comes in.” This is known as a heat sink.
While these studies are promising and innovative solutions to making renewable energy competitive and reliable on a large scale, they’re still in their initial stages, and commercialization can’t come fast enough. With catastrophic climate change right around the corner and the UN begging for investment in renewables, it’s a race against the clock, and right now it’s not certain if we will win.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 21:25 - Twitter Says It'll Censor Deepfakes And Basically Anything Else It Wants To Ahead Of 2020 Election
Twitter Says It’ll Censor Deepfakes And Basically Anything Else It Wants To Ahead Of 2020 Election
Just days after banning Zero Hedge, Twitter has announced it’ll also be implementing new rules to address deepfakes and “other forms of synthetic and manipulated media” as we head closer to the 2020 election.
Because we can’t have a repeat of 2016, right?
The company said it is going to not allow users to “deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm,” according to CNBC. The rules go into effect after March 5 this year, where the company will now label some Tweets containing synthetic or manipulated media.
Social media can, and will, have a profound effect on the state of the election heading into November this year. Altered media often shows up, with candidates words sometimes parroted or mocked in certain ads that seek to undermine them. Lawmakers have been trying to figure out a way to hold social media companies accountable for the spread of misinformation.
According to CNBC, last month the “House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce held a hearing where experts shared warnings of both deepfakes and potential over-regulation of tech platforms that host them.”
Twitter is now going to test media in three different ways to see if it meets parameters that violate its policy.
-
Is the media synthetic or manipulated?
-
Was it shared in a deceptive manner?
-
Is it likely the content will cause serious harm?
The article notes that if all three of these come back “yes”, that Twitter said it would be likely to remove the content.
But we’re willing to bet – and we know from experience – that Twitter is just going to remove the content it wants to, regardless.
In fact, the new policy is broad enough that it’ll allow the company to even take action against “cheapfakes”, which are low-tech edits meant to deceive other users. And what example is immediately brought up in CNBC’s article? One video where a Twitter user simply slowed down a video of Nancy Pelosi:
The doctored video of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that circulated on social media last year, for example, would be an example of such amateur editing, since the video was simply slowed down to give the effect that her speech was slow and slurred. More sophisticated deepfakes can involve transposing a person’s face on a video of another person, for example, which could give false impressions of a person’s words or actions.
So we guess we won’t be seeing any videos of her tearing up the State of the Union Speech in slow motion.
🚨 NEW LOW FOR NANCY PELOSI: She ripped up @realDonaldTrump’s #SOTU speech for the cameras on national TV.
This speech was about American heroes and American workers. She decided THAT was worth literally tearing apart.
Absolutely disgraceful. pic.twitter.com/Cp0tg3AE1W
— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) February 5, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Twitter also said that some world leaders would be exempt from some of its policy standards. They company said it’s because “it’s important for users to see and be able to debate their messages.” But we know it’s likely because Twitter doesn’t want to lose the traffic they drive and popularity they bring to the site.
Again it seems like a case of Twitter enabling itself for purely arbitrary and discretionary bans of whomeever it wants, whenever it wants.
Recall, we wrote about Facebook implementing similar censorship policies, alongside of YouTube, heading into the 2020 election. We wonder if these social media sites realize that, instead of helping the public make informed decisions, they are giving them an excuse to vote for the party with the least government outreach.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 21:05 -
- Americans Express Record-High Optimism On Personal Finances
Americans Express Record-High Optimism On Personal Finances
Authored by RJ Reinhart of Gallup
Americans’ views on their personal financial situation have been climbing since 2018 and are now at or near record highs in Gallup’s trends. Nearly six in 10 Americans (59%) now say they are better off financially than they were a year ago, up from 50% last year.
These data come from Gallup’s annual Mood of the Nation survey, conducted Jan. 2-15. The survey was completed after months of historically low levels of unemployment and as the Dow Jones Industrial Average neared the 30,000 mark for the first time.
The current 59% of Americans who say they are better off financially than they were a year ago is essentially tied for the all-time high of 58% in January 1999. That was recorded during the dot-com boom, with conditions similar to the current state of the economy — a stock market rocketing to then-record highs and unemployment at multidecade lows — though GDP growth was higher at that time.
From 1998 to 2000, at least half of Americans rated their financial situation better than that of a year ago. However, in most surveys from 2001 to 2018, the percentage saying their personal finances were better off than the previous year was under 50% — with a low of 23% in May 2009, during the Great Recession.
Record-High Level of Optimism About Financial Future
In addition to U.S. adults’ highly positive report on their current financial situation, Americans are also expressing peak optimism about their future personal financial situation. About three in four U.S. adults (74%) predict they will be better off financially a year from now, the highest in Gallup’s trend since 1977.
Since Gallup began asking this question in 1977, Americans have consistently been more optimistic than pessimistic about where their personal financial situation is headed, with more saying their finances will be better in a year than they are now. The previous record high, 71%, was seen in 1998 during the dot-com boom.
