- A Conspiracy Theorist Confesses
A Conspiracy Theorist Confesses
Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/06/2020 – 00:00Authored by Iain Davis via Off-Guardian.org,
I am what the general population, politicians and the mainstream media (MSM) would call a conspiracy theorist. While I don’t agree with their definition of the term, there’s not much point in me denying it. It is applied to me, and millions like me, whether we like it or not.
For those who deem conspiracy theorists to be some sort of threat to society, we are the social and political malcontents who lack reason and hate our democratic way of life. We are trolls, bots and disinformation agents on social media, probably employed by the Russians, the Chinese or Iranians.
We are supposedly hellbent on sewing the seeds of discontent and can be found protesting against every government policy and decision. Alternatively, we are arrogant fools, both anti-science and evidence averse, who trot out crazy theories based upon little knowledge and no evidence. Apparently this is a very dangerous thing.
Thus we come to the glaring contradiction at the heart of the concept of the loony conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theorists are both imbeciles, who don’t have any proof to back up anything they say, while simultaneously being dangerous subversives who threaten to destabilise democracy and foment chaos.
Which is it? It can’t be both. Unless society is so fragile it cannot withstand the opinions of idiots.
So where does the idea that fools present a threat to “our way of life,” come from? What is it that the conspiracy theorists say that is so dangerous? Why do their opinions seemingly need to be censored? What are governments so worried about?
WHAT IS A CONSPIRACY THEORY?
Some definitions are required here. From the Cambridge online English dictionary we have:
Misinformation: [noun] wrong information, or the fact that people are misinformed.
Disinformation: [noun] false information spread in order to deceive people.
Fake News: [noun] false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke.
Conspiracy: [noun’] the activity of secretly planning with other people to do something bad or illegal.
Theory: [noun] a formal statement of the rules on which a subject of study is based or of ideas that are suggested to explain a fact or event.
Conspiracy Theory: [noun] a belief that an event or situation is the result of a secret plan made by powerful people
It is notable that Cambridge University Press have introduced the concept of “secret” into their definition. By describing something as secret you are suggesting that it is impossible to know what it is. This added notion of secrecy is not commonly found in other dictionaries.
Nor is it present in the legal definition of conspiracy. Blacks Law Dictionary defines conspiracy as:
Conspiracy: In criminal law. A combination or confederacy between two or more persons formed for the purpose of committing, by their joint efforts, some unlawful or criminal act.
Obviously conspirators would like to keep their plans hidden. But that doesn’t mean they always remain so. If all conspiracies were “secrets” nobody would ever discover any of them.
Known conspiracies, such as Operation Gladio, Iran Contra, the Lavon Affair, the 2001 anthrax letter hoax and so on, would not have been exposed had people not highlighted the evidence which proved their existence.
The notion of the “secret conspiracy” is not one most people called conspiracy theorists would recognise. Often the whole point of our argument is that the conspiracies can be quite plainly evidenced. Most of that evidence is in the public domain and freely available.
More often conspiracy theorists are concerned with the denial or obfuscation of the evidence. It is not that the evidence doesn’t exist, rather that it either isn’t reported at all or is hidden by labelling those who do report it conspiracy theorists.
We can define “conspiracy theory” simply to mean: the reporting of evidence indicating a plan between two or more people to commit an illegal or nefarious act.
We can add that a conspiracy theory is an opinion or an argument. The merit of which is solely defined by the strength or weakness of the evidence.
However, if you read Wikipedia a very different definition is suggested. Suddenly conspiracy theory means an attempt to ignore other more plausible explanations. It is a theory based upon prejudice or insufficient evidence, it resists falsification and suffers from circular reasoning. It has left the realms of logical deduction and become a matter of faith.
This rationale is some distance away from the dictionary and legal definitions. It relies heavily upon opinion and is highly subjective. It is a pejorative definition which claims to be based in science, though the scientific evidence is feeble to non existent.
This depiction of the delusional conspiracy theorist, as described by Wikipedia, is the popularly accepted meaning. Perhaps we can agree, the narrative we are given about alleged conspiracy theorists broadly runs like this:
Conspiracy theorists forward arguments that are unfounded. These are based upon limited knowledge and lack substantiating evidence. Most conspiracy theorists are simply wrong and unwittingly spread misinformation. However, prominent conspiracy theorists spread disinformation and have used their large followings on the Internet to create a dangerous phenomenon called ‘fake news.’
Many of those with the largest followings are agents for foreign powers. They use a global network of trolls and bots to advance their dangerous political agenda. This is designed to undermine our democratic way of life and valued political institutions. Therefore all conspiracy theory is anti-democratic and must be stopped.
It is difficult to understand how democracies, which supposedly value freedom of thought, speech and expression, can be threatened by diversity of opinion. Yet it appears many people are willing to ignore this contradiction and support government attempts to censor information and silence the voices of those it labels conspiracy theorist. Which is genuinely anti-democratic.
Consequently it has become relatively straightforward for politicians and the media to refute evidence and undermine arguments. As long as they can get the label of conspiracy theory or theorist to stick, most people will discount their arguments without ever looking at the evidence.
The label of conspiracy theorist is an umbrella term for a huge array of ideas and beliefs. Some are more plausible than others. However, by calling everyone who challenges accepted norms a “conspiracy theorist” it is possible to avoid addressing the evidence some offer by exploiting guilt by association.
For example, many people labelled as conspiracy theorists, myself included, believe even the most senior elected politicians are relatively low down the pecking order when it comes to decision making. We suggest powerful global corporations, globalist think tanks and international financial institutions often have far more control over policy development than politicians. We can cite academic research to back up this identification of “Biased Pluralism.”
We do not believe the Earth is flat or the Queen is a lizard. However, because we believe the former, politicians, mainstream academia and the media insist that we must also believe the latter.
Psychology is often cited as evidence to prove conspiracy theorists are deranged, or at least emotionally disturbed in some way. Having looked at some of this claimed science I found it to be rather silly and anti-scientific. But that is just my opinion.
However, unlike many of the psychologists who earn a living by writing junk science, I do not think they should be censored nor stopped from expressing their unscientific opinions. However, governments across the world are seemingly desperate to exploit the psychologist’s ‘work’ to justify the silencing of the conspiracy theorists.
This desire to silence people who ask the wrong questions, by labelling all as conspiracy theorists, has been a common theme from our elected political leaders during the first two decades of the 21st century. But where did this idea come from?
THE HISTORY OF THE CONSPIRACY THEORIST LABEL
Conspiracy theory is nothing new. Nearly every single significant world event had at least one contemporary conspiracy theory attached to it. These alternative interpretations of events, which lie outside the accepted or official narratives, are found throughout history.
In 117 CE, the Roman Emperor Trajan died only two days after adopting his successor Hadrian. All his symptoms indicated a stroke brought on by cardio vascular disease.
Yet by the 4th century, in the questionable historical text Historia Augusta, a number of conspiracy theories surrounding Trajan’s death had emerged. These included claims that Trajan had been poisoned by Hadrian, the praetorian prefect Attianus and Trajan’s wife, Plotina.
While we would call this a conspiracy theory today, the term was not commonly used until the late 1960’s. The earliest written reference to something approaching the modern concept of conspiracy theory appeared in the 1870’s in the Journal of Mental Science vol 16.
“The theory of Dr Sankey as to the manner in which these injuries to the chest occurred in asylums deserved our careful attention. It was at least more plausible that the conspiracy theory of Mr Charles Beade”
This is the first time we see an association made between “conspiracy theory” and implausibility. Throughout most of the 19th and 20th century, if used at all, it usually denoted little more than a rationale to expose a criminal plot or malevolent act by a group.
After the Second World War colloquial use of “conspiracy theory” was rare. However, academics were beginning to lay the foundations for the interpretation which has produced the label we are familiar with today.
The burgeoning idea was that the large numbers of people who questioned official accounts of events, or orthodox historical interpretations, were all delusional to some degree. Questioning authority, and certainly alleging that authority was responsible for criminal acts, was deemed to be an aberration of the mind.
Karl Popper
In 1945 The philosopher Karl Popper alluded to this in his political work The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper was essentially criticising historicism. He stated that historical events were vulnerable to misinterpretation by those who were predisposed to see a conspiracy behind them.
He argued this was because historians suffered from cognitive dissonance (the uncomfortable psychological sensation of holding two opposing views simultaneously.) They could not accept that tumultuous events could just happen through the combination of error and unrelated circumstances.
In Popper’s view, these historians were too quick to reject the possibility of random, chaotic events influencing history, preferring unsubstantiated conspiratorial explanations. Usually because they made better stories, thereby garnering more attention for their work.
Popper identified what he called the conspiracy theory of society. This reflected Popper’s belief that social sciences should concern themselves with the study of the unintended consequences of intentional human behaviour. Speaking of the conspiracy theory perspective, he wrote:
It is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.”
Popper also believed that increasing secularism had led people to ascribe power to secretive groups rather than the gods:
The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups – sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from – such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.”
Popper’s theory illustrates the fundamental difference between those labelled conspiracy theorists and those who, on the whole, defend the official narrative and the establishment. For conspiracy theorists the evidence shows that powerful forces have frequently conspired to shape events, control the flow of information and manipulate society. The deliberate engineering of society, suggested by the conspiracy theorists, is rejected by their opponents and critics.
For them the conspiratorial view has some minor, limited merit, but the suggested scale and prevalence of these plots is grossly exaggerated. They see nearly all world events as the result of the unintentional collision between disparate forces and the random influence of fate.
In general, they consider the powerful incapable of malice. Where disastrous national and global events have clearly been caused by the decisions of governments, influential groups and immensely wealthy individuals, these are invariably seen as mistakes.
Any suggestion that the power hierarchy’s destructive decisions may have achieved their intended objectives receives blanket rejection. Even asking the question is considered “unthinkable.”
For many people called conspiracy theorists this is a hopelessly naive world view. History is full of examples of the powerful using their influence to further their own interests at others expense. Often costing people their lives.
For their opponents, like Popper, to reject this possibility outright, demonstrates their cognitive dissonance. They seem unable even to contemplate the possibility that the political and economic power structures they believe in could ever deliberately harm anyone. They have faith in authority and it is not shared by people they label conspiracy theorists.
Following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 alternative explanations proliferated, not least of all due to the apparent implausibility of the official account. Many U.S. citizens were concerned that elements within their own government had effectively staged a coup. Others, such as the prominent American historian Richard Hoftsadter, were more concerned that people doubted their government.
Richard Hofstadter
Building on the work of Popper, partly as a critique of McCarthyism but also in response to the Republican nomination loss of Nelson A. Rockefeller, American historian Richard Hofstadter suggested that people’s inability to believe what they are told by government was not based upon their grasp of the evidence. Rather it was rooted in psychological need.
He claimed much of this stemmed from their lack of education (knowledge), political disenfranchisement and an unjustified sense of self importance. He also suggested these dangerous opinions threatened to pollute the body politic.
Like Popper, Hofstadter did not identify conspiracy theorists directly. But he did formulate the narrative underpinning the modern, widely accepted, definition. He wrote:
I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind…It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant
[…]
Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.”….he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions.
Going to great lengths to focus on the “paranoid’s” tendency to highlight the evidence, as if that were a failing, like most critics of so-called conspiracy theorists, Hofstadter chose neither to address nor even mention what that evidence was. He merely asserted that it was unbelievable. The reader just had to take his word for it.
The Warren Commission Report into the JFK assassination drew considerable criticism. The finding that Oswald acted alone contradicted numerous eye witness accounts, film, autopsy and ballistic evidence.
Four of the seven commissioners harshly criticised the report issued in their name. Widely seen as quite ridiculous, in the absence of any sensible official account of the assassination, numerous explanatory theories inevitably sprang up.
In response to the mounting criticism, in 1967 the CIA sent an internal dispatch to all field offices called Document 1035-960: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report.
