- How The Fight Over American Freedom Will Probably Escalate
How The Fight Over American Freedom Will Probably Escalate
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,
Three months ago in December I published an article titled ‘Is The Globalist Reset Failing? The Elites May Have Overplayed Their Hand’. I was specifically interested in the development of the pandemic “crisis”, the lockdown mandates of governments worldwide, the bizarre vaccination campaign for the new and under-tested mRNA cocktail which was rushed out to the public in the span of six months, the World Economic Forum’s open statements that they hoped to exploit the pandemic as a springboard for their globalist agenda, and the public’s reaction to it all.
I have to say, I continue to see a divergence in what the elites clearly wanted to happen vs. what has actually happened. If the Event 201 pandemic war game on a coronavirus outbreak, held two months before the actual outbreak occurred in China, is any indication, then the globalists greatly overestimated the fear effect of Covid.
They predicted at least 65 million deaths from a coronavirus outbreak, but over a year has passed since the pandemic went international and the official death count stands at 2.5 million, with over 40% of deaths in the US attributed to nursing home patients that were ALREADY dying from preexisting conditions. Removing suspect nursing home deaths from the equation, the death count is probably closer to 1.5 million, again, if we adhere to official estimates.
To put this number in perspective, the CDC states that global deaths from the flu virus peak at around 649,000 depending on the year. Deaths from the flu and pneumonia reach as high as 1.4 million globally per year. Studies funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation find annual pneumonia death stats that are comparable to the CDC’s. Yet, we never saw Bill Gates calling for economic lockdowns, mask mandates and medical passports because of the flu or pneumonia. Why is that?
Today, the death rate of covid is 0.26%, FAR below initial predictions by globalist institutions and governments. It is now widely proven that the lockdowns did NOTHING to slow the infection spread of the virus, and now many areas of the US are starting to experience what the lab coat “professionals” affectionately call “herd immunity”. Infections and deaths are plunging, and the lockdowns and mask mandates were useless.
Like the vast majority of all viral illnesses, humans simply get sick, endure, build immunity and get healthy. Some of us die, as we always have, and government intervention is not needed nor is it welcome. This is why large portions of US and European populations are refusing to accept the lockdowns and the vaccines. Why destroy the economy and submit to a potentially dangerous genetic cocktail over a disease that 99.7% of the population is sure to survive?
The establishment elites really blew it this time.
My suspicion, my “conspiracy theory” if you will, is that the globalists announced their reset agenda under the assumption that the death rate for covid would be MUCH higher than it is. They were expecting something biblical, and instead they got something not much more dangerous than the flu and pneumonia.
There is now mass public resistance to the vaccinations and medical passports. This is probably why they rushed out the vaccines in the span of 6 months instead of a year to 18 months as they hinted at in early 2020. They are trying to get as many people as possible to take the experimental vaccines before the citizenry realizes that covid is a nothing-burger.
I can say that in my area the majority of people never wore the masks and the majority of local businesses never tried to enforce them. And though they initially went along with the first economic shutdown, they will not be complying with another. In my state of Montana, there are 1,300 deaths attributed to covid. In my county, the estimated infection rate is over 25% (which means almost everyone has probably already been infected), and there are only 13 deaths total.
No one is scared of this thing. Almost no conservative is going to wear a mask, and many people in Red states (and some in Blue states) are going to refuse to take the vaccines or accept medical passports.
This means that the globalists have a big problem. They obviously invested a lot into this pandemic. It is the key to their entire Reset agenda. Without a frightening pandemic killing tens of millions, the globalists will not be able to lock down the public and prevent them from traveling or organizing. They will not be able to institute the medical passports and contact tracing apps that would allow them to watch the public 24/7. They certainly won’t get most Americans to go along with the cashless society and the centralized global governance the elites are so obsessed with.
The fear of coronavirus is waning. The globalists have indeed failed in epic fashion. But, this doesn’t mean that they are going to give up. If my experience studying psychopathic people tells me anything, it is that when these lunatics are cornered they tend to double and triple down on their failures.