Partisan Divide in Optimism
Given today’s highly politically polarized environment, it is perhaps not surprising that Republicans and Democrats see their personal finances differently. There is a 33-percentage-point gap between Republicans’ (76%) and Democrats’ (43%) reports of being financially better off today than they were a year ago.
There is also a partisan gap when it comes to optimism about one’s future finances, though it is smaller than the difference seen in attitudes toward current conditions. Among Republicans, 83% say their personal financial situation will be better in a year, compared with 60% of Democrats.
Independents fall in between on both measures, with 58% saying they are better off now than a year ago and 76% reporting they will be better off next year.
Bottom Line
Americans’ levels of optimism about both their current financial situation and where it will be a year from now are at or near record highs. These views align with President Donald Trump’s contention that Americans are doing better under his presidency, and with his use of the economy and job growth as key selling points for his reelection. Republicans’ positive views on their finances are something of a given for a GOP president, at least during good economic times.
The majority levels of optimism among political independents are more significant for Trump’s reelection prospects — and something Trump will want to maintain in 2020 to stay competitive.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 20:45 - US Launches Criminal Probe Into JPMorgan For Gold Price Manipulation
US Launches Criminal Probe Into JPMorgan For Gold Price Manipulation
There was a time when the merest mention of gold manipulation in “reputable” media was enough to have one branded a perpetual conspiracy theorist with a tinfoil farm out back… and immediately banned from social media.
That was roughly coincident with a time when Libor, FX, mortgage, and bond market manipulation was also considered unthinkable, when High Frequency Traders were believed to “provide liquidity”, or when the stock market was said to not be manipulated by the Fed, and when the ever-confused media, always eager to take “complicated” financial concepts at the face value set by a self-serving establishment, never dared to question anything.
That has now changed…
In November 2018, a former JPMorgan precious-metals trader admitted he engaged in a six-year spoofing scheme that defrauded investors in gold, silver, platinum, and palladium futures contracts.
John Edmonds, 36, of Brooklyn, New York, pleaded guilty under seal on Oct. 9 in the District of Connecticut to commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, commodities price manipulation, and spoofing. As Justice notes in a statement:
“From approximately 2009 through 2015 John Edmonds engaged in a sophisticated scheme to manipulate the market for precious metals futures contracts for his own gain by placing orders that were never intended to be executed,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski.
“The Criminal Division is committed to prosecuting those who undermine the investing public’s trust in the integrity of our commodities markets through spoofing or any other illegal conduct.”
That was followed, a year later, by the DOJ charging the entire precious-metals trading desk at JPMorgan of being deeply involved in what prosecutors described as a “massive, multiyear scheme to manipulate the market for precious metals futures contracts and defraud market participants.”
The DoJ charged Michael Nowak, a JPMorgan veteran and former head of its precious metals trading desk and Gregg Smith, another trader on JPM’s metals desk, in the probe. (Blythe Masters was somehow omitted).
“Based on the fact that it was conduct that was widespread on the desk, it was engaged in in thousands of episodes over an eight-year period — that it is precisely the kind of conduct that the RICO statute is meant to punish,” Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski told reporters.
Here’s where it gets extra interesting: according to Bloomberg, the unusually aggressive language language embraced by prosecutors reminds legal experts of indictments utilizing the RICO Act – a law allowing prosecutors to take down ‘criminal enterprises’ like the mafia by charging all members of the organization for any crimes committed by an individual on behalf of the organization.
Prosecutors charged the head of JP Morgan’s global metals trading operation and two other traders with “conspiracy to conduct the affairs of an enterprise involved in interstate or foreign commerce through a pattern of racketeering activity” – language that is typically used to describe a RICO charge.
And now, 5 months later, Bloomberg reports that things have escalated even further.
According to two people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that U.S. authorities that accused six JPMorgan Chase & Co. employees of rigging precious-metals futures are building a criminal case against the bank itself.
So more than 11 years after the farce began, this previously unreported investigation of the global bank’s parent company – part of a wide-ranging federal clampdown on market manipulation – raises the prospect of criminal charges and significant fines against America’s largest bank.
Additionally, Bloomberg notes that, according to a third person familiar with the matter, authorities are conducting a similar racketeering investigation of a second financial firm involving spoofing.
And all of this is occurring as more and more investors realize the value of gold as a hedge against the idiocy of politicians and policy-makers… in other words, just as manipulating precious-metals prices lower would be at its most use to the banking elites.
Conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact… and we wonder whether any of this would be public had Twitter’s newly-minted “censor anything we don’t like” policies been in place?