Revealed by a New York Times Freedom of Information Request in 1976, the dispatch is the first written record we have of the combination of Popper’s “conspiracy theory of society” with Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” militant. It defined the modern concept of the conspiracy theorist.
The document states:
Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists.”
It can be considered as the origin of the weaponised term “conspiracy theory.” It recommends a set of techniques to be used to discredit all critics of the Warren Commission Report. Once you are familiar with them, it is obvious that these strategies are commonly deployed today to dismiss all who question official statements as “conspiracy theorists.” We can paraphrase these as follows:
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Deny any new evidence offered and cite only official reports stating ‘no new evidence has emerged.’
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Dismiss contradictory eyewitness statements and focus upon the existing, primary, official evidence such as ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence.
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Do not initiate any discussion of the evidence and suggest that large scale conspiracies are impossible to cover up in an open and free democracy.
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Accuse the conspiracy theorists of having an intellectual superiority complex.
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Suggest that theorists refuse to acknowledge their own errors.
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Refute any suggestion of witness assassinations by pointing out they were all deaths by natural causes.
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Question the quality of conspiracy research and point out that official sources are better.
The report recommended making good use of “friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)” and to “employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics.”
The CIA advocated using mainstream media feature articles to discredit people labelled conspiracy theorists.
While the use of these methods has been refined over the years, the essential process of labelling someone a conspiracy theorist, while studiously avoiding any discussion of the evidence they highlight, is extremely common in the mainstream media today. We only need look at the reports about academics who questioned the government’s narrative about COVID19 to see the techniques in operation.
The drive to convince the public to use only “official sources” for information has seen the rise of the fact checker.
These organisations, invariably with the support of government and corporate funding, are offered as the reliable sources which provide real facts. The facts they provide are frequently wrong and the fact checking industry has settled legal claims from those who challenged their disinformation.
People have been directed by the mainstream media to abandon all critical thinking. They just need to go to their government-approved fact-checker in order be told the truth.
Providing the public believe the people labelled conspiracy theorists are crazy, ill informed or agents for a foreign powers, the mainstream media, politicians and other commentators can undermine any and all evidence they present. In keeping with the CIA’s initial recommendations, it is extremely unlikely that the evidence will ever be openly discussed but, if it is, it can be written off as “conspiracy theory.”
However, it isn’t just the mainstream media who use the conspiracy theorist label to avoid discussing evidence. Politicians, speaking on the worlds biggest political stage, have seized the opportunity to deploy the CIA’s strategy.
THREE SPEECHES ONE AGENDA
Even for Prime Ministers and Presidents, addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations is a big deal. These tend to be big thematic speeches as the leader impresses their vision upon the gathered dignitaries and global media.
Yet, despite the fact that conspiracy theorists are supposed to be idiots who don’t know the time of day, global “leaders” have repeatedly used this auspicious occasion to single them out as one of the greatest threats to global security.
In November 2001 George W. Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly with the following words:
We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty. To inflame ethnic hatred is to advance the cause of terror.”
Even if you accept the official account of 9/11, and there are numerous reasons why you wouldn’t, how does questioning it suggest that you support terrorism or mark you out as a racist?
The suggestion appears absurd but it does illustrate that the U.S. president wanted both to silence all criticism of the government account and link those questioning it to extremism and even terrorism.
This theme was reiterated by the UK Prime Minister David Cameron in his 2014 address. He said:
To defeat ISIL – and organisations like it we must defeat this ideology in all its forms…..it is clear that many of them were initially influenced by preachers who claim not to encourage violence, but whose world view can be used as a justification for it. We know this world view. The peddling of lies: that 9/11 was a Jewish plot or that the 7/7 London attacks were staged […] We must be clear: to defeat the ideology of extremism we need to deal with all forms of extremism – not just violent extremism. We must work together to take down illegal online material […] we must stop the so called non-violent extremists from inciting hatred and intolerance.
This season we will mostly be wearing anti-fear glasses
Like Bush before him, Cameron was at pains to identify what he called non violent extremists (commonly called conspiracy theorists). According to him, all who question government accounts of major geopolitical events are, once again, tantamount to terrorists.
Calling for online censorship to stop any questions ever being asked, it is this authoritarian need to avoid addressing evidence that led his successor, Prime Minister Theresa May, to propose wide-sweeping censorship of the Internet.
At the time of writing, the UK is among the many nations still in so called “lockdown” following the outbreak of COVID19. When UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the U.N General Assembly in September 2019 he delivered a speech which seemed weirdly out of context. With Brexit and possible conflict with Iran high on the agenda his address, which barely touched on those issues, was received with considerable bewilderment.
Six months later his predictive powers appear to be remarkable. It transpires that Johnson’s comments were extremely relevant. Just six months too early.
There are today people today who are actually still anti-science […] A whole movement called the anti-Vaxxers, who refuse to acknowledge the evidence that vaccinations have eradicated smallpox […] And who by their prejudices are actually endangering the very children they want to protect […] I am profoundly optimistic about the ability of new technology to serve as a liberator and remake the world wondrously and benignly […] Together, we can vanquish killer diseases.”
Despite the wealth of scientific evidence which justifies scepticism about some vaccines, anti-vaxxer (a variant of conspiracy theorist), is another label used to convince people not to consider evidence. The assertion is that those who question vaccines all fundamentally reject the concept of artificially inducing an immune response against a disease.
This isn’t true but how would you know? The anti-vaxxer label alone is sufficient to convince most to turn away.
Johnson’s speech rambled across so many seemingly irrelevant subjects there is little reason to suspect any COVID 19 foreknowledge. But given the global pandemic that would occur just a few months later, it was certainly prescient. Johnson was sufficiently concerned about the supposedly baseless questions of so called conspiracy theorists (or anti-vaxxers) to allege they killed children. A ludicrous suggestion the mainstream media strongly promoted.
It doesn’t matter that academic research has proven that the official account of 9/11 cannot possibly be true; it makes no difference that Mossad agents admitted that they had gone to New York on the morning of 9/11 to “document the event;” studies showing that approximately 90% of the total 20th Century disease reduction in the U.S. occurred prior to the widespread use of vaccines are irrelevant.
None of these facts need to be known by anyone and governments are going to censor all who try to tell others about them. All questions that reference them are crazy conspiracy theories. They are both stupid questions and a huge threat to both national security and the safety of the little children.
One of the recurring themes the people labelled conspiracy theorists discuss is that policy is made behind the closed doors of corporate boardrooms and policy think tanks. It doesn’t matter who you elect or what party you choose to rule over you, they are only capable of tinkering at the edges of the policy platform.
The policy agenda is set at a globalist level. So the fact that, over two decades, one U.S president and two British Prime Minsters were delivering essentially the same message doesn’t surprise the conspiracy theorists.
As we move toward a world where certain ideas are forbidden and only officially approved questions can be asked, where governments and corporations have a monopoly on the truth and everything else is a conspiracy theory, only one thing really matters. The evidence.
Hofstadter’s believed that his paranoid style militants constant citation of evidence was merely an attempt to “protect his cherished convictions.” This could be true, but the only way to find out is to look at that evidence. The label of the conspiracy theorist has been deliberately created in order to convince you not to look at it.
Regardless of whether or not you think someone’s opinion is a conspiracy theory, you owe it to yourself and your children to consider the evidence they cite. Perhaps you will reject it. There’s nothing wrong with that.
But to reject it, without knowing what it is, really is crazy. Your only other option is to unquestioningly accept whatever you are told by the government, globalist think tanks, multinational corporations and their mainstream media partners.
If you choose to believe that everyone who claims to have identified the malfeasance of officials, the crimes of government or the corruption of powerful global institutions, are all conspiracy theorists, then you have accepted that the establishment is beyond reproach.
If you also agree the same established hierarchy can not only determine what you can or cannot know, but can also set all the policies and legislation which dictates your behaviour and defines the limits of your freedom, you have elected to be a slave and don’t value democracy in the slightest.
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- Engineering The Perfect Human? Biotech Examines Rare DNA In Himalayan People
Engineering The Perfect Human? Biotech Examines Rare DNA In Himalayan People
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 23:40Variant Bio has spent the last several years scouring the world for genetic outliers in human beings. It found a small group of “outlier humans” with special variations in their DNA that could affect disease risk and eventually be used to develop medicines to improve human life.
Founded in New York, the 10-person startup’s lead geneticist Stephane Castel is focusing on the DNA of Sherpa people living at high altitudes in Nepal and Himalayas. Their unique genetic characteristics allow them to live healthy lives with blood oxygen levels far below what most humans need. Most people in high altitudes suffer from hypoxia, which is the absence of enough oxygen in the tissues to sustain bodily functions.
“They [Sherpa people] don’t suffer any ill health effects,” Castel told Bloomberg. “It’s incredible.”
Sherpa village Castel’s team is betting on the sequencing of Sherpa DNA, which could lead to discoveries of new superior traits that would aid in the development of novel medicines and therapies to improve metabolism, eyesight, and immune response.
It’s up to Variant’s software and scientific analysis to find breakthrough genetic coding in Sherpa DNA, Castel said it could take several years to develop drugs and therapies based on the results.
Sherpa man Variant Bio recently received a capital infusion from venture firm Lux Capital for $16 million to pursue the research.
Josh Wolfe, the co-founder of Lux Capital, said:
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if some secrets of human health were possessed by these small groups of people [Sherpa people], and they could ultimately benefit the rest of the world?,” Wolfe said.
Variant’s new CEO, Andrew Farnum, previously managed the $2 billion investment arm of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that concentrated on global health and infectious diseases.
“There are huge advantages here for drug discovery,” Farnum said while referring to Variant’s research.
“People will see how seriously we take this and how we conduct our projects, and other populations will want to work with us,” he said.
Variant has held talks with Sherpa village leaders and Nepal’s research council to negotiate deals for DNA extraction with locals.
Keolu Fox, a genome scientist and an assistant professor at the University of California at San Diego, said Variant must compensate Sherpa people for their DNA:
“If the people don’t get a cut, this is colonial,” Fox said. “It’s extractive capitalism.”
Variant has taken the approach that human genetics has the power to transform drug development. Perhaps, the startup is on to something by examining superior genes possed by Sherpa people.
Could this company be in the early innings of engineering perfect humans?
- "Unreported Truths" – This Is The COVID-19 Book That Amazon 'Quarantined'
"Unreported Truths" – This Is The COVID-19 Book That Amazon 'Quarantined'
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 23:20Via RealClearInvestigations.com,
Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has developed a wide following on Twitter for detailed posts that challenge some mainstream reporting and government declarations about COVID-19.
THEY CENSORED IT! It is based entirely on published government data and scientific papers. It doesn’t say coronavirus isn’t real or doesn’t kill people (in fact, the worst-case death toll is likely to be striking to people). And Amazon won’t run it.
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) June 4, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Read the full thread here.
Thursday morning he tweeted that Amazon had refused to offer for sale his self-published book, “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns Part 1: Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates.”
Among those responding in outrage over what they called blatant censorship were SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (“This is insane @JeffBezos”) and journalist Glenn Greenwald. And late Thursday Berenson reported that Amazon had backed off and is now offering the book for sale on Kindle.
Before Amazon reversed itself (calling its earlier move an “error,” according to Fox News), RealClearInvestigations asked the award-winning novelist to elaborate on his experience. Here’s his response, followed by an excerpt from the book:
By Alex Berenson
June 4, 2020The booklet was the first in a series of coronavirus pamphlets I plan to put out covering various aspects of the crisis. Readers of my Twitter feed encouraged me to compile information in a more comprehensive and easier-to-read format, and when I polled people on Twitter to ask if they would be willing to pay a nominal fee for such a pamphlet, the response was strong.
Originally I only planned to write one, but I had so much information I realized that the booklet would be an awkward length – longer than a magazine article but shorter than a book. Also, doing so would take too long, and I wanted to put it out quickly. So I decided to split the booklet into pieces. Part 1 included an introduction and a discussion of death coding, death counts, and who is really dying from COVID, as well as a worst-case estimate of deaths with no mitigation efforts.