The question is, what will happen next? The establishment will need maximum instability and chaos in the near term if they hope to salvage their Reset project. If they wait too long awareness will spread and they might not get another chance for many decades to come, if ever. Here are the events I expect to see over the course of the next year…
Covid Mutation Hype
The globalists are doomed unless they can keep the pandemic panic rolling forward. For now, puppets like Biden and Fauci are going to pretend as if a full reopening of the economy is going to happen. This us a lie. Already we are seeing Biden waffling on when a reopening will take place. He has indicated that it will be at least a YEAR before the shutdowns will completely end, and this is predicated on the majority of Americans submitting to vaccinations and medical passports.
In other words, the establishment is telling us that they intend to hold the economy hostage until we take the jab and give up our freedoms.
Now, are these inbred totalitarians just out of their minds? Well, probably, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a Plan B. Just look at all the hype surrounding “covid mutations” in places like South Africa and Brazil; the narrative will be that a “new covid variant” that is more dangerous and deadly than the first virus is spreading, and that the lockdowns must return for the greater good of the public.
As a recent article from ‘The New Scientist’ states:
“Existing vaccines should stop people getting severely ill and dying if they do get infected by the P.1 variant. However, because many people remain unvaccinated, plans to ease lockdown restrictions would have to be rethought if this variant causes a resurgence in case numbers. Plus, any variant that circulates widely will have more opportunities to evolve into a more dangerous form.”
The New Scientist does not seem to understand basic science. The overwhelming majority of viruses circulating in the world usually evolve into less deadly forms of their original iteration. Viruses need to survive too, and they don’t do this by mutating into more and more deadly monstrosities that kill their favorite hosts. There is still no evidence that the new covid mutations are any threat whatsoever, but the establishment is already staging the narrative that new lockdowns are coming.
Federal Lockdowns
If the mutation narrative continues on the path it seems to be following, then I expect the Biden Administration to attempt a national federalized lockdown similar to the Level 4 lockdowns used in Europe and Australia, and it will be announced sometime this year.
This program will trigger several reactions; most importantly, most conservative states and counties will refuse to follow federal mandates. I know that my county and probably most of Montana will defy any new shutdown.
There will be several economic consequences that will erupt from this conflict; some positive and some negative.
Domestic Economic Warfare
This phase of the crisis will happen within a month to two months of any national shutdown. Red states will refuse to comply. State politicians, even if they are part of the agenda, will be too scared to try to enforce federal mandates. They will be compelled by the conservative citizenry to keep their states open. Most people in these areas will ignore mandates.
This will lead to a red state fiscal boom, at least in the beginning, as business continues to thrive in conservative areas while blue states suffer under medical tyranny. Companies will flee leftist states by the thousands and move to any states that remain open and accommodating. This will be short lived, though.
Biden and the federal government will try to retaliate, first by cutting off federal funds to any state that does not bow to their power and refusing to give stimulus to any businesses that relocate. Blue states will be flush with stimulus cash while red states will be forced to reduce or eliminate welfare programs and some pension funds.
Of course, the government has no real money to give, they only have our tax dollars and the fiat that the central bank creates from thin air. The likely response will be that conservative states and citizens will simply stop paying federal taxes. Another reaction will be red states taking over federal lands and utilizing the resources on those lands to rejuvenate their industry and make up for the federal dollars lost.
What this amounts to is a soft secession of conservative regions, which will eventually lead to federal attempts at physical intervention (the economic war will turn into a shooting war). The argument from the establishment will be that conservatives are putting the rest of the country “at risk”, that we are “selfish” and “literally killing grandma”.
Complete Erasure Of Conservatives From The Internet
I expect Biden and Big Tech to further pursue their current witch hunt against conservative voices, far beyond what we have already seen. In order to win a fight with conservatives they will first have to silence us so that our side of the argument is never seen or considered by the rest of the population. If they allow us to be heard, we will undoubtedly win because facts and moral reason are on our side.
It is hard to demonize people that simply want to be free.