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 20:25 - Grassley, Johnson Seek Hunter Biden's Travel Records From Secret Service
Grassley, Johnson Seek Hunter Biden’s Travel Records From Secret Service
Two top Republican Senators are expanding their probe into potential conflicts of interest “posed by the business activities of Hunter Biden” as the Senate investigative committees continue to probe former Vice President Joe Biden’s son’s business activities overseas during his father’s tenure in the Obama Administration.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, Chairman of the Finance Committee, and Sen. Ron Johnson, who already have an ongoing investigation into numerous White House meetings during the Obama Administration with senior Ukrainian officials, sent a letter Wednesday to Secret Service Director James M. Murray requesting information “about whether Hunter Biden used government-sponsored travel to help conduct private business, to include his work for Rosemont Seneca and related entities in China and Ukraine.”
Grassley and Johnson say they want the information no later than February 19, according to the letter sent to Murray.
“The Committee on Finance and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (“the committees”) are reviewing potential conflicts of interest posed by the business activities of Hunter Biden and his associates during the Obama administration, particularly with respect to his business activities in Ukraine and China,” the letter states.
The two powerful GOP chairmen want “Hunter Biden’s travel arrangements to conduct business related to his dealings in Ukraine and China, among other countries, while he received a protective detail.”
-
Please describe the protective detail that Hunter Biden received while his father was Vice President.
-
Please provide a list of all dates and locations of travel, international and domestic, for Hunter Biden while he received a protective detail.
-
Please provide a list o f all dates and locations o f travel, international and domestic, for Hunter Biden while he received a protective detail. In your response, please note whether his travel was on Air Force One or Two, or other government aircraft, as applicable and whether additional family members were present for each trip.
The Senators also stated in the letter that they have sent other letters to other government agencies questioning ‘potential conflicts of interest’ regarding the deal during the Obama Administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approval to sell off 20 percent of U.S. uranium from the Canadian company that had assets in the U.S. to to the Russian energy giant Rosatom.
The transaction required the the approval of CFIUS, the multi-agency approval committee. At the time Hillary Clinton was head of the State Department, which was a voting member of the CFIUS board.
“In addition to several letters that the committees have sent to other agencies as part of that inquiry, the Committee on Finance also has written to the Department of Treasury regarding potential conflicts of interest in the Obama-era CFIUS- approved transaction which gave control of Henniges, an American maker of anti-vibration technologies with military applications, to a Chinese government-owned aviation company and China-based investment firm with established ties to the Chinese government.
That transaction included Rosemont Seneca Partners, a company formed in 2009 by Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz, and others.”
The letter goes on to state that “in December of 2013, one month after Rosemont Seneca’s joint venture with Bohai Capital to form BHR, Hunter Biden reportedly flew aboard Air Force Two with then-Vice President Biden to China. While in China, he helped arrange for Jonathan Li, CEO of Bohai Capital, to “shake hands” with Vice President Biden.
Afterward, Hunter Biden, met with Li for reportedly a “social meeting.” After the China trip, BHR’s business license was approved.6 Then, in 2015, BHR joined with Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) to acquire Henniges, which was the “biggest Chinese investment into US automotive manufacturing assets to date,” Johnson and Grassley’s letter revealed.
Read full letter:
As Robert Wenzel concluded earlier, it really made no sense for Democrats to go after Trump if they didn’t have an open and shut case that would cause the entire public into wanting him removed from the White House. A big mistake.
A wounded enemy is a very dangerous enemy. Now, it’s Trump’s turn.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 20:05 -
- Coronavirus Will Whack 2% From Global GDP Growth In Q1: Goldman
Coronavirus Will Whack 2% From Global GDP Growth In Q1: Goldman
While the market today soared to just shy of new all time high amid a return of the “coronavirus is contained” euphoria following unconfirmed speculation overnight that drugs are in the pipeline, the reality is that China, and the world, are at best months away from a lab setting and actual human usage. But while a vaccine will eventually emerge, the more important question for markets is what is the impact on the Chinese and global economy from the coronavirus pandemic which has effectively shut down much of China’s production capacity, crippling supply chains critical to keep not only the second largest economy in the world humming, but the world itself.
In this vein, last week Goldman estimated that the coronavirus outbreak is set to reduce Chinese GDP growth in the first quarter of 2020 by 1.6% in year-over-year terms, or 6.4% in quarter-on-quarter annual rate terms, resulting in a sub-5% GDP Q1 print. However, with Goldman expecting the outbreak to be contained by Q2, it then sees GDP surging and making up for almost all of the Q1 shortfall. Whether or not this is an optimistic take remains to be seen.
What does that Chinese GDP “shock” mean for the rest of the world?
In a follow-up note published this week, Goldman also provides its first preliminary estimate of the impact of this shock on global GDP growth.
According to Goldman’s chief economist Jan Hatzius, the assumed hit to Chinese growth will directly subtract about 1% from global GDP growth in Q1. In addition, spillover effects to the rest of the world will take just under 1% off global growth, for a total hit of nearly 2% in the first quarter. The spillover effects consist of reduced exports to China (worth about 0.3%) and reduced spending by Chinese tourists abroad (worth about 0.6%).