It is about 6,500 words, and I planned to sell it for $2.99 as an ebook or $5.99 for a paperback. It is called “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1, Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates.”
I created covers for both and uploaded the book. I had published Kindle Singles (Amazon’s curated program for short Kindle pieces, which now focuses more on fiction from established writers), so I was relatively familiar with the drill. I briefly considered censorship but assumed I wouldn’t have a problem because of my background, because anyone who reads the booklet will realize it is impeccably sourced, nary a conspiracy theory to be found, and frankly because Amazon shouldn’t be censoring anything that doesn’t explicitly help people commit criminal behavior. (Books intended to help adults groom children for sexual relationships, for example, should be off-limits – though about 10 years ago Amazon did not agree and only backed down from selling a how-to guide for pedophiles in the face of public outrage.)
I didn’t hear anything until this morning, when I found the note I posted to Twitter in my inbox (shown below).
Note that it does not offer any route to appeal. I have no idea if the decision was made by a person, an automated system, or a combination (i.e. the system flags anything with COVID-19 or coronavirus in the title and then a person decides on the content). I am considering my options, including making the booklet available on my Website and asking people to pay on an honor system, but that will not solve the problem of Amazon’s censorship. Amazon dominates both the electronic and physical book markets, and if it denies its readers a chance to see my work, I will lose the chance to reach the people who most need to learn the truth – those who don’t already know it.
Here are the first 1,000 words of Chapter 1:
Maybe the most important questions of all:
How lethal is SARS-COV-2?
Whom does it kill?
Are the death counts accurate – and, if not, are they over- or understated?
Estimates for the lethality of the coronavirus have varied widely since January. Early Chinese data suggested the virus might have an “infection fatality rate” as high as 1.4 – 2 percent.
A death rate in that range could mean the coronavirus might kill more than 6 million Americans, although even under the worst-case scenarios some people would not be exposed, and others might have natural immunity that would prevent them from being infected at all.
As we have learned more about the virus, estimates of its lethality have fallen. Calculating fatality rates is complex, because despite all of our testing for COVID, we still don’t know how many people have been infected.
Some people who are infected may have no or mild symptoms. Even those with more severe symptoms may resist going to the hospital, then recover on their own. We have a clear view of the top of the iceberg – the serious infections that require hospitalization – but at least in the early stages of the epidemic we have to guess at the mild, hidden infections.
But to calculate the true fatality rate, we need to know the true infection rate. If 10,000 people die out of 100,000 infections, that means the virus kills 10 percent of all the people it infects – making it very, very dangerous. But if 10,000 people die from 10 million infections, the death rate is actually 0.1 percent – similar to the flu.
Unfortunately, figuring out the real infection rate is very difficult. Probably the best way is through antibody tests, which measure how many people have already been infected and recovered – even if they never were hospitalized or even had symptoms. Studies in which many people in a city, state, or even country are tested at random to see if they are currently infected can also help. Believe it or not, so can tests of municipal sewage. (I’ll say more about all this later, in the section on transmission rates and lockdowns.)
For now, the crucial point is this: randomized antibody tests from all over the world have repeatedly shown many more people have been infected with coronavirus than is revealed by tests for active infection. Many people who are infected with SARS-COV-2 don’t even know it.
So the hidden part of the iceberg is huge. And in turn, scientists have repeatedly reduced their estimates for how dangerous the coronavirus might be.
The most important estimate came on May 20, when the Centers for Disease Control reported its best estimate was that the virus would kill 0.26 percent of people it infected, or about 1 in 400 people. (The virus would kill 0.4 percent of those who developed symptoms. But about one out of three people would have no symptoms at all, the CDC said.) (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html#box.)
Similarly, a German study in April reported a fatality rate of 0.37 percent (https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tests-show-15-of-people-are-now-immune-to-covid-19-in-one-town-in-germany/). A large study in April in Los Angeles predicted a death rate in the range of 0.15 to 0.3 percent.
Some estimates have been even lower. Others have been somewhat higher – especially in regions that experienced periods of severe stress on their health care systems. In New York City, for example, the death rates appear somewhat higher, possibly above 0.5 percent – though New York may be an outlier, both because it has counted deaths aggressively (more on this later) and because its hospitals seem to have used ventilators particularly aggressively.
Thus the CDC’s estimate for deaths is probably the best place to begin. Using that figure along with several other papers and studies suggests the coronavirus has an infection fatality rate in the range of 0.15 percent to 0.4 percent.
In other words, SARS-COV-2 likely kills between 1 in 250 and 1 in 650 of the people whom it infects. Again, though, not everyone who is exposed will become infected. Some people do not contract the virus, perhaps because their T-cells – which help the immune system destroy invading viruses and bacteria – have already been primed by exposure to other coronaviruses. [Several other coronaviruses exist; the most common versions usually cause minor colds in the people they infect.] An early May paper in the journal Cell suggests that as many as 60 percent of people may have some preexisting immune response, though not all will necessarily be immune. (https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30610-3.pdf).
The experience of outbreaks on large ships such as aircraft carriers and cruise liners also show that some people do not become infected. The best estimates are that the virus probably can infect somewhere between 50 to 70 percent of people. For example, on one French aircraft carrier, 60 percent of sailors were infected (none died and only two out of 1,074 infected sailors required intensive care). https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2020/05/covid-19-aboard-french-aircraft-carrier-98-of-the-crew-now-cured/
Thus – in a worst-case scenario – if we took no steps to mitigate its spread or protect vulnerable people, a completely unchecked coronavirus might kill between 0.075 and 0.28 percent of the United States population – between 1 in 360 and 1 in 1,300 Americans.
This is higher than the seasonal flu in most years. Influenza is usually said to have a fatality rate among symptomatic cases of 1 in 1,000 and an overall fatality rate of around 1 in 2,000. However, influenza mutates rapidly, and its dangerousness varies year by year. The coronavirus appears far less dangerous than the Spanish flu a century ago, which was commonly said to kill 1 in 50 of the people it infected.
It appears more comparable in terms of overall mortality to the influenza epidemics of 1957 and 1968, or the British flu epidemics of the late 1990s. (Of course, the United States and United Kingdom did not only not shut down for any of those epidemics, they received little attention outside the health-care system.)
- Iran's Nuclear Stockpile Rose By Over 50% During Three Months Of COVID Lockdown: IAEA
Iran's Nuclear Stockpile Rose By Over 50% During Three Months Of COVID Lockdown: IAEA
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 23:00Over the past three months of global lockdowns due to the coronavirus, Iran’s nuclear development has been busy, apparently. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Friday circulated a confidential report seen by Associated Press which details the Islamic Republic’s nuclear stockpile rose by a whopping over 50% in the three months prior to May 20.
“The agency said that as of May 20, Iran’s total stockpile of low-enriched uranium amounted to 1,571.6 kilograms (1.73 tons), up from 1,020.9 kilograms (1.1 tons) on Feb. 19,” AP reports.
AFP/Getty Tehran months ago vowed to break from its commitments under the Obama-brokered JCPOA until the biting American-led sanctions regimen is eased. Officials warned Europe that if action weren’t taken major nuclear milestones would be reached.
This has also included enriching uranium up to a purity of 4.5%, blowing past the 3.67% ceiling stipulated under the JCPOA. The IAEA report also noted “with serious concern that, for over four months, Iran has denied access to Agency… to two locations.”
Recently reports suggested IAEA inspectors were being blocked in part on Iranian authorities’ concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.
“The [IAEA] director general calls on Iran immediately to cooperate fully with the agency, including by providing prompt access to the locations specified,” the report said, however like other warnings this is likely to fall on deaf ears, given Iran’s economy has been decimated, further at a sensitive moment a large chunk of the population and failing health system have been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report comes a mere day after President Trump suggested there could be a fresh opening with Iran to ‘negotiate a better deal’ – as he’s long sought after withdrawing from the nuclear deal in May 2018. “Thank you to Iran, it shows a deal is possible!” Trump said in a rare positive tweet regarding the Islamic Republic on the occasion of the return of Navy Veteran Michael White from an Iranian prison.
We achieved humanitarian swap *despite* your subordinates’ efforts, @realDonaldTrump
And we had a deal when you entered office. Iran & other JCPOA participants never left the table.
Your advisors—most fired by now—made a dumb bet.
Up to you to decide *when* you want to fix it. pic.twitter.com/TFg698pWS9
— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) June 5, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
But the Iranians immediately poured cold water on that prospect, given Foreign Minister Javad Zarif reminded the US president, “we had a deal when you entered office.”
The Iranian position has been that it will never reenter negotiations until Washington removes sanctions, and returns to the 2015 deal it signed in the first place.
- "Somebody Cooked Up The Plot": The Hunt For The Origins Of The Russia Collusion Narrative
"Somebody Cooked Up The Plot": The Hunt For The Origins Of The Russia Collusion Narrative
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 22:40Authored by John Solomon via JustTheNews.com,
Hollywood once gave us the Cold War thriller called “The Hunt for Red October.” And now the U.S. Senate and its Republican committee chairmen in Washington have launched a different sort of hunt made for the movies.
Armed with subpoenas, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., want to interrogate a slew of Obama-era intelligence and law enforcement officials hoping to identify who invented and sustained the bogus Russia collusion narrative that hampered Donald Trump’s early presidency.
And while Graham and Johnson aren’t exactly Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin, they and their GOP cohorts have a theory worthy of a Tom Clancy novel-turned-movie: The Russia collusion investigation was really a plot by an outgoing administration to thwart the new president.
“What we had was a very quiet insurrection that took place,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican, told Just the News on Thursday as she described the theory of Senate investigators. “And there were probably dozens of people at DOJ and FBI that knew what was going on.
“But they hate Donald Trump so much … that they were willing to work under the cloak of law and try to use that to shield them so that they could take an action on their disgust,” she added. “They wanted to prohibit him from being president. And when he won, they wanted to render him ineffective at doing his job.”
For much of the last two years, the exact theory that congressional Republicans held about the bungled, corrupt Russia probe — where collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin was ultimately disproven and FBI misconduct was confirmed — was always evolving.
But after explosive testimony this week from former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who openly accused the FBI of keeping him in the dark about flaws, failures and exculpatory evidence in the case, the GOP believes it may prove the Russia case was a conspiracy to use the most powerful law enforcement and intelligence tools in America to harm Trump.
Two years of declassified memos are now in evidence that show:
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The FBI was warned before it used Christopher Steele’s dossier as evidence to target the Trump campaign with a FISA warrant that the former British spy might be the target of Russian disinformation, that he despised Trump and that he was being paid to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But agents proceeded anyway.
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The bureau was told by the CIA that its primary target, Trump adviser Carter Page, wasn’t a Russian spy but rather a CIA asset. But it hid that evidence from the DOJ and courts, even falsifying a document to keep the secret.
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The FBI opened a case on Trump adviser George Papadopoulos on the suspicion he might arrange Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton but quickly determined he didn’t have the Russian contacts to pull it off. But the case kept going.
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The FBI intercepted conversations between its informants and Papadopoulos and Page showing the two men made numerous statements of innocence, and kept that evidence from the DOJ and the courts.
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The FBI investigated Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn for five months and concluded there was no derogatory evidence he committed a crime or posed an intelligence threat and recommended closing the case. But higher-ups overruled the decision and proceeded to interview Flynn.
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The FBI and DOJ both knew by August 2017 there was no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion but allowed another 18 months of investigation to persist without announcing the president was innocent.
That is just a handful of the key evidentiary anchors of the storyline Republicans have developed. Now they want to know who helped carry out each of these acts.
“There are millions of Americans pretty upset about this,” Graham said this week. “There are people on our side of the aisle who believe this investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, was one of the most corrupt, biased criminal investigations in the history of the FBI. And we’d like to see something done about it.”