But, if you can silence conservatives and moderates, then the narrative can be rigged. The establishment spin doctors can tell people that we don’t actually want freedom; we want something else, something evil and nefarious. They can tell people we are “fascists”, and that we are “racists” and that we actually want tyranny. Who is going to tell the public otherwise when we are removed from all available platforms and our websites are booted off service providers due to “dangerous ideas”?
Gun Control Madness
I know that some people think that leftists under Biden will not try to carry out a widespread gun crackdown and that much of the current talk is merely hollow rhetoric. I disagree. I think the globalists are going for broke, and they need to get as many combat capable firearms as they can from Americans soon. Democrats will push hard for legislation like HR 127.
They will then offer a “compromise” with Republicans and the NRA, cutting out portions of the bill. This will be a trick to make the public think that the new restrictions are a “reasonable compromise”. They think we will breath a sigh of relief and say “Well, at least they didn’t take everything…”
The gun grabbers are delusional.
What will really happen is millions of gun owners will pass local and state laws negating federal restrictions. No conservatives are going to give up their gun rights, allow red flag laws to be implemented or allow high capacity firearms to be limited; not at this stage in the game.
International Intervention
Eventually, leftists and the establishment will realize that conservatives will be harder to subjugate than they expected. They will discover that a large part of the US military and law enforcement is on our side. They will start to see mutiny among the people that they rely on as cannon fodder to carry out their dictates.
Even now, there are sheriff’s departments across the country refusing to enforce lockdown orders. And, 30% to 50% of medical professional say they will not be taking the covid vaccine depending on the state. When the rebellion goes live, this is when the globalists will have to pursue extreme options. They will not be able to win using domestic forces. Instead, they will seek out an international response, probably through the United Nations.
The rationale will be that the US has an enormous nuclear arsenal and that the international community cannot allow these weapons to fall into the hands of “white supremacists”. This is when the real fight will begin. If international intervention fails in the US, the globalists will find their heads on the chopping block. If the globalists win the fight in the US then there will be very few people left to resist them in the years going forward.
I have had numerous readers from all over the world write to me, saying that they believe in the face of the pandemic lockdowns it is now all up to Americans to turn the tide. I agree. A successful rebellion against globalism in America will lead to rebellions elsewhere, but the fact remains that if we lose, no one else will dare lift a finger. The future is in our hands.
* * *
If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch. Learn more about it HERE.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 23:40 - First-Ever "Space Hotel" Begins Construction In 2025, Operational By 2027
First-Ever “Space Hotel” Begins Construction In 2025, Operational By 2027
Orbital Assembly Corp., a California-based startup, has raised a million dollars with aims at opening an out-of-this-world space hotel in low Earth orbit by 2027, according to Daily Mail.
Orbital calls itself the “world’s first large-scale space construction company” and has grand ambitions to build the first space hotel in low Earth orbit, beginning in 2025. The hotel will be equipped with restaurants, a cinema, spa, and space pods (rooms) for 400 people.
The 3-year-old company plans to use robots to construct the celestial hotel shaped like a Ferris wheel. The 650-foot-wide wheel-shaped structure will spin with an angular velocity high enough to generate moon-like levels of artificial gravity for occupants.
If realized, Voyager Station will be the biggest human-made structure in space. It will be made up of a series of rings, with modules attached to the rings’ outermost area.
Some of these 24 modules will house crew quarters, power systems, research labs, and supplies.
The rotating wheel space station was an idea derived out of the 1950s from aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun.
To complete the build and make it affordable, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has dramatically lowered the cost of launching things into space. Before the reusable Falcon 9 rocket, launching items into space cost around $8,000 per kg – prices are now around $2,000/kg. SpaceX believes Starship will bring it to list a few hundred dollars.
Orbital is set to test the concept with a much smaller scale prototype space station in a zero-gravity research facility.
“This will be the next industrial revolution,” explained John Blincow, founder of the Gateway Foundation, adding it will create a new space industry. The Voyager station’s concept was first realized with Gateway Foundation in 2012, then rolled into Orbital in 2018.