As shown in the next chart, both channels of transmission to the rest of the world have increased greatly in importance since the 2003 SARS epidemic because of the breathtaking growth of the Chinese economy over the past two decades. Exhibit 3 shows that several Asian countries are now particularly exposed to China. As a result, our Asia team has cut its growth forecast in Thailand due to its tourism exposure and has signaled downside risk in Korea and Taiwan due to their trade exposure.
Using these two transmission channels, Goldman then calculates the overall impact on global growth. The next chart shows a hit of about 2% in Q1. Roughly half of that impact reflects the direct effect of weaker growth in China while the other half reflects spillover effects, with effects of about 0.3% from reduced Chinese goods imports and 0.6% from reduced tourist flows.
Why is the hit confined to just the first quarter? Because as Goldman explains, its baseline assumption is that the “aggressive response from the authorities in China and elsewhere will bring the rate of new infections down sharply by the end of Q1.” If so, global economic activity should normalize in subsequent quarters, with positive GDP growth effects of about 1½% in Q2 and ½% in Q3. For the year as a whole, Goldman concludes this would imply a modest hit to annual-average global GDP growth of 0.1-0.2pp but still allow for a slight reacceleration from 3.1% in 2019 to 3¼% in 2020.
What if Goldman’s baseline assumption is too optimistic? Well, in a more severe scenario, the bank’s Asia Economics team assumes that it would take until “sometime in the second quarter for the rate of new infections to peak.” If so, the predicted Q2 recovery would obviously be delayed and the hit to global GDP growth in 2020 would likely rise to about 0.3%, which while modest, would likely be the best case outcome for markets as it would prompt global central banks to engage in more aggressive easing, boosting risk assets around the globe. It also means that the reacceleration of full-year global growth that Goldman now expects to take place in 2020 would likely be delayed until 2021.
Of course, if the epidemic can’t be contained by the end Q2, then the world will have a far bigger problem than what GDP will be in the second half of the year, or any other time in the future for that matter.
With all that said, Hatzius is adamant that the coronavirus outbreak “does not change our baseline view that underlying global growth has bottomed and the next leg is likely to be higher, driven by a reduced drag from the trade war and the past easing in financial conditions.” For this reason, the Goldman economist thinks monetary policy easing in the largest advanced economies is probably behind us, and rate cuts in 2020 will be largely confined to a minority of EM central banks.
That said, with every passing day that China fails to contain the pandemic, the less confident Goldman is, with Hatzius saying that at least “the near-term risks to both our growth and monetary policy views are clearly on the downside until the outbreak is contained.”
As for Goldman’s forecast that there will be no more rate cuts, just remember that in December 2018 Goldman predicted 4 rate hikes in 2019. Instead the Fed went on to cut 3 times, and it didn’t need a global viral pandemic for justification.
Finally, we are curious why Goldman did not account for the crunch that global supply chains are already sustaining: while Chinese tourism and exports are certainly important economic pathways, we wonder what will happen to both vendors and customers of intermediate goods that rely on Chinese factory tolling for output and for downstream products. Or perhaps that will be the topic of a subsequent Goldman report looking at how badly corporate earnings will be hit as the GDP hit impacts the corporate top and bottom line. We eagerly await such a report not only from Goldman but the other banks who have been oddly mute on the topic. Perhaps they are just waiting for the wave of guidance cuts that will inevitably be unleashed in the coming weeks by S&P500 member companies.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 19:45 - There Is Something Very Strange In The Latest Chinese Official Coronavirus Numbers
There Is Something Very Strange In The Latest Chinese Official Coronavirus Numbers
Moments ago, China’s National Health Commission released the latest daily coronavirus epidemic numbers for February 5.
What they showed is that the total number of deaths jumped by the biggest daily total since the start of the epidemic, rising by 73 to 563, while the total number of cases on the mainland rose by 3,694, surprisingly a welcome modest decline from the 3,890 increase reported yesterday, which nonetheless brought the total Chinese cases to the highest yet, or 28,018.
This dynamic is shown in the chart below.
And while the slowdown in cases will likely be cheered by the market, we wanted to make two observations.
First, one can’t help but wonder if China is goalseeking either the number of deaths or the number of news cases, because every single day, the death rate has been steady at 2.1% +/- 0.1%. a surprisingly stable relationship.
However what is far more curious is that a secondary data series which is far less popular yet is just as important, the number of people under medical observations, was surprisingly low. In fact, one almost wonders if this number wasn’t fudged. What we mean is that after rising between 15,000 and 22,500 every single day since Jan 27, the number of people under observation rose to just 186,354, which is just 799 cases higher than the day before, which the China National Health Commission represented was 185,555.
Why is this bizarre? The following chart will make it clear. The highlighted box shows that paltry increase in today’s official numbers of people under observation. Needless to say, unless somehow China overnight stopped observing any new cases, this makes no sense.