Graham tried to take action to approve 50-plus subpoenas from the Senate Judiciary Committee to witnesses on Thursday but was forced to delay a week.
Johnson, meanwhile, successfully secured about three dozen subpoenas to get documents and interviews with key witnesses from his Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Evidence is growing, Johnson said, that there was not a “peaceful and cooperative” transition between the Obama and Trump administrations in 2017.
“The conduct we know that occurred during the transition should concern everyone and absolutely warrants further investigation,” he said.
With Rosenstein’s testimony now behind them, the senators have some lofty targets for interviews or testimony going forward, including fired FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, ex-CIA Director John Brennan, and the former chiefs of staff for President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
Blackburn said during an interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast that the goal of the subpoenas and witnesses was simple: to identify and punish the cast of characters who sustained a Russia collusion narrative that was never supported by the evidence.
“Somebody cooked up the plot,” she explained.
“Somebody gave the go-ahead to order, to implement it. Somebody did the dirty work and carried it out — and probably a lot of somebodies. And what frustrates the American people is that nobody has been held accountable.
“Nobody has been indicted. Nobody has been charged, and they’re all getting major book deals and are profiting by what is criminal activity, if you look at the statutes that are on the book, and if you say we’re going to abide by the rule of law and be a nation of laws.”
For Blackburn, identifying and punishing those responsible is essential for two goals: to deter anyone in the future from abusing the FBI and FISA process again and to ensure Americans there isn’t a two-tiered system of justice in America.
“I think when you Google [Russia collusion] in future years, you’re going to see a screenshot of this cast of characters that cooked this up, because it is the ultimate plot,” Blackburn said.
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- The Fed Just Unleashed A Trillion In New Debt: Companies Took The Money And Spent It On Dividends While Firing Millions
The Fed Just Unleashed A Trillion In New Debt: Companies Took The Money And Spent It On Dividends While Firing Millions
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 22:23It was all the way back in 2012 when we first described in “How The Fed’s Visible Hand Is Forcing Corporate Cash Mismanagement” that the era of ultra cheap money unleashed by the Fed is encouraging corporations not to invest in capex or growth or investing in a satisfied employee base, but to rush and spend it on cheap, short-term gimmicks such as buybacks and dividends which benefit the company’s shareholders in the short term while rewarding management with by bonuses for reaching stock price milestones, vesting incentive compensation.
We concluded by saying that this was “the most insidious way in which the Fed’s ZIRP policy is now bleeding not only the middle class dry, but is forcing companies to reallocate cash in ways that benefit corporate shareholders at the present, at the expense of investing prudently for growth 2 or 3 years down the road.”
For years, nobody cared about what ended up being one of the most controversial aspects of capital mismanagement in a time of ZIRP/NIRP/QE, then suddenly everyone cared after the coronavirus crisis, when it emerged that instead of prudently deploying capital into rainy day funds, companies were systematically syphoning cash out (usually by selling debt) to rewards shareholders and management, confident that if a crisis struck the Fed would bail them out: after all the Fed bailed out the banks in 2008, and by 2020 US corporate debt had reached $16 trillion, or over 75% of US GDP, making it a systematic risk and virtually assuring that expectations for a Fed bailout would be validated.
Sure enough, that’s precisely what happened.
But while none of this should come as a surprise to anyone following events over the past decade, what came next may be a shock, because in response to creating a massive debt bubble whose proceeds were used to make shareholders extremely rich at the expense of a miserable employee base and declining corporate viability, the Fed… doubled down and virtually overnight gave companies a green light to do everything they did leading to the current disaster.
In a Bloomberg expose written by Bob Ivry, Lisa Lee and Craig Torres, the trio of reporters show how, 12 years after we first laid out the “New Normal” capital misallocation paradigm, we are again back to square one as the Fed actions – which as even former NY Fed president Bill Dudley admits are brazen moral-hazard – have prompted a record debt binge even as corporate borrowers are firing millions of workers while using the debt to – drumroll – make shareholders richer.
Take food-service giant Sysco, which just days after the Federal Reserve crossed the final line into centrally-planned markets on March 23 when it assured that it would make openly purchase corporate debt, Sysco sold $4 billion of debt. Then, just a few days after that, the company announced plans to cut one-third of its workforce, more than 20,000 employees, even as dividends to shareholders would continue.
That process repeated itself in April and May as the coronavirus spread. The Fed’s promise juiced the corporate-bond market. Borrowing by top-rated companies shot to a record $1.1 trillion for the year, nearly twice the pace of 2019.
What happened then was a case study of why Fed-endorsed moral hazard is always a catastrophic policy… for the poor, while making the rich richer:
Companies as diverse as Sysco, Toyota Motor Corp., international marketing firm Omnicom Group Inc. and movie-theater chain Cinemark Holdings Inc. borrowed billions of dollars — and then fired workers.
Just two weeks ago, Fed chair Powell testified before Congress, and when asked why the Fed is buying investment grade and junk bond debt, Powell responded “to preserve jobs.” That was a blatant lie, because as Bloomberg notes, the actions of the companies that benefited from the Fed’s biggest ever handout called into question the degree to which the U.S. central bank’s promise to purchase corporate debt will help preserve American jobs.
Unlike the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, which has incentives for employers to keep workers on the job and is only a grant if the bulk of the proceeds are used to retain workers, the taxpayer-backed facilities that the Fed and Treasury Department created for bigger companies have no such requirements. In fact, to make sure the emergency programs help fulfill one of the Fed’s mandates – maximum employment – the central bank is simply crossing its fingers that restoring order to markets will translate to saving jobs.
Instead, what the Fed’s actions have unleashed so far is a new record debt bubble, with more than $1.1 trillion in new debt issuance in just the first five months of the year, even as companies issuing debt are quick to lay off millions!
“They could set conditions, say to companies, hire back your workers, maintain your payroll to at least a certain percentage of prior payroll, and we will help,” said Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor for President Bill Clinton who now teaches economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s hardly clear that if you keep companies afloat they’ll hire employees.”
Just don’t tell the Fed Chair: in a May 29 webinar, Jerome Powell said that it’s “really it’s all about creating a context, a climate, in which employees will have the best chance to either keep their job, or go back to their old job, or ultimately find a new job. That’s the point of this exercise.”
The exercise has failed, because just as soon as the bailout funds expire, America will see a second wave of epic layoffs: the extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits that Congress approved in March stops on July 31, while the prohibition against firing workers in the $25 billion government rescue of U.S. airlines expires Sept. 30, and the biggest recipients have said they intend to shed employees after that date.
But where did all the hundreds of billions in newly issued debt go? Well, dividends for one. Without provisions for employees, “the credit assistance will tend to boost financial markets, but not the broad economic well-being of the great majority of the population,” Marcus Stanley, Americans for Financial Reform’s policy director, told Bloomberg.
Of course, when confronted with this reality, the Treasury Secretary did what he normally does: he lied.
“Our No. 1 objective is keeping people employed,” Mnuchin said during a May 19 Senate Banking Committee hearing after Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, accused him of “boosting your Wall Street buddies” at the expense of ordinary Americans. “What we put in the Main Street facility is that we expect people to use their best efforts to support jobs,” Mnuchin said.
The phrase “best efforts” echoes the original terms for the Main Street program, which required companies to attest they’ll make “reasonable efforts” to keep employees. The wording was subsequently changed to “commercially reasonable efforts,” which Jeremy C. Stein, chairman of the Harvard University economics department and a former Fed governor, called a welcome watering-down of expectations that the central bank would dictate employment policies to borrowers.
And while Stein said that it was “smart of them to weaken that”, what ended up happening is that companies entirely sidestepped preserving employees and rushed to cash out – guess who – shareholders once again.
But in keeping with the Fed’s overarching directive – that its programs are about lending, not spending in the words of Powell – once the Fed has triggered a new debt bubble with its explicit interventions in the secondary market, the Fed has no control over what companies do with the source of the virtually free funds:
“For the Fed to second-guess a corporate survival strategy would be a step too far for them,” said Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor. Putting explicit conditions on program beneficiaries would make the central bank “a weird hybrid of the Federal Reserve, Treasury, BlackRock and an activist stockholder,” he added, clearly unaware that we now live in a world in which this “new normal” Frankenstein monster is precisely who is in charge of capital markets, as the helicopter money resulting from the unholy merger of the Fed and Treasury is precisely what BlackRock is frontrunning, in its own words. But heaven forbid some of the trillions in new debt are used for emplyees…
And while tens of millions of jobs have been lost since March – today’s laughable and fabricated jobs report, in the BLS’ own admission – notwithstanding, there has been one clear beneficiary: the S&P 500 has jumped 38% since March 23, the day the Fed intervened; on Friday, the Nasdaq just hit an all time high. Observers of the stock market wonder how it could be so bullish at the same time as the country faces an avalanche of joblessness unsurpassed in its history.
The choices companies are making – choices which we correctly predicted back in 2012 – provide an answer.
Since selling $4 billion in debt on March 30, Sysco has amassed $6 billion of cash and available liquidity, enabling it to gobble up market share, while cutting $500 million of expenses, according to Chief Executive Officer Kevin Hourican. Sysco, which is based in Houston, will continue to pay dividends to shareholders, Chief Financial Officer Joel Grade said on a May 5 earnings call.
Countless other companies are also splurging on debt-funded dividends, while some – such as Apple and Amazon – are now issuing debt to fund their next multi-billion buyback program.
Of course, it’s not just investment grade debt: the Fed notoriously is also active in the junk bond space, buying billions in high yield ETFs (that now hold bonds of bankrupt Hertz).
Movie theaters were one of the first businesses to close during the pandemic. Cinemark, which owns 554 of them, shut its U.S. locations on March 17. Three days later, the company paid a previously announced dividend. It has since said it will discontinue such distributions. Cinemark borrowed $250 million from the junk-bond market on April 13, the same day it announced the firing of 17,500 hourly workers. Managerial staff were kept on at reduced pay, according to company filings. Cinemark, which is based in Plano, Texas, said it plans to open its theaters in phases starting June 19.
The theater chain opted to go to the bond market over seeking funding from the government because “it didn’t come with any of the strings attached that government-backed facilities can include,” CEO Mark Zoradi said on the April 15 earnings call. It “was really no more complicated than that.” And why did Cinemark find no trouble in accessing the bond market? Because with the Fed now buying both IG and HY bonds, there is no longer any credit risk, which is why spreads have collapsed back to all time lows; in effect the Fed is forcing investors to buy Cinemark’s bonds, which then uses the proceeds to pay shareholders either a dividend or to buyback stock. As for the company’s employees? Why they are expendable, and in a few month there will be millions of unemployed workers begging for work at or below minimum wage.
Win win… for Cinemark’s management and shareholders. Lose for everyone else.
Actually, win win for all corporations: like Cinemark, Omnicom issued $600 million in bonds in late March. In an April 28 conference call to discuss quarterly earnings, CEO John Wren said the company was letting employees go but didn’t say how many. He said the company was extending medical benefits to July 31 for employees furloughed or fired.
Wren added: “Our liquidity, balance sheet and credit ratings remain very strong and we have no plans to change our dividend policy.”
And once again, Dividends 1 – Employees 0, because everything will be done to prevent shareholders from dumping the stock.
Toyota borrowed $4 billion from investors on March 27. Three days later, the Japan-based car company said it would continue paying dividends to shareholders. Eight days after that it said it would drop roughly 5,000 contract workers who helped staff its plants in North America.
And so on, and so on, as companies issue hundreds of billions in debt without a glitch – now that the Fed has taken over the bond market – and use the proceeds to fund dividends, while laying off millions.
In a March 24 letter, 200 academics, led by Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor Jonathan Berk, called lending programs aimed at corporations “a huge mistake.” Better to focus help directly on people living paycheck to paycheck who lost their jobs, it said.
“Bailing out investors who chose to take high-risk investments because they wanted the high returns undermines capitalism and makes it an unfair game,” Berk said in an interview. “If you don’t have a level playing field in capitalism, it doesn’t work.”