Essentially a new space race has already begun as NASA works to commercialize spaceflight. This shift of space exploration: from the government to private corporations, has already ignited a space boom and could help boost the economy in the coming years.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 23:20 - Escobar: The Shape Of Things To Come In China
Escobar: The Shape Of Things To Come In China
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
It’s Lianghui (“Two Sessions”) time – the annual ritual of the Beijing leadership. The stars of the show are the top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; and the traditional delivery of a work report by the Prime Minister to the top legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC).
The review of the draft outline of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan will proceed all the way to March 15. But in the current juncture, this is not only about 2025 (remember Made in China 2025, which remains in effect). The planning goes long-range towards targets in the Vision 2035 project (achieving “basic socialist modernization”) and even beyond to 2049, the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
Premier Li Keqiang, delivering the government work report for 2021, stressed that the target for GDP growth is “above 6%” (the IMF had previously projected 8.1%). That includes the creation of at least 11 million new urban jobs.
On foreign policy, Li could not draw a sharper contrast with the Hegemon: “China will pursue an independent foreign policy of peace” and will “promote the building of a new type of international relations”.
That’s code for Beijing eventually working with Washington on specific dossiers, but most of all focusing on strengthening trade/investment/finance relations with the EU, ASEAN, Japan and the Global South.
The outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for the Chinese economy had already been designed last October, at the CCP plenum. The NPC will now approve it. The key focus is the “dual circulation” policy, whose best definition, translated from Mandarin, is “double development dynamics”.
That means a concerted drive to consolidate and expand the domestic market while continuing to push foreign trade/investment – as in the myriad Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. Conceptually, this amounts to a quite sophisticated, very Daoist, yin and yang balancing.
In early 2021, President Xi Jinping, while extolling Chinese “conviction and resilience, as well as our determination and confidence”, was keen to stress the nation faces “unprecedented challenges and opportunities”. He told the Politburo “favorable social conditions” must be created by all means available all the way to 2025, 2035 and 2049.
Which brings us to this new stage of Chinese development.
The key target to watch is “common prosperity” (or, better yet, “shared prosperity”), to be implemented alongside technological innovations, respect for the environment, and fully addressing the “rural question”.
Xi has been adamant: there’s too much inequality in China – regional, urban-rural, income disparities.
It’s as if in a cool reading of the dialectical drive of historical materialism in China, we would arrive at the following model. Thesis: imperial dynasties. Antithesis: Mao Zedong. Synthesis: Deng Xiaoping, followed by a few derivations (especially Jiang Zemin) all the way to the real synthesis: Xi.
On the Chinese “threat”
Li stressed China’s success in containing Covid-19 domestically; the nation spent at least $62 billion on it. This should be read as a subtle message, addressed especially to the Global South, about the efficacy of China’s governance system to design and execute not only complex development plans but also cope with serious emergencies.
What’s ultimately at stake in this competition between wobbly Western (neo)liberal democracies and “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (copyright Deng Xiaoping) is the capacity to manage and improve people’s lives. Chinese scholars are very proud of their national development plan ethos, defined as SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).
A very good example is how China, in less than two decades, managed to extricate 800 million people out of poverty: an absolute first in History.
All of the above is rarely evoked as Atlanticist circles drown in virtually 24/7 China demonization hysteria. Wang Huiyao, the director of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, at least had the merit to bring into the discussion Sinologist Kerry Brown of King’s College, London.
Drawing from comparisons between Leibniz – close to Jesuit scholars, interested in Confucianism – and Montesquieu – who only saw a despotic, autocratic, imperial system – Brown re-examines 250 years of entrenched Western positions on China and remarks how is “more difficult than ever” to engage in a reasonable debate.
He identifies three major problems.
1. Throughout modern history, there’s no Western appreciation of China as a strong and powerful nation, and its restored historical importance. Western mindsets are not ready to deal with it.
2. The modern West never really thought of China as a global power; at best as a land power. China was never seen as a naval power, or capable of exercising power way beyond its borders.