And just so we are not accused of making up the numbers, here is a screengrab of the official, google translated, National Health Commission website as of Feb 4, 2020…
… And here is what it looked like today, today, Feb 5:
Incidentally, all the latest official daily coronavirus “statistics” can be pulled from the following page on the Commission’s website:
Which begs the question: did China suddenly succeed in conquering the epidemic, even as virtually every official admits there is no vaccine or drug that can cure the novel Coronavirus, or did someone in China once again get sloppy with the data release, as they did over the weekend via Tencent, and were caught by the Taiwan Times.
We hope to have an answer shortly.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 19:30 - The State Of The Union: An Annual Reminder Of Inevitable Default
The State Of The Union: An Annual Reminder Of Inevitable Default
Authored by Tho Bishop via The Mises Institute,
Last night’s State of the Union was particularly noteworthy for its showmanship. Scholarships were given away, medals were awarded, families reunited. At a time when national politics is bad theater, President Trump is clearly its most gifted star.
Trump also knows what sells. As a political figure, he’s motivated not by any consistent ideology but rather transactional legislation. Following the performance, an MSNBC pundit noted that the speech was a “microtargeted ad” to various demographics aimed at expanding his base before next year’s election.
Combined with his Super Bowl ads highlighting criminal justice reform, his focus on charter schools and honoring 100-year-old Tuskegee Airman are aimed at eroding away the Democrat’s 90% control of black voters. His cameo by Venezuela opposition leader Juan Guaidó was an appeal to Hispanic families who fled communist regimes – a perhaps a poke at Bernie Sanders. Paid family leave, a policy focus of his daughter, is intended to help him with suburban women.
What doesn’t sell? Fiscal responsibility.
The political equivalent of Crystal Pepsi, the Republican Party has given up its long-standing façade of budgetary restraint. As Donald Trump told donors earlier this year, “Who the hell cares about the budget?”
Of course some people do care, particularly those that understand the real costs of runaway spending. Unfortunately, politics isn’t about the economic literacy of the few, but the prevailing ideology of the masses. As Jeff Deist noted in 2016, the implicit ideology of the American population is much closer to Bernie Sanders than it is than Ludwig von Mises. As such, it should be no surprise that the policies of the country align closer to the “deficits don’t matter” vision of Modern Monetary Theorists than sober analysis of Austrians economists.
Of course, the popularity of political positions cannot shield a society from the consequences of their actions.
A recent CBO forecast now has America on track for a 98% debt-to-GDP ratio by the end of the decade, and that’s with a built in assumption that spending trends won’t significantly increase – a bet I wouldn’t feel comfortable making.
Left out of this measure, of course, are the true costs of the current American government – including unfunded liabilities built into to America’s entitlement system. For example, social security has a projected long-term deficit of over $13 trillion. Medicare adds another $37 trillion. Factor in federal pensions and veterans benefits and the number gets to $122 trillion.
Working in DC’s benefit is that American debt is still treated globally as one of the world’s most secure assets. Global demand for US Treasuries remains strong, and directly subsidizes our leviathan state, even as we simultaneously weaponize it against the rest of the world. While it’s impossible to predict exactly how long this status will continue, history informs us that it would be foolish to assume it will go on forever.
To his credit, Donald Trump seemed to instinctually understand this as a candidate. While running, he was remarkably honest when he talked about the need for American creditors to eventually take haircuts. The self-dubbed “king of debt,” he compared it to his own approach in business:
I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts. And I’ve done very well with debt. Now of course I was swashbuckling, and it did well for me, and it was good for me and all of that. And you know debt was always sort of interesting to me. Now we’re in a different situation with a country, but I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed you could make a deal. And if the economy was good it was good so therefore you can’t lose. It’s like you make a deal before you go into a poker game. And your odds are much better.
While his comments shocked (shocked!) the Very Serious pundits at the time, they reflected a refreshingly honest look at America’s future. As is often the case with Trump, he was attacked by the press for saying aloud the things you are supposed to keep quiet – like his reportedly saying “yeah, but I won’t be here,” when given a briefing on America’s growing debt crisis in 2017.
Of course, while any sort of default from the American government would be a major chaotic event for the global financial system, it’s something we should embrace and prepare for. Peter Klein has noted, “the US can never restructure or even repudiate the national debt — that US Treasuries must always be treated as a unique and magical “risk-free” investment — is wildly speculative at best, preposterous at worst.” Murray Rothbard advocated for the repudiation of the national debt, which he viewed as a “part of the American tradition.”
At the end of the day, however, whether one agrees with the idea of debt default is inconsequential. The political system today is inherently unprepared to tackle this issue. The incentive structures of democracy actively work against restraint and responsibility. So long as the economic profession is dominated by bad economists, and our education system is dedicated towards government indoctrination rather than economic literacy, we will continue to lack the political will to make the difficult choices necessary to get our fiscal house in order.
Luckily, America’s political disorder doesn’t mean American citizens have to unprepared. Awareness of the real problems we face doesn’t require taking the blackpill, it simply means being aware of practical steps we can take as individuals to best prepare for the future.