Why dear, misguided Jonathan: whoever told you the US still has “capitalism”?
- Why Does The New York Times Brazenly Deny The Obvious?
Why Does The New York Times Brazenly Deny The Obvious?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 22:00Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic research,
Don’t laugh derisively, as people do these days, but I’ve always admired the New York Times. First draft of history. Talent everywhere. Best production values. Even with its ideological spin, it can be scrupulous about facts. You can usually extract the truth with a decoder ring. Its outsized influence over the rest of the press makes it essential. I’ve relied on it for years. Even given everything, and I mean everything.
Until now. It’s just too much. Too much unreality, manipulation, propaganda, and flat out untruths that are immediately recognizable to anyone. I can’t believe they think they can get away with this with credibility intact. I’m not speaking of the many great reporters, technicians, editors, production specialists, and the tens of thousands who make it all possible. I’m speaking of a very small coterie of people who stand guard over the paper’s editorial mission of the moment and enforce it on the whole company, with no dissent allowed.
Let’s get right to the offending passage. It’s not from the news or opinion section but the official editorial section and hence the official voice of the paper. The paragraph from June 2, 2020, reads as follows.
Healing the wounds ripped open in recent days and months will not be easy. The pandemic has made Americans fearful of their neighbors, cut them off from their communities of faith, shut their outlets for exercise and recreation and culture and learning. Worst of all, it has separated Americans from their own livelihoods.
Can you imagine? The pandemic is the cause!
I would otherwise feel silly to have to point this out but for the utter absurdity of the claim. The pandemic didn’t do this. It caused a temporary and mostly media-fueled panic that distracted officials from doing what they should have done, which is protect the vulnerable and otherwise let society function and medical workers deal with disease.
Instead, the CDC and governors around the country, at the urging of bad computer-science models uninformed by any experience in viruses, shut down schools, churches, events, restaurants, gyms, theaters, sports, and further instructed people to stay in their homes, enforced sometimes even by SWAT teams. Jewish funerals were broken up by the police.
It was brutal and egregious and it threw 40 million people out of work and bankrupted countless businesses. Nothing this terrible was attempted even during the Black Death. Maximum economic damage; minimum health advantages. It’s not even possible to find evidence that the lockdowns saved lives at all.
But to hear the New York Times tell the story, it was not the lockdown but the pandemic that did this. That’s a level of ideological subterfuge that is almost impossible for a sane person to conjure up, simply because it is so obviously unbelievable.
It’s lockdown denialism.
Why? From February 2020 and following, the New York Times had a story and they are continuing to stick to it. The story is that we are all going to die from this pandemic unless government shuts down society. It was a drum this paper beat every day.
Consider what the top virus reporter Donald J. McNeil (B.A. Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley) wrote on February 28, 2020, weeks before there was any talk of shutdowns in the U.S.:
There are two ways to fight epidemics: the medieval and the modern.
The modern way is to surrender to the power of the pathogens: Acknowledge that they are unstoppable and to try to soften the blow with 20th-century inventions, including new vaccines, antibiotics, hospital ventilators and thermal cameras searching for people with fevers.
The medieval way, inherited from the era of the Black Death, is brutal: Close the borders, quarantine the ships, pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities.
For the first time in more than a century, the world has chosen to confront a new and terrifying virus with the iron fist instead of the latex glove.
And yes, he recommends the medieval way. The article continues on to praise China’s response and Cuba’s to AIDS and says that this approach is natural to Trump and should be done in the United States. (AIER called him out on this alarming column on March 4, 20202.)
McNeil then went on to greater fame with a series of shocking podcasts for the NYT that put a voice and even more panic to the failed modeling of Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College London.
This first appeared the day before his op-ed calling for global lockdown. The transcript includes this:
I spend a lot of time thinking about whether I’m being too alarmist or whether I’m being not alarmist enough. And this is alarmist, but I think right now, it’s justified. This one reminds me of what I have read about the 1918 Spanish influenza.
Reminder: 675,000 Americans died in that pandemic. There were only 103 million people living in the U.S. at the time.
He continues:
I’m trying to bring a sense that if things don’t change, a lot of us might die. If you have 300 relatively close friends and acquaintances, six of them would die in a 2.5 percent mortality situation.
That’s an astonishing claim that seems to forecast 8.25 million Americans will die. So far as I know, that is the most extreme claim made by anyone, four times as high as the Imperial College model.
What should we do to prevent this?
You can’t leave. You can’t see your families. All the flights are canceled. All the trains are canceled. All the highways are closed. You’re going to stay in there. And you’re locked in with a deadly disease. We can do it.
So because this coronavirus “reminds” him of one he read about, he can say on the air that four million people could soon die, and therefore life itself should be cancelled. Because a reporter is “reminded” of something.
This is the same newspaper that in 1957 urged people to stay calm during the Asian flu and trust medical providers – running all of one editorial on the topic. What a change! This was an amazing podcast — amazingly irresponsible.
McNeil was not finished yet. He was at it again on March 12, 2020, demanding that we not just close big events and schools but shut down everything and everyone “for months.” He went back on the podcast twice more, then started riding the media circuit, including NPR. It was also the same. China did it right. We need to lock down or people you know, if you are one of the lucky survivors, will die.
To say that the New York Times was invested in the scenario of “lock down or we die” is an understatement. It was as invested in this narrative as it was in the Russia-collaboration story or the Ukrainian-phone call impeachment, tales to which they dedicated hundreds of stories and many dozens of reporters. The virus was the third pitch to achieve their objective.
Once in, there was no turning back, even after it became obvious that for the vast numbers of people this was hardly a disease at all, and that most of the deaths came from one city and mostly from nursing homes that were forced by law to take in COVID-19 patients.
That the newspaper, a once venerable institution, has something to answer for is apparent. But instead of accepting moral culpability for having created a panic to fuel the overthrow of the American way of life, they turn on a dime to celebrate people who are not socially distancing in the streets to protest police brutality.
To me, the protests on the streets were a welcome relief from the vicious lockdowns. To the New York Times, it seems like the lockdowns never happened. Down the Orwellian memory hole.
In this paper’s consistent editorializing, nothing is the fault of the lockdowns.
Everything instead is the fault of Trump, who “tends to see only political opportunity in public fear and anger, as in his customary manner of contributing heat rather than light to the confrontations between protesters and authority.”
True about Trump but let us remember that the McNeil’s first pro-lockdown article praised Trump as perfectly suited to bring about the lockdown, and the paper urged him to do just that, while only three months later washing their hands of the whole thing, as if had nothing to do with current sufferings much less the rage on the streets.
And the rapid turnaround of this paper on street protests was stunning to behold. A month ago, people protesting lockdowns were written about as vicious disease spreaders who were denying good science. In the blink of an eye, the protesters against police brutality (the same police who enforced the lockdown) were transmogrified into bold embracers of First Amendment rights who posed no threat to public health.
Not even the scary warnings about the coming “second wave” were enough to stop the paper from throwing out all its concern over “targeted layered containment” and “social distancing” in order to celebrate protests in the streets that they like.
And they ask themselves why people are incredulous toward mainstream media today.
The lockdowns wrecked the fundamentals of life in America. The New York Times today wants to pretend they either didn’t happen, happened only in a limited way, or were just minor public health measures that worked beautifully to mitigate disease. And instead of having an editorial meltdown over these absurdities, preposterous forecasts, and extreme panic mongering that contributed to vast carnage, we seen an internal revolt over the publishing of a Tom Cotton editorial, a dispute over politics not facts.
The record is there: this paper went all in back in February to demand the most authoritarian possible response to a virus about which we already knew enough back then to observe that this was nothing like the Spanish flu of 1918. They pretended otherwise, probably for ideological reasons, most likely.
It was not the pandemic that blew up our lives, commercial networks, and health systems. It was the response to the virus that did that. The Times needs to learn that it cannot construct a fake version of reality just to avoid responsibility for what they’ve done. Are we really supposed to believe what they write now and in the future? This time, I hope, people will be smart and learn to consider the source.
- "Worst-Case" Scenario – COVID Strikes Navy's New Submarine Program
"Worst-Case" Scenario – COVID Strikes Navy's New Submarine Program
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 21:40Without firing a shot, well maybe unleashing a virus pandemic across the world, China has severely disrupted US Naval operations, from shipbuilding to deployments.
Breaking Defense reports, the Navy’s USS Columbia nuclear missile submarine (SSBN 826) experienced months of construction delays thanks to virus-related issues.
A Navy depiction of the future USS Columbia nuclear missile submarine (SSBN 826). h/t Breaking Defense During lockdowns, the main problem for the build were workers’ absences at a top supplier, which resulted in delayed work on missile tubes. At the moment, the service is struggling to make up for the lost time.
Navy and Pentagon officials have become alarmed that large-scale work on the first of twelve nuclear-powered Columbia-class submarines, set to officially start in 2021, with deliveries, beginning in 2030, could now be fraught with timeline delays.
Rear Adm. Scott Pappano, executive program officer for the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program, said “a hiccup” during coronavirus lockdowns led to a serious decline in workers at UK-based Babcock Marine, leading to major delays in the work schedule.
“There was an interruption in our ability to do work,” Pappano said, calling the several month delays a “worst-case” scenario if no additional measures were taken to speed up the work going forward.
“We’re analyzing the plan right now,” he added. “Prioritizing what tubes go where and then coming up with mid-term and long-term recovery plans to go deal with that.”
The Navy is now “walking a tightrope on its Virginia and Columbia programs, and any slip on one program will affect the other,” Breaking Defense said.
A major risk developing is that if any of the programs are delayed, it could give China and Russia a leg up in the global arms race.
While the virus has affected the Navy’s shipbuilding, there were deployment issues due to an outbreak of infections on several vessels. One ship, in particular, was the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which saw at least 1,000 soldiers contract the virus. The aircraft carrier had to divert from its mission in the Western Pacific to treat and isloate crew in Guam.
And just like that, the Chinese virus has weakened the US Navy — while China’s Navy conducts war drills in the South China Sea.
- Crime… Is Crime! The Age Of Chaos Has Arrived
Crime… Is Crime! The Age Of Chaos Has Arrived
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 21:20Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,
You can fool most of the people most of the time, but you can’t fool reality any of the time.
The reigning chaos reflects perfectly what passes for thought in millions of minds. Minds that have been taught that reality is whatever one believes it to be. That reason is a superstition and is inferior to random feelings and emotions. That observation, hypotheses, experimentation, discovery, and science itself are akin to voodoo rituals. That consumption precedes production and is morally superior to it. That anyone’s work, income and wealth are subject to anyone else’s proclaimed need. That actions have no consequences.
Rioters and looters are faithfully adhering to the distilled essence of what our rulers and intellectual have been telling them for decades: If you need it, or just want it, it’s yours to have or destroy. They are simply eliminating the government middleman. The only surprise is that it didn’t happen long ago.
The Age of Chaos has arrived. Violence is accomplishing what violence always accomplishes—destruction, ruin, and death. The only theoretical justification for government is that it employs force to protect its citizens from violence—invasion, violence against persons or property, and the indirect violence implicit in procuring and keeping value through fraud or extortion.
Modern governments don’t protect their citizens from violence, they subject them to it and are its chief instigator. The latest outrage is coronavirus totalitarianism. It is nauseatingly hypocritical for politicians to ritually and halfheartedly denounce looting and destruction after they’ve spent the last three months destroying millions of businesses and jobs.
There are other killers lurking out there: crime and mass unrest. The statistics for the former and the probability of the latter will only increase with the duration of lockdowns. Police are already reporting an uptick in crime. The death toll from a week of widespread urban rioting could easily surpass that of the entire coronavirus outbreak. There’s no mystery why President Trump has called up a million military reservists, and no assurance they will be able to prevent sporadic riots from deteriorating into total chaos and pandemonium. No mystery, either, why sales of firearms and ammo have jumped. By the way, rioters and looters don’t always social distance, so they may spread the coronavirus.