3. Propelled by the iron certainty over its values – enter the very much debased concept of “true democracy” – the Atlanticist West has no idea what to make of Chinese values. Ultimately the West is not interested in understanding China. Confirmation bias reigns; the result is China as a “threat to the West”.
Brown points to the key predicament afflicting any scholar or analyst trying to explain China: how to convey China’s extremely complex worldview, how to capture the China story in a few words. Soundbites do not apply.
Examples: explaining how a whopping 1.3 billion people in China have some sort of health security, and how 1 billion enjoy some kind of social security. Or explaining the intricate details of China’s ethnic policies.
Premier Li, delivering his report, vowed to “forge a strong sense of community among the Chinese people and encourage all of China’s ethnic groups to work in concert for common prosperity and development”. He did not specifically mention Xinjiang or Tibet. It’s an uphill task to explain the trials and tribulations of integrating ethnic minorities into a national project amid non-stop hysteria on Xinjiang, Taiwan, South China Sea and Hong Kong.
Come and join the party
Whatever the Atlanticist West’s whims, what matters for the Chinese masses is how the new Five-Year Plan will deliver, practically, what Xi has previously described as “high-quality” economic reform.
Things look good for powerhouses Shanghai and Guangdong – they were already aiming at 6% growth. Hubei – where Covid-19 cases first appeared – is actually targeting 10%.
Based on frenetic social media activity, public opinion confidence in the Beijing leadership remains solid, considering a series of factors. China won the “health war” against Covid-19 in record time; economic growth is back; absolute poverty has been eradicated, according to the original timetable; the civilization-state is firmly established as a “moderately prosperous society” 100 years after the founding of the Communist Party.
Since the start of the millennium, China’s GDP grew no less than 11-fold. Over the past 10 years, GDP more than doubled, from $6 trillion to $15 trillion. No less than 99 million rural people, 832 counties and 128,000 rural villages were the last ones to be extricated from absolute poverty.
This complex hybrid economy is now even engaged in setting up an elaborate, “sweet” trap for Western firms. Sanctions? Don’t be fools; come here and enjoy doing business in a market of at least 700 million consumers.
As I’ve noted last year, the systemic process in play is like a sophisticated mix of internationalist Marxism with Confucianism (privileging harmony, abhorring conflict): the framework for “community with a shared future for mankind”. One country – actually a civilization-state, focused on its renewed historical mission as re-emerging superpower. Two sessions. And so many targets – and all of them achievable.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 23:00 - Watch: Boeing "Loyal Wingman" Stealth Drones Makes First Flight
Watch: Boeing “Loyal Wingman” Stealth Drones Makes First Flight
About two years after we told readers the pilotless “Loyal Wingman” drone was being developed in Australia, the military unmanned aerial vehicle that uses artificial intelligence to attack enemy targets has conducted its first test flight, according to ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
Boeing developed the Loyal Wingman in partnership with the Defence Department and Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). It’s the first time in more than five decades a military plane has been designed and manufactured in Australia.
The RAAF wants the Loyal Wingman to fly alongside high-value assets such as the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, Boeing P-8 Poseidon, and Boeing E-7 Wedgetail.
Designed by Boeing Phantom Works in Brisbane, the largest Boeing development center outside the US, the stealth drone has a nautical mile range of 3,704 km (approximately 2,300 miles). The fighter-like jet is 11.6 meters long and will be embedded with a host of electronic warfare sensors. As far as the type of weapons the drone will carry, well, that remains classified.
The drone’s artificial intelligence will allow it to fly independently to support manned aircraft while maintaining a safe distance between other aircraft.
Australia plans to spend $89 million to acquire three more Loyal Wingman later this year.
“It is a milestone for Australia, for the Boeing Company, and for the Royal Australian Air Force,” said President of Boeing Australia, Dr. Brendan Nelson.
A boost for our industry team and Australian sovereign capability as we partner with @AusAirForce to co-develop 3 more #LoyalWingman to advance the aircraft’s capabilities.
Thanks @DeptDefence for your commitment to growing Aussie innovation!
Release: https://t.co/Tht7saqd45 pic.twitter.com/poV0AQO89d
— Boeing Australia (@BoeingAustralia) March 2, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
… and here’s the video of the first-ever test flight of the stealth drone.