Just as we can arm ourselves to protect ourselves against inept law enforcement, we can safeguard our wealth outside of the American financial system to protect ourselves against inept fiscal management. Be it gold, silver, Bitcoin, or whatever, the future may very well belong to those who refuse to leave their destiny in the hands of politicians, bureaucrats, and central bankers.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 19:25 - Iran War Was "Closer Than You Thought", Trump Admits
Iran War Was “Closer Than You Thought”, Trump Admits
In what the administration has described as an “off-the-record lunch” on Tuesday, President Trump told television anchors hosted at the White House that war with Iran was “closer than you thought,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
It’s an annual tradition for the president to host television anchors from major networks just ahead of the State of the Union address, which was delivered last night.
The private luncheon marks the first time the president gave candid remarks confirming the US stood very close to entering another major war in the Middle East, which was on the heels of the Jan.3 assassination of IRGC Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani and subsequent Iranian ‘retaliatory strike’ on Jan.8 against a US base in Iraq.
During that time in early January the hashtag WWIII was trending on Twitter, along with countless social media viral memes warning the US stood on the brink of major war with Iran.
In apparent confirmation that the public’s fears were justified, the WSJ describes further of the president’s off-the-cuff comments:
The president’s comment on Iran came after one attendee asked him how close the U.S. came to going to war with Iran earlier this year, after the U.S. killed a top Iranian military commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Iran responded with a missile barrage on Iraqi bases housing U.S. and allied military forces. The Iranian strikes didn’t result in any U.S. deaths.
And further, the report notes:
Mr. Trump didn’t elaborate on why war with Iran was “closer than you thought,” the people said.
A reassuring list of trends for the start of #2020 #WWIII etc pic.twitter.com/IkJiGUrVYY
— Bel Trew (@Beltrew) January 3, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
During the lunch, the president spoke mostly about conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, who later in the evening received the Presidential Medal of Freedom award during the State of the Union address itself.
He also briefly addressed the controversy over the belatedly rising troop injuries from the Iranian ballistic missile attack on Ain al Asad Air Base, telling anchors he’d seen “worse injuries”.
This is consistent with his previously dismissing reports of scores of US troops suffering from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) as a result of the missiles’ impact and blasts as but a few mere “headaches”.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 19:05 - China Confirms 70 New Deaths, Raising Global Total To 562, As 10 More Cases Confirmed Aboard 'Diamond Princess'
- The Lies We Are Being Told About The Coronavirus
The Lies We Are Being Told About The Coronavirus
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
Lies are a powerful form of magic; they can mislead large groups of people into making terrible errors, as well as cause them to be blind to the obvious. Lies make people hurt themselves while thinking they are helping themselves. It is a truly dark and horrific act of sorcery.
As the world stands at the edge of a global pandemic event, the people who are immune to the effects of lies have an opportunity to take action should the virus continue to expand beyond the borders of China. We have a small window of time, perhaps a couple of months, in which we can prepare ourselves for the fallout and ensure we are as protected as we can be. This means taking precautions to prevent viral transmission, increasing the strength of our own immune systems, prepping for the loss of supply lines and freight shipments to retailers, organizing family, friends and neighbors for mutual aid and security, as well as preparing for the inevitable government attempts at martial law.
Of course, a person cannot or will not take any of these measures as long as they believe that the virus is not a threat, or they think that the pandemic will have little effect on their daily lives. I have recently seen a discomforting level of propaganda and disinformation agents invading the media and discussion boards related to this issue. Whenever I see such an intense disinformation campaign surrounding an event, this tells me a couple of things:
1) If they are trying to overtly downplay the seriousness of the event while lying about the facts involved, it tells me that the event is a legitimate threat and it will probably get worse as time passes.
2) If they all push the same false narrative and talking points it tells me that this is an organized effort paid for by a larger party with extensive resources.
If the narrative glosses over or hides recently revealed evidence by claiming that the event is “all hype”, then it is designed to create inaction in the public – It is designed to make us apathetic, which means there is a concerted conspiracy to harm us. It is not just an attempt to hide the guilt of the people involved in creating the crisis.
So what are some of the most insidious lies being spread right now on the virus threat? Lets go through a quick list of those I’ve identified so far:
Lie #1: Deaths Caused By The Coronavirus Are Nothing Compared To The Death Rate Of The Average Flu…
This lie seems to be the most common being used to plant seeds of apathy in the public consciousness right now. I have even heard people on the street regurgitate it verbatim as they try to convince themselves that all is well. But even using official numbers, which are likely false and greatly reduced, the argument is simply wrong on every level.
There is a big difference between “number of deaths” and the actual “death rate” of a virus. The flu infects tens of millions of people annually around the world with deaths in the US numbering usually under 10,000. In the US in the 2019-2020 season so far, the flu infected over 9 million people resulting in 4800 deaths; meaning the death rate of the flu is minor compared to the number of sick. Flu deaths are usually collated over the course of a year, yet people are already trying to compare death rates to the coronavirus, which has only been active for a few weeks.