SLL, “Surrendered Without A Shot,” April 6, 2020
Let’s reach a conclusion that lockdown proponents will reflexively deny: the lockdowns have made the rioting worse. It’s not implausible to suggest that people stuck in their houses for three months might have joined in simply because they were going stir crazy…or were desperate and angry because they lost their jobs and can’t pay their bills.
Government now does everything except the one thing it’s supposed to do—protect the citizenry from violence. Some of the government officials who tossed people into jail for letting their kids play in parks or opening a barbershop are now assuring rioters and looters they feel their pain and are doing little to stop them. It’s the perfect inversion: persecute the innocent, succor the criminals.
Politics is an exercise in criminal demagoguery, the promise of something for nothing in exchange for votes and power. That something has to be stolen from someone by the government. Governments don’t protect against the criminal element because they are the criminal element. Theft, extortion, and fraud can’t produce wealth. They only redistribute and ultimately reduce or eliminate it by destroying the rights of those who produce it.
Rioters have screamed, “Eat the Rich!” and have looted high end stores as an appetizer. To the extent that they’ve announced a program, this appears to be it: install a government that will eat the rich, and by implication anyone who produces wealth. Left open is the question: after they eat the rich and productive, where does their next meal come from?
The present government is already devouring producers and its debt is extortion, theft, and fraud all rolled into one. The full faith and credit of the United States is the full faith and credit of its present and future producers, whose production is and will continue to be extorted and stolen under threats of fines and imprisonment. Creditors are holding debt the value of which the government will do everything to fraudulently undermine via debt monetization, inflation, and currency depreciation.
You can fool most of the people most of the time, but you can’t fool reality any of the time. Reality never grants something for nothing, not even on credit. To get something out, you have to put something in.
The utterly incompetent and incoherent response by government officials to the nationwide rioting, in both word and deed, was inevitable. They can neither speak nor act with intellectual, philosophical, or moral clarity given the dominant political creed—that reality can be subverted, something can be had for nothing, and the rights of some are justifiably destroyed for the benefit of others. That creed obliterates the concept of individual rights and the principles that logically flow from that concept. Yet, only the intellectual vantage point afforded by that concept and its concomitant principles offers clarity.
A policeman in Minneapolis knelt on an already-subdued and handcuffed suspect’s neck for approximately eight minutes and the suspect died shortly thereafter. Three other police did nothing to either stop the policeman or aid the suspect. Based on the video evidence, which will probably not be the complete evidentiary record, the kneeling policeman should be charged with murder and the three other police should be charged as accomplices. All four should have the legal protections afforded all criminal defendants and receive a fair trial before either a judge or a jury. Verdicts would then be reached and any defendant who was found guilty, punished.
Anyone enraged by the police’s behavior, or by the way police treat people or specific groups of people, or any other conduct by the government or its agents has the right to peaceably protest and take other political action, either as an individual or as a member of a group. The key word is peaceably. Nobody has the right to initiate violence against anyone else or their property. The government’s duty is to protect its citizens from such violence and destruction. When it erupts en masse, as in a riot, the government must stop it, with force if necessary, up to and including deadly force. The motivations or justifications of those engaging in the violence and destruction are irrelevant.
Every year governments steal trillions of dollars from their productive citizens. Some of it remains with governments or their agents, some of it is bestowed as unearned largess to the politically favored. Foreign and military policy has degenerated into nonstop war whose only purpose is to feed the military-industrial-intelligence complex and enrich it’s contractors. People can be tossed in jail if they refuse to accept as legal tender a fiat-debt currency backed by nothing, one which the government’s central bank continuously debases, in part to reduce the real value of the government’s debt.
Industry after industry has been turned into government-sponsored predatory cartels, with the military-industrial-intelligence complex and the financial-banking complex at the head of the pack and the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex coming on strong. Regulation is an instrument of government extortion and a means for the cartels to exclude potential competition by making entry into cartelized industries prohibitively expensive. No industry is so inconsequential that it can escape regulation; the government has its arbitrary and grasping fingers in every pie.
Under a contradictory-on-its-face rationale of “equality,” governments have created unequal-by-law quotas, preferences, and set-asides for favored groups. Taking the next giant step towards the eradication of whatever remains of individual rights, governments have locked “unessential” people in their homes and prevented them from opening their businesses or working at their jobs. Virtually every government activity and job has been deemed “essential.” There are no individual rights when inequality is written into the law.
Adding insult to injury, attending schools, gathering in groups, or even breathing clean air have also been prohibited in response to a dramatically and intentionally overblown medical danger. When government destroys rather than protects individual rights, its law enforcement arm inevitably does the same. Enforcement becomes a matter of caprice, whim, and the personal predilections and prejudices of its agents. The multitude of laws give law enforcement virtually unlimited power to harass, arrest, brutalize, incarcerate, and kill. The coronavirus measures only increase that power.
There are so many laws and regulations that no person can possibly be aware of or comply with them all, yet government exempts law enforcement from even the most basic strictures against criminality. Under asset forfeiture laws, it can steal property arbitrarily deemed to be involved in the commission of a crime and it is then up to the owner to prove that it was not. Incidents like the one in Minneapolis are commonplace, but the chances the police who commit crimes will be imprisoned, or even lose their jobs, is minimal. The glaring inequity of a system in which innocent citizens are routinely treated as criminals but government exempts itself from justice has not been lost on the citizenry. It has not been lost on police forces, who have been militarized not to protect themselves and the government from criminals, but from an increasingly subjugated and enraged citizenry.
To believe that a government that has destroyed individual rights while enshrining its own criminality can speak or act with any kind of moral authority towards criminal rioters and looters is absurd. The apex of absurdity—so far—is the Minneapolis police force’s abandonment of its own precinct station to rioters. Criminals will attack soft targets, and those who agree with them in principle are soft targets. If a government won’t protect its own property from criminals, it’s certainly not going to protect law abiding citizens’ lives or property.
The rioting makes a mockery of arguments that the government should control or eliminate citizens’ right and access to firearms, which would make them soft targets. A government that refuses to protect individuals and their rights hasn’t a leg to stand on when it tries to restrict individuals from defending themselves. Such restrictions are clearly seen for what they are: another government destruction of individual rights.
How long can governments that outlaw businesses, jobs, and education—in short, production—and engage in and legitimize theft, fraud, extortion, vandalism, violence, and murder—in short, destruction—survive? Reality cannot be fooled. Production is survival—for both producers and the governments they support—destruction its antithesis. The bell tolls.
WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The Declaration of Independence, 1776
Our government effects only terror and misery. To effect our Safety and Happiness, it’s past time to withdraw “the Consent of the Governed” and “to alter or to abolish” it. That is our right, enshrined in our Declaration.
- Friday Humor: San Francisco Does "New" COVID-19 Math
Friday Humor: San Francisco Does "New" COVID-19 Math
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 21:00Just in case you hadn’t had enough of the utter hypocrisy of our ruling classes and liberal elites as they juggle unrequited support for anyone and everyone “protesting” vs the tyrannical need for groups of humans to remain locked up inside their homes, the San Francisco Bay Area just issued its new “rules” for ‘gathering’…
Under the updated Contra Costa County health order, protests of up to 100 people will be permitted.
Also allowed to reopen in Contra Costa County starting Wednesday are child care for everyone (not just children of essential workers and select others), business offices, sports team practices for up to 12 participants (but not games with other teams), Scouting-type gatherings of young people and summer camps with “cohorts” of up to 12 people each that don’t mix with other groups.
And so, for the hard of ‘rithmetic, the math goes something like this:
Our leaders and their health professionals believe 100 “Protesters” are equally ‘deadly’ and equally likely to ‘kill their granny’ as 12 “non-protesters” who stayed at home.
This fantastic new cognitively dissonant math is “the latest step toward reopening our county is a reflection of our successful collective effort as a community to limit the spread of the virus,” county Health Officer Dr. Chris Farnitano said in a statement.
“I know there’s a lot of frustration out there, but it’s important to keep in mind that interventions like social distancing have saved lives.”
Frustration indeed Chris!
As one wit pointed out, this would seem to also equate the contagion of 100 “protesting” Americans as being equally terrible as the contagion of 12 “non-protesting” Americans – that sounds very racist to us!!!
#ProtestersLivesMatter(AboutOneEightOfANonProtester)
However, in the spirit of ‘freedom’, this new ‘rule’ inspired some rather exceptional entrepreneurial ideas…
Welcome to the Protest Bar and Grill™, Protest Child Care™, Protest Cinema™, and Protest Gym™.
We will be first in line.
TGIF!
- Black Lives Matter Melbourne Tells White People: "No Selfies"
Black Lives Matter Melbourne Tells White People: "No Selfies"
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 20:40Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Black Lives Matter Melbourne has issued a list of required behavior from white people attending their protest, which includes no selfies and the demand that, “If a black person tells you to do something, you do it immediately without question.”
Up to 40,000 people are expected to attend the demonstration in Australia, which the potential for riots high given the city’s militant left-wing nature.
In anticipation of that, BLM Melbourne issued a lengthy list of requirements for how white people are allowed to behave during the rally.
“DO NOT TAKE SELFIES,” states the guide. “Ask to take pictures or videos of individuals. You are there to witness only. Film the police as much as possible. Your goal is documentation to ensure that the true narrative is told.”
The guide also instructs white people to show deference and obedience to black people at all times.
“FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. If a black person tells you to do something, you do it immediately without question. You respect the authority and decisions of the black protestors at all times.”
White people are also not allowed to lead chants and will be required to stay at the back of the protest until they are called forward, with the guide telling them, “WHEN YOU ARE AT THE FRONT, YOU ARE SILENT.”
The no selfies rule is funny because it’s likely to keep many protesters at home given they won’t be able to properly virtue signal for the purposes of their Instagram page, which for some is the most important thing.
The other irony is that protest leaders are basically enforcing racial segregation by keeping the white attendees away from the main demonstrators.
* * *
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- Journalist Who Busted Illinois Governor's Wife Violating Lockdown Sues After Briefing Ban
Journalist Who Busted Illinois Governor's Wife Violating Lockdown Sues After Briefing Ban
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 20:20An Illinois journalist who broke the story that Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s wife violated the state’s “stay-at-home” order by traveling to the family’s equestrian estate in Wisconsin has sued after she was barred from Pritzker’s coronavirus press briefings.
On Friday, May 15, Jacobson broke the story that Pritzker’s family had traveled to their equestrian estate in Wisconsin amid Illinois’s stay-at-home order – weeks after it was reported that his family was at another estate in Florida. The news raised questions about why the stay-at-home order did not apply to the governor’s family.
On the day of the governor’s next press briefing, Pritzker’s press secretary told Jacobson she was banned from the briefings because she had attended a rally advocating for Illinois to end its lockdown. When questioned by reporters about Jacobson’s exclusion the next day, Pritzker told the press corps that Jacobson could not attend because advocating for Illinois to end its stay-at-home order represents an “extreme position.” The governor went on to say: “That is not a reporter … once upon a time she was a reporter but she proved that she is no longer a reporter.” –AP
Here in Chicago I found 2 signs to be offensive. There is NO need for this. @GovPritzker @MorningAnswer @DanProft https://t.co/QOl3wrJ0cD pic.twitter.com/TBoIHTtg1J
— Amy Jacobson (@AmyJacobson) May 16, 2020
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The lawsuit, filed by attorneys from the Liberty Justice Center, asks the court to take immediate action to allow Jacobson back into the press briefings.
“Gov. Pritzker has been in the hot seat over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s visible from his reactions to Amy Jacobson’s questions that her reporting made him uncomfortable. But what the governor appears to not understand is that Americans have a right to hold their elected officials accountable, and one of the ways they do this is through a vibrant, free press,” said Liberty Justice Center president and co-founder, Patrick Hughes.