Watch the first ever #LoyalWingman flight.
“A year ago this was a concept – now it’s a reality – it’s amazing to imagine and then create a new uncrewed aerial capability with our partner @BoeingAustralia. Designed & made right here in Australia!” AVM Cath Roberts. #AusAirForce pic.twitter.com/f5fUqRgpOC
— Royal Australian Air Force (@AusAirForce) March 2, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The drone’s development comes as a great power competition between the US and China will continue to flourish in the 2020s. Both countries are fighting for global dominance and have been quickly modernizing their respective militaries for potential conflict in the Pacific, which is not that far away from Australia.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 22:40 - San Francisco Pays $16.1 Million To Shelter 300 Homeless In Tents
San Francisco Pays $16.1 Million To Shelter 300 Homeless In Tents
Authored by Rick Moran via PJMedia.com,
California is in the midst of a self-induced homelessness crisis that shows no sign of abating anytime soon. The crisis is especially acute in San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has erected three tent cities to house about 300 homeless people.
The cost? About $61,000 a year per tent. All told, the cost of the program is $16.1 million. I guess in San Francisco, even the tents are first class.
The city is running a $650 million deficit and the tent city isn’t eligible for reimbursement by the government, so that money comes out of city coffers. If the homeless were housed in a first-class hotel, the federal government would gladly reimburse the city for that, but not for a few measely tents?
In the six “Safe Sleeping Villages” set up by the city of San Francisco during the pandemic, the cost of maintaining a single tent-camping spot is $5,000 per month, or $61,000 per year – more than it would cost to put each of these people in a market-rate apartment.
The insane costs of running these sleeping “villages,” which only have space for a total of 262 tents spread across the six sites, makes one immediately think of the criticisms that are leveled against the Homeless Industrial Complex, as conservative commentators are eager to call it. The revelation of the pricetag for the tent program — $16.1 million for the year — came at a budget committee meeting on Wednesday, as the Chronicle reports, via Abigail Stewart-Kahn, the interim director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
In addition to the tents, the city supplies meals, sanitation services, and police protection.
The cost boils down to $190 per tent per night, which includes 24-hour security, bathrooms, maintenance, and three meals per day. This is cheaper than the per-day cost for the hotel program, but the hotel program is getting 100% federal reimbursement. (Thanks, Biden.)
Also, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing has committed to rehousing everyone as the [sic] come out of the hotel rooms — an enormous task, given that there are upwards of 2,000 people currently in the program.
San Francisco counts about 6,400 people as homeless, although that doesn’t include people living out of their cars, or the thousands who flit from temporary shelters to relative’s residences to friends and neighbors — anywhere they can find a place to lay their body down. Many of these people have jobs that don’t pay them enough to live within 50 miles of San Francisco.
The city was basically forced to adopt the tent idea because most homeless shelters closed down due to COVID restrictions. But $5,000 a tent? Certainly, allowances should be made but that is a ludicrous amount of money to spend on any group, regardless of their hard-luck circumstances.
Even city council members are critical.
“I understand the motivation to create sleeping space during this COVID-19 crisis,” says Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, speaking to the Chronicle.
“But we really need to dive deep to see if this a sustainable model… without any federal reimbursement.”
Perhaps if they had “dove deep” before they wasted this money, they wouldn’t be regretting it now.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 22:20 - Money Can Buy Happiness After All
Money Can Buy Happiness After All
What’s the relationship between money and happiness? Previous studies have indicated that, while money can in fact buy happiness, it plateaus at approximately $75,000/year.
However, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang details below, new research suggests otherwise.
Using over a million real-time reports from a large U.S. sample group, a recent study found that happiness increases linearly with reported income (logarithmic), and continues to rise beyond the $80,000/year mark.
Below, we’ll provide more details on the research methodology, while touching on a few possible reasons why higher incomes may improve people’s happiness levels.
How is Happiness Measured?