Keep in mind also that the CDC has been called out for greatly inflating influenza death rates in order to push vaccine propaganda. They consistently attach flu death numbers with pneumonia deaths; which I would point is is the exact OPPOSITE of what the Chinese are doing with the coronavirus numbers.
The coronavirus has been active for about a month in China, it has a hibernation of around two weeks, and, China has been lying extensively about the number of deaths associated with the disease by labeling most deaths due to pneumonia. We truly have no idea what the potential death rate of this illness is. What we do know is that it behaves much like SARS, which had a death rate of around 11%. According to official numbers the coronavirus transmits faster and has already killed more people in a few weeks than SARS did in over a year.
The notion that the virus only kills the elderly is also incorrect. The two deaths now confirmed outside of China were both men in their 30’s and 40’s.
When considering the issue of viral death rate, we have to take into account the capacity of local medical facilities in handling patient load. If hospitals are only handling a few cases at a time, then the patients will get better overall treatment and less deaths will occur. But, if hospitals are overwhelmed with thousands of cases at a time, as is happening in China, then treatment quality will go down and many more people will die. A minimal death rate outside of China today does not mean a minimal death rate tomorrow should the virus spread beyond hospital capacity.
With the flu, people can usually treat themselves with ease at home; the coronavirus is obviously much more dangerous. No country in modern times has EVER quarantined over 50 million people in 16 cities because of the average flu. The comparison between the coronavirus and the flu is patently ridiculous. There is no comparison. The coronavirus is on another level entirely.
Lie #2: The Coronavirus Came From An Animal Market And The Claim It Is Engineered Is A “Conspiracy Theory”…
The phrase “conspiracy theory” is usually exploited as a way to dismiss facts and evidence without consideration on the basis that the official story is the only story that has any validity. In other words, the official story requires no justification because the authorities are infallible and always have our best interests at heart.
The problem is, governments and the mainstream media have been caught lying over and over again about issues far less important than a global pandemic, so I’m not sure why we should trust ANYTHING they say ever. There is considerable evidence that China has been lying incessantly about the number of sick and dead due to the coronavirus, including leaked accounts from medics and other people at ground zero in Wuhan. These people are now being silenced by the Chinese government. In fact, the Chinese government was suppressing coverage and information on the coronavirus from the very beginning of the contagion, which helped allow it to spread unchecked.
Now, social media companies are taking action to remove people who try to document the facts of the virus and its potential source in the name of “stopping fake news”. Anyone who questions the official narrative is not only a “conspiracy theorist” but also a “danger” to the public. This narrative is supported by US government officials:
“These lies can cause immediate and tangible harm to people, and the platforms must act to stop them from spreading,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said in a statement to The Hill. “It’s critical that Americans receive verified, trustworthy information about the coronavirus and heed the advice of our country’s public health officials as we learn more about its potential impact here at home…”
The facts are the facts, and if the facts suggest a conspiracy, then so be it. Only 20 miles away from the market in question stands the LARGEST Level 4 Biohazard Lab in Asia, which studies directly into the world’s deadliest pathogens including SARS and coronavirus. In 2017, experts warned that a virus could escape the labs in Wuhan because of lax containment standards. To put this in perspective, it would be like an Ebola outbreak striking the city of Atlanta and then blamed on a food market only 20 miles from the CDC. It looks suspicious…
Last year, Chinese researchers were dismissed from a Level 4 lab in Winnipeg, Canada without public explanation, but the same lab was exposed last year for sharing deadly virus samples with China, including Ebola and henipavirus. One of the Chinese researchers work focus was the SARS virus. Media and government attention in Canada at the time of the scandal was on concerns that the lab in Winnipeg was supplying viral samples that would be used in China’s biowarfare programs.
According to a paper published by virologists in India, the coronavirus genetic code also contains proteins that are exactly like those found in HIV. Interestingly, coronavirus patients have been shown to respond positively to drugs that are meant to treat HIV and AIDS carriers. Through official pressure the paper has now been retracted and the authors have said they will “revise it”. But, the whole point of peer review is for the data to be examined by others in the field and then proven or disproven. If the data can be reproduced, then it needs to be taken seriously.
This is not what the CDC and other official institutions on disease study want. They seem intent on dismissing any information outright that suggests the coronavirus might have been made in a lab rather than in nature.
If true, the chances of coronavirus containing protein combinations identical to HIV in nature are astronomical, meaning, the virus was engineered. If the virus is proven to be engineered, then this makes future narratives and propaganda harder to implement. For example, it will be much harder to blame the pandemic on “global warming” if the virus was created by a bunch of guys in lab coats rather than in nature.
To repeat the facts, Wuhan is a hub for China’s largest biohazard labs and these labs are suspected by biological warfare experts of being involved in bioweapons testing. Until there is more independent examination of the virus (the original strain before mutation), no one knows for certain what the source is.