“It’s not up to Gov. Pritzker to pick and choose which reporters can cover him based on how much he agrees with their coverage or their points of view. And keeping reporters out of the room because he disagrees with their line of questioning or point of view is a gross violation of the First Amendment.”
Jacobson has worked for television and radio stations nationwide for over 25 years – the last decade of which has been spent as a reporter and morning show host on Salem Media’s Chicago AM 560 The Answer.
Jacobson has been attending the governor’s COVID-19 press briefings on behalf of the station since April. While some reporters have used the daily briefings to ask softball questions, such as how the governor is holding up, Jacobson has asked notably tough questions. –AP
“The reason we sent Amy to these press briefings is because she is a dogged reporter with a reputation for holding public officials accountable. Over the last two months Amy has done her job well, asking the tough questions that are on the minds of so many of our listeners,” said AM 560 regional VP and general manager, Jeff Reisman. “We’re disappointed that the governor would retaliate against her and take the unprecedented step of blocking her from his press briefings. We had hoped litigation would not be necessary, but it’s imperative for Amy to get back into the room and keep doing her job.”
- "Extreme" Looters Are Using Absolutely Crazy Tactics Never Seen Before
"Extreme" Looters Are Using Absolutely Crazy Tactics Never Seen Before
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 20:00Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Do you have to go to “looting school” to learn this stuff? It is not that difficult to smash a few store windows and grab a few things, but some of the incidents that we have witnessed over the last several days have been so bizarre that it is hard to believe that they are actually real. In fact, if they were put into a big Hollywood disaster movie at lot of people would probably dismiss them as “unrealistic”. But it is very important to understand what is going on out there, because these looters are giving us a preview of coming attractions. If they will sink to such depths now, what will they be willing to do once things get really, really bad in this country?
There are so many examples that I could share with you, but I think that I will start with the looters in Fairfield, California that decided to use a telescopic forklift to break down the doors of a Best Buy store…
A particularly brazen attempt by looters to storm a store in Fairfield, California, has been caught on video, showing them commandeering what appears to be a telescopic forklift to force their way in.
A video has emerged showing vandals using heavy equipment on the doors of the Best Buy store in Fairfield, a city in Solano County, located between San Francisco and Sacramento.
Looters Use Telescopic Forklift To Break Into Best Buy In Fairfield, California pic.twitter.com/PKIkjAeKU6
— GrantB911 (@GrantB911) June 2, 2020
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I suppose that the moral of this story is that you should never leave a telescopic forklift sitting around where looters might find it.
Now that criminals have seen how much they can get away with, they are going to become more emboldened than ever, and the entire west coast is going to be a major danger zone for the foreseeable future.
In the East Bay area, police say that “caravans of cars full of looters” have been roaming around systematically searching for targets. Authorities have been trying to crack down on these caravans of looters, but that has proven to be quite difficult because many of them are heavily armed.
Elsewhere in northern California, one group of looters just pulled off an absolutely stunning heist that is like something out of a “Fast and Furious” film…
Police in Northern California are searching for suspects after rioters reportedly stole more than 70 premium cars from a dealership near San Francisco Sunday night.
San Leandro Chrysler Dodge Jeep dealership owner Carlos Hidalgo said that although he blocked the exits as a precaution, the thieves “started ramming, ramming until they could get out. They took out chains and fence posts. It was a very malicious act,” FOX 2 in Oakland reported.
This means that at least 70 looters must have descended upon that dealership simultaneously, because each of those vehicles would have required a driver.
If you stop and try to envision what that must have looked like, it will send a chill up your spine.
Of course it isn’t just the west coast that is dealing with such over the top criminality. The following is how Rachel Olding described the crazy looting that we just witnessed in Midtown Manhattan…
Hard to describe how rampant the looting was tonight in Midtown Manhattan and how lawless it was. Complete anarchy. Literally hundreds of stores up and down Broadway, Fifth Ave, Sixth Ave. Kids ruling the streets like it was a party.
These are the stores where the Wall Street elite shop.
If law enforcement authorities can’t even keep that area secure, do you think that any city in the entire country is truly safe at this point?
And some of these looters are not exactly “impoverished”. In fact, the New York Post is reporting that some of the looters were pulling up to the stores “in luxury SUVs”…
New York City looters were caught on camera pulling up in luxury SUVs — including what was claimed to be a pricey Rolls-Royce — before apparently looting an upscale retail store in Manhattan, according to footage shared on social media.
The video, filmed by Justine Miller and Keith Feldman, shows a group of men in masks hopping out of two cars and charging through a smashed door in Soho before running back outside carrying boxes of goods on Monday night.
I honestly don’t know what the police in New York City were doing.
They had to know that the luxury retail outlets in Midtown Manhattan would be prime targets, and yet this was allowed to happen anyway.
Down in Philadelphia, the looting has been absolutely insane. Just yesterday, I discussed the fact that looters were allowed to loot one drugstore for 15 hours straight. Elsewhere in the city, one very ambitious looter ended up dying in a botched attempt to blow up an ATM machine…
A looter has been killed in a botched ATM explosion in Philadelphia, that police believe was part of a ‘coordinated’ effort to raid 30 machines across the city over a series of two nights.
Police said the 24-year-old man died early Tuesday, several hours after attempting to break into an ATM with explosives in the north of the city.
Needless to say, bank robbery has nothing to do with justice for George Floyd.
All over America, thousands upon thousands of criminals are using the George Floyd protests as an opportunity to commit crimes, and the fact that it is happening on such a widespread basis is extremely sobering.
At this point, things have gotten so crazy that looters are even looting from other looters. The U.S. is descending into madness, and many people believe that this is just the beginning.
Of course all of this rampant lawlessness is deeply alarming millions upon millions of ordinary citizens, and a lot of people are deeply concerned that this sort of behavior could start spreading into the suburbs and beyond. In fact, Polk County Sheriff Judd Grady has publicly acknowledged that in his county “some folks were threatening to take their criminal conduct into the neighborhoods”…
Grady said the department “had received information on social media that some folks were threatening to take their criminal conduct into the neighborhoods.”
“I would tell them, if you value your life, they probably shouldn’t do that in Polk County,” Grady said. “Because the people of Polk County like guns, they have guns, I encourage them to own guns, and they’re going to be in their homes tonight with their guns loaded, and if you try to break into their homes to steal, to set fires, I’m highly recommending they blow you back out of the house with their guns. So, leave the community alone.”
Hopefully things will start to cool down at least for a while.
But many Americans understand that it is just a matter of time before more violence erupts, and so they are preparing to defend themselves and their families. Gun sales are absolutely soaring, and one shop owner in New York says that he has been so busy that he is literally running out of stuff to sell…
Phones have been ringing off the hook and the line has been wrapped around the building at Coliseum Gun Traders in Uniondale, Nassau County, ever since the coronavirus pandemic began. And now with protests and rioting after the killing of George Floyd, the store has seen another enormous spike in sales. Keeping the shelves stocked has been hard, store owner Andy Chernoff said.
“We started out this week with a fair amount of merchandise. We’re running out. Literally running out,” Chernoff said. “Never thought I’d say that.”
Just six months ago, life in America seemed so “normal”, but now everything has changed.
All of the anger that has been building up for years is now starting to boil over, and the upcoming election in November is just going to increase tensions even more.
So please be very careful out there, because our society really is starting to fall apart right in front of our eyes.
- 2 National Guardsmen Struck By Lightning During Washington DC Protest
2 National Guardsmen Struck By Lightning During Washington DC Protest
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 19:40In a freak occurrence during Wednesday night’s protests, two National Guardsmen were badly injured after being struck by lightning near the White House, officials said early Friday. The two service members were struck shortly after midnight within the Lafayette Park perimeter, where protests over the death of George Floyd continued for a seventh day (note: it was the ninth day of demonstrations in Minneapolis).
Both officers were taken to a nearby hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Video of the aftermath went viral.
Shortly after midnight, #DCsBravest received a call for a report of 2 military personnel suffering the effects of a nearby lighting strike within the Lafayette Park perimeter. Both were transported with non life threatening injuries. pic.twitter.com/JvwRIHk74k
— DC Fire and EMS #StayHomeDC (@dcfireems) June 5, 2020
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Despite the heavy rain and flood warnings, a core group of protesters returned Thursday night despite the weather after Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser rescinded a planned curfew after there were zero arrests the night before.
The DC area saw some pretty intense lightning during last night’s storm.
INSANE Video from our @wusa9 SkyCam WOOOOOW #lightning #WashingtonMonument pic.twitter.com/iYmwDwDUMO
— Ryan Sprouse (@RSprouseNews) June 5, 2020
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Probably not an ideal time to be standing outside carrying a bunch of metal.
- Rickards: You May Never See "Normal" Again
Rickards: You May Never See "Normal" Again
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 19:20Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,
American cities are burning, there’s a lethal pandemic and we’re in a new Great Depression.
Other than that, everything’s fine…
People often ask me when things will “get back to normal.” Well, the answer could be never (or at least not for a long time).
Germany was not “normal” from 1914–54, for example. Social disorder is like a virus; it goes away eventually but not necessarily soon.
Meanwhile, we’re now in our third month of a national lockdown, with perhaps another month to go, depending on your locality.
Some states and cities are beginning to reopen, but they’re doing it in “phases,” so maybe your hair stylist reopened last week and your favorite restaurant will reopen next week.
The lockdown has certainly been painful for many. Even under the best of circumstances, anxiety levels went up, patience wore thin and tempers flared at trivial things. Cabin fever is a real disease.
Was it all worth it?
I’ve done a deep dive on this and the answer is almost certainly no.
The lockdown did slow the spread of the virus and did save some lives, that’s true. Yet the gains may only be temporary.
“Flattening the curve” does not mean reducing total infections and deaths. It just means stretching them out over a longer period so the hospital system is not overwhelmed.
There were much better solutions for this, including temporary hospitals and sending doctors and nurses from low-infection areas to those areas most in need, like New York City.
The biggest problem with the lockdown was that everyone counted the benefits but no one calculated the costs.
Many may have died and still could die from suicide, drug overdoses, alcoholism, domestic violence and other untreated medical conditions like cancer and heart attacks because patients were afraid to go to hospitals for fear of getting the virus.
In short, the lockdown may end up costing more lives than were saved.
That’s on top of trillions of dollars of lost wealth and lost economic output. That’s what happens when you put doctors in charge of the economy. Next time, it might be a good idea to let a few economic analysts into the room also.
But don’t worry, the optimists say. We’ll see a “V”-shaped recovery once the lockdowns are fully lifted.
You probably know the theory of a “V”-shaped recovery. The idea is that the economy fell sharply in March and April 2020 but it’s ready to bounce back with a record recovery this summer and fall.
The crash is one side of the “V” and the recovery is the other. The result is you end up recovering all of your losses and are ready for new growth from the old levels.
You’ll hear this a lot, but don’t believe it.
Remember “green shoots” in 2009 and 2010? They turned out to be brown weeds. Yes, the economy eventually recovered and the stock market went on to new highs, but it was the weakest recovery in U.S. history and those stock market highs took almost seven years to appear.
Things are much worse now.
Yes, we will hit a bottom this summer. And yes, a recovery will begin. But it will be long and hard.
Output may not get back to 2019 levels until 2022 or later. Unemployment will come down, but it is still expected to be higher than the worst of the 2008 crisis in 2023. The bankruptcies are just starting.
We’ve seen J. Crew, J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus, Pier 1 Imports and Hertz all file for bankruptcy in recent weeks. There is a long line of name-brand companies right behind them preparing to go bankrupt also.
Not only will we not have a V-shaped recovery, but it will probably be an “L” (down and then sideways).
The 2009–2020 recovery was an “L” where the new trend for growth was 2.2% instead of the post-1980 trend of 3.2%.
Now the new recovery (when it begins) may have output of only 1.9% or less.
When each recovery is weaker than the one before and debt goes up faster than growth, it’s just a matter of time before you go broke — or eventually break out in inflation.
We probably won’t see inflation for a while because inflation has a strong psychological component and right now a deflationary mindset prevails.
That may change — it probably will — but we’re not there at this point.
Meanwhile, people are looking for “safe havens” right now.
Stock and Treasury market behavior can be explained as much by “safe haven” demand as fundamentals. But what happens when the safe haven doesn’t look so safe?
There’s still one place to go — gold.
- NFL Condems Police Brutality And Racism, Says It Was "Wrong" Not To Support Kneeling Players
NFL Condems Police Brutality And Racism, Says It Was "Wrong" Not To Support Kneeling Players
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 19:11The NFL – in a decision that will likely be remembered as a major victory for the anti-police brutality protest movement inspired by the horrific death of George Floyd – has just announced that it was wrong to not wholeheartedly support the league’s black players who participated in the kneeling protests started by Colin Kaepernick.
It seems like ancient history now, but the culture war over Kaepernick’s decision, which infuriated conservatives and sparked a massive backlash among many NFL fans, while activists castigated the league for appearing to blackball Kaepernick, who hasn’t played since he left the 49ers, despite remaining a competitive athlete on the field.
In a video statement released just minutes ago, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says the league “is listening” to protesters and their message. Goodell apologized, saying the league was “wrong”, for not supporting athletes who kneeled during the national anthem during a protest movement a couple of years back. Goodell added that “I personally am with you, and want to be part of the change in this country,” and added that “the NFL would be nothing” without black players. He added that he would be reaching out to black players for feedback on “how we can improve and go forward for a better, more united NFL family.”
We, the NFL, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of Black People. We, the NFL, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the NFL, believe Black Lives Matter. #InspireChange pic.twitter.com/ENWQP8A0sv
— NFL (@NFL) June 5, 2020
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The decision will put pressure on other sports leagues, particularly the NBA and its commissioner, Adam Silver, to speak out and offer similar assurances.
But after the latest images of police brutality during the protests surfaced on Friday, will this be enough to quiet the unrest that’s expected to spring back into gear during rallies planned for tomorrow in Washington DC and across the US.
- Instagram "Influencers" Use Floyd Protests For Photoshoots, Eliciting Furious Backlash
Instagram "Influencers" Use Floyd Protests For Photoshoots, Eliciting Furious Backlash
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 19:00As it does with everything nowadays, social media played a critical role in rousing the US, and then the world (or at least parts of wealthy western Europe), to stand up against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd while being taken into custody.
More recently, the incessant virtue signaling by Hollywood actors, celebrities and just normal people has, at times, verged on parody, like when – earlier this week – hundreds of thousands of users posted black squares on their screens in an effort to “amplify black voices”. Minutes later, they deleted the squares after someone else said it was tantamount to a “blackout” on minority voices.
But without a doubt the most infuriating social media phenomenon is the IG “influencer” crowd treating the protests and riots, as well as their aftermath, like it was Coachella, or some kind of massive block party, posting for highly curated photos, often obstructing the paths of others while they scream at their boyfriends to make sure they get “the perfect pic”.
On Friday, another video of an influencer holding a cardboard sign went viral.
“IG influencer” goes to “protest” for an aesthetic pic.twitter.com/o3Xhyjs3WW
— viral posts (@BestViralPosts) June 5, 2020
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She just needed to get that “protest aesthetic”.
In another example, a protester calls for an “influencer” to be cancelled for using the “blackout tuesday” protests as she strutted out her “assets”.
YO #BlackTwitter this tacky influencer used #BlackoutTuesday and the #BlackLivesMatter protest to stage an Instagram photo op to show off her breasts + take slutty photos. Didn’t bother wearing a mask.Tone Deaf, Do your job and cancel her ! Link : :https://t.co/2cKzLCBBh9 pic.twitter.com/mAiNNXXoGs
— Penn (Not) Teller (@not_penn) June 4, 2020
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Kendall Jenner is probably persona non grata at any BLM event since that widely panned Pepsi commercial where she ended police brutality with a can of Pepsi. But that didn’t stop some deranged stan from photoshopping the pic below, which sent several rose emojis into a white-hot rage.
HELP I CAN’T BREATHE pic.twitter.com/qN9FWfnpcn
— 𝐦𝐚𝐞 (@9Oskissy) June 5, 2020
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Meanwhile, how dare this young lady try to organize a protest without the approval of “BLM”.
This is the Non-Black ig “influencer” who appropriates Black culture and also organized the protest in Van Nuys tomorrow morning. https://t.co/KvPtRbsq81 pic.twitter.com/k35JxGeo5a
— yumari tonalli (@em0jisocks) June 1, 2020
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Leftists now claiming “white women” have ruined their movement. Sounds a little misogynistic if you ask us.
In my mind the movement lost its legitimacy once it was hijacked by attention seeking white women
— Mola Ram (@anon42447210) June 5, 2020
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Let’s not forget this one from earlier this week.
So so gross for any “influencer” to try and capitalise on the BLM protests. Says so much about someone’s character https://t.co/xXj5zihaLH
— Marie-Claire (@marieclairee_) June 2, 2020
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Can’t say we disagree with this one.
This is worse than the looting
— Davey Jones (@titusxpullo) June 5, 2020
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The movement to outlaw selfies at protests has begun.
Can influencer pls just go to a protest and not take a picture of themselve? Can’t they just show how the protests are actually peaceful and how cops are starting the violence? Cmon @NikitaDragun pic.twitter.com/3cS4hcEUfb
— #blm #acab (@itsryanbb) June 3, 2020
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Before we go: a heartfelt plea.
Y’all can’t take a break from posting influencer pics? Beach and vacation pics? Y’all down at the protest doing fit pics? pic.twitter.com/LLx8YcEWb3
— Lawrence Hive President (@b_rad_hill) June 2, 2020
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If they really want to pitch in, one of them should make a makeup tutorial about how to cover rubber-bullet and tear gas-related injuries.
- Devouring Its Own: How Many On The Left Fostered The Violent Movement Now Rioting Across The Country?
Devouring Its Own: How Many On The Left Fostered The Violent Movement Now Rioting Across The Country?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 18:40Attorney General Bill Barr acknowledged yesterday that there is a “witches’ brew” of groups fostering violations, including an anarchist group from the right. The anarchists on the left or right are opportunists who will strike at any time of unrest to seek the breakdown of order. However, police are reporting a high number of Antifa and anarchist members arrested in various states. These are groups that are all too familiar to some of us on college and university campus. While I have opposed efforts to declare Antifa a terrorist organization, the role of all of these groups in the recent violence should be a cautionary tale for academics and politicians alike in the tolerance shown for such anti-free speech movements.
Ian Fleming famously lamented that history often moves so quickly that “heroes and villains keep on changing parts.” Our media and politicians are now struggling with the same problem today, following the killing of George Floyd. As rioting and looting continue across the country, the question is who to blame for the mayhem. Ultimately, the response was strikingly familiar and telling. Maybe white supremacists were behind it. Maybe the Russians were. It could be anyone except people in the rioting communities or, worse yet, groups lionized or tolerated by the left.
While most protesters remained peaceful, the narrative quickly spiraled glaringly out of sync with images of burning buildings in the background. Although “Today” show host Craig Melvin tweeted out a guide not to refer to them as rioters but rather as protesters, that narrative has since broken down. Indeed, news outlets have been reporting that “outsiders” have been fueling the rioting and that the destruction might be the work of nefarious groups of white supremacists or Russians.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and other officials there claimed a majority of those arrested were outsiders. Walz estimated the figure at 80 percent. National Urban League President Marc Morial ratcheted up the outrage in a cable news interview. He demanded an investigation to confirm “if it is white supremacists, if it is Russians, if it is other foreign actors who have tried to exploit the pain and exploit legitimate protests.”
It was manifestly implausible to suggest the rioting was the work of white supremacists or Russians. Arrest data showed a majority of those arrested in Minneapolis were from the city. The four people arrested in New York in fire bombing attacks were all state residents. The problem is that the most obvious culprits are all too familiar. A movement of anarchist, antifascist, and extreme left wing groups has been building for years, with violence from Washington to Berkeley. The most prominent is antifa, but there are also groups like By All Means Necessary with similar histories.
This is a broad movement, not one group, which makes the suggested designation by President Trump of antifa as a terrorist organization both constitutionally and practically dubious. However, the growing antifascist movement has attacked conservative speakers and events for years, with far less media attention than their right wing counterparts receive. Just as many critics have accused Trump of not doing enough to denounce extreme right wing groups, many Democratic leaders have been conspicuously silent in denouncing these antifascist groups.
Indeed, when Attorney General William Barr correctly observed that the rioting shows “antifa like tactics,” politicians and media figures both balked at the suggestion, as opposed to accepting the white supremacist or Russian option. Despite reports of antifa followers and anarchists being arrested, White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor objected that there was “no evidence” of any activity sparked by anarchists.
Antifa, By All Means Necessary, and other militant or anarchist groups have disrupted universities across the country, including my own, for years. They have found many political and academic allies. Dartmouth Professor Mark Bray wrote a book on antifa, defining the movement as committed to the silencing of opponents and the rejection of classic concepts of free speech. The movement has since found open or passive acceptance with many on the academic left. In fairness, however, many Democratic politicians have denounced past violent attacks.
Yet despite its violent history, some Democratic leaders have been enablers or outright supporters of the antifa movement, insisting that such groups cannot be compared to extreme right wing groups.
While criticizing antifa members three years ago, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted the group has “been there forever” and that “some people may have infiltrated” it. This was not viewed as her Charlottesville moment of claiming there are “very fine people” in antifa. It was a commonly held view that antifascists are by definition better than fascists.
Other Democratic leaders have been much more direct in their support, including the former deputy chair of the Democratic Party, Representative Keith Ellison. Although Germany has banned an antifa website, Ellison posed with the antifa handbook to show support at a Minneapolis bookshop and said it would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump.
Ellison, now the Minnesota state attorney general, was under fire this week for telling protesters they should not attack the National Guard on the streets or “react to them the way you might react to the Minneapolis Police Department. Their job is to try to bring peace and calm back again.” His son Jeremiah Ellison, a Minneapolis city council member, declared support for antifa even as the city endured rioting and looting.
Meanwhile, some media coverage has the uncomfortable feel of a new type of Russia collusion theory. Susan Rice, former national security adviser to President Obama, said that she suspects Russia is behind the effort “to hijack those protests and turn them into something very different” and that “this is right out of the Russian playbook.”
It is likely that racist or foreign actors will try to exploit the unrest on the internet. The same was true, on a larger scale, with Russian interference in the 2016 election. While most of us denounced that Russian interference, it was never plausible that the work of a dozen internet trolls in Saint Petersburg or a dozen military hackers in Moscow had a measurable, let alone meaningful, impact on the outcome of the election.
The same is true with these protests. The rioting began due to deep seated and legitimate anger over police brutality and the tragic death of Floyd. Young people and others did not rush to the streets because they read a posting from some skinhead on the Stormfront website. Yet the references to white supremacists or Russians continued even as reports filtered in of antifa and anarchists being arrested in various cities.
Some politicians in the past sought to tap into the antifascist movement. Others completely avoided denouncing the group. After all, for years, the movement threatened or attacked conservatives. They were not treated as an outside element but rather as this grassroots movement outraged by Trump and his policies. However, the same tactics and likely some of the same people are now burning buildings and cars, attacking police officers and business owners, and destroying property across the country. This is why, during the French Revolution, the journalist Jacques Mallet Pan warned, “Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children.”
- Daily Briefing – June 5, 2020
Daily Briefing – June 5, 2020
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/05/2020 – 18:25Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal and senior editor Ash Bennington discuss a roaring day on Wall Street as the U.S. labor market breathed a sigh of relief. Looking at everything from tech valuations to the AUD/USD trade, Raoul and Ash dive deeper into this jam-packed news day to see whether the economy really is on the mend. In the intro, Jack Farley touches on these themes and previews Raoul’s interview with Gerard Minack.
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