The mainstream media has been very aggressive in denying any links to bioweaponry, claiming that there “is no evidence” linking Wuhan’s labs to the virus; yet, there is FAR MORE evidence of the involvement of the biohazard labs than there is evidence proving that the virus originated an animal market. They have simply decided that the animal market story is the tale they prefer, and so it has become the official story.
Lie #3: The Virus Won’t Have Any Effect On America
The general thrust of the mainstream view of the coronavirus has been to assert that the US will not be affected and that concerns are “overblown”. The UN’s World Health Organization continues to refuse to take the event very seriously, and even Larry Kudlow, Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council, claims the damage to the US economy will be ‘minimal’.
Now, firstly I have to say I would take the economic analysis of a long time cocaine addict with a grain of salt. This is the same guy who was wildly incorrect in all his calls on the housing bubble in 2005-2006, and yet he is now advising the White House on financial crisis events? But lets set the incompetence of Kudlow aside for a moment and consider that perhaps he is just reading from a script prepared for him by others. Certainly, there are a lot of people out there that would like to keep the public ignorant of the depth of the situation, and they will give all sorts of half-assed rationales as to why they lie.
For the Chinese authorities, the pandemic is an undeniable fact of life, but they will say their economy and global image required the truth to be “tempered” to prevent civil unrest and to stop investors pulling from their money out of Chinese markets en masse.
For US authorities who waited far too long to start shutting down flights from China carrying multiple infected, the claim will be that they had to lie to prevent general panic and market panic.
For the UN’s World Health Organization that lied about China “containment” and actually downplayed the danger of travel to China for a time while the virus was raging and human-to-human transmission was confirmed, I see no excuse really. Their behavior, and the behavior of the US and Chinese governments makes me suspect that they WANT the pandemic to spread.
As I write this the 11th confirmed case of coronavirus has been identified in the US with many more suspected cases still under observation. Obviously, the virus is here already, but the issue of how much it will affect Americans is being diminished or buried in an endless stream of propaganda.
Given enough time, a viral outbreak that spreads as fast as the coronavirus with a death rate of 5% or more is going to cause negative effects in every facet of the US economy. But in our current window of the progression of the pandemic, I think it’s important to point out that even if the death rate is low in the US, there is no escaping the economic consequences attached to this event.
The US economy is interdependent with multiple nations, and is tightly connected to China. The greatest danger of globalism in terms of economics is that it forces national economies into losing the redundancies that protect them from systemic collapse. When one major economy goes down, it brings down all other economies with it.
Not only that, but the US financial structure is precariously unstable anyway, with record levels of national debt, consumer debt and corporate debt, not to mention steep declines in manufacturing and demand. The US sits atop one of the most massive economic bubbles of all time – The Everything Bubble, created by the Federal Reserve over ten years of stimulus measures, barely keeping the system alive in a state of zombification.
The bubble was always going to collapse. In fact, recent events in Fed repo markets suggest it was already collapsing. The coronavirus outbreak is a perfect cover event for this implosion. To understand why a collapse event might be preferred by a certain minority of people within the elitist establishment, read my last article ‘How Viral Pandemic Benefits The Globalist Agenda’.
As I have argued for the past couple of years, all that is needed to bring down the US economy is one major trigger event. The idea that a global pandemic would not damage the American system already teetering on the edge of the abyss is simply absurd. This event has the capacity to cause crisis around the world, not just in China.
Lie #4: The Virus Is Contained
You are going to hear this lie often in the next month or two. I’ve heard it several times already from Chinese and US authorities in the past few weeks, and clearly their definition of the word “contained” must be different from mine.
China’s official sickness count and death toll rises exponentially by the day, and this is not accounting for the number of sick and dead they are hiding. Over 50 million people are now in forced quarantine and martial law measures have been implemented. Hong Kong’s hopes of containment have been dashed and officials now expect the outbreak to grow worse in the region.
Japan just announced that a man carrying the virus boarded a cruise liner and then departed, infecting at least ten people in the process and forcing the ship into quarantine for the next two weeks.
A woman in Santa Clara, California carrying the virus came back from China and had been in the US for around 10 DAYS before the illness was identified. Meaning, every single person she came in contact with in that time is now a potential carrier, and for the next two weeks they won’t know they are contagious. These are just a few examples of why it is foolish to write off this situation as “contained”; you cannot contain what you cannot identify.
The disinformation campaign seems designed to hide the true source of the virus, but also to keep the masses lethargic and inactive. We are meant to sit and wait while the virus and the potential economic catastrophe runs us over. Do not fall for the con; prepare accordingly, and never accept what lying governments and mainstream media outlets tell you as the whole truth. It is better to take precautions you might not need than to be found very stupid and desperate down the road because the “experts” told you it was all hype.
* * *
If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch. Learn more about it HERE.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/05/2020 – 18:45
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...