Past research on happiness relative to income has relied on retrospective data, which leaves room for human memory errors. In contrast, this new study uses real-time, logged data from a mood tracking app, allowing for a more accurate representation of respondents’ experienced well-being.
Data was also collected by random prompts over a period of time, with dozens of entries logged for each single respondent. This provides a more well-rounded representation of a person’s overall well-being.
Two forms of well-being were measured in this study:
-
Experienced well-being
A person’s mood and feeling throughout daily life. -
Evaluative well-being:
Someone’s perception of their life upon reflection.
Both forms of well-being increased with higher incomes, but evaluative well-being showed a more drastic split between the lower and higher income groups.
The Results (Measured in Standard Deviations from Mean)
Why Does Money Buy Happiness?
The report warns that any theories behind why happiness increases with income are purely speculative. However, it does list a few possibilities:
-
Increased comfort
As someone earns more, they may have the ability to purchase things that reduce suffering. This is particularly true when comparing low to moderate income groups—larger incomes below $80,000/year still showed a strong association with reduced negative feelings. -
More control
Control seems to be tied to respondents’ happiness levels. In fact, having a sense of control accounted for 74% of the association between income and well-being. -
Money matters
Not all respondents cared about money. But for those who did, it had a significant impact on their perceived well-being. In general, lower income earners were happier if they didn’t value money, while higher income earners were happier if they thought money mattered.
Whatever the cause may be, one thing is clear—Biggie Smalls was wrong. Looks like more money doesn’t necessarily mean more problems.
* * *
Like this? Then you might enjoy this article, Which Countries are the Most (and Least) Happy?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 22:00 -
- These Are The Companies Whose Employees Most Often Get Payday Loans
These Are The Companies Whose Employees Most Often Get Payday Loans
Submitted by Priceonomics,
Payday loans are used by people who need money fast, who often have no other way of borrowing money to cover an unexpected expense. The benefit of these kinds of loans is they enable you to meet your immediate financial obligations. The risk, however, is you are taking on debt and incurring future obligations that require future income to fulfill.
This article analyzes the employment status of people who take on payday loans. Do they have jobs that will enable them to pay back the loans in a timely fashion or are they cornering themselves into an amount of debt without the income to ever repay the loans?
LendUp provides loans to people to cover unexpected expenses or when they need the money fast. Due to its years of underwriting loans and working with customers, the company knows a lot about the financial background of loan recipients.
In this analysis, LendUp reviews the data on the employment characteristics of Americans who turn to payday loans. How many people who turn to payday loans have jobs? Are they employed full-time and where do they work?
The overwhelming majority of payday loan recipients (81.2%) have full time jobs. When you add the number of recipients that work part-time or are already retired, that accounts for well over 90% of recipients. Most commonly, payday loan recipients work in sales, office, and healthcare support. The most common employer of LendUp users who seek a payday loan is Walmart, followed by Kaiser, Target and Home Depot.
* * *
As part of its loan application process, LendUp asks borrowers to state their employment status and current employer. For this analysis, the company reviewed loans from 2017 to 2020 to see the most common employment status, industries and employers. The data is from states where LendUp currently operates (WI, MO, TX, LA, MS, TN, CA) plus additional states in which LendUp previously made loans (IL, KS, LA, MN, OK, OR, WA, WY). When considering the most common employers of payday loan recipients, this data set will reflect the largest employers in our largest markets, like California.
To begin, let’s look at the employment status of people who get payday loans via LendUp. What percentage of loan recipients have full time employment versus some alternative?
81.2% of all payday loan recipients on LendUp have full-time employment, meaning that they should have income coming to pay back their debts. More commonly, people use payday loans to cover the timing mismatch of having an expense coming in before the paycheck arrives to cover it. If you add those that are part-time employed, retired, or self-employed to those with full-time employment, you account for 96.1% of payday loan recipients. Just 1.2% of payday loan recipients are classified as unemployed.
As part of its application process, LendUp payday loan recipients report information on their industry of employment. The following chart breaks down loan recipients by industry:
The most common industry for needing a payday loan is sales related. This could include retail workers or sales people working on a commission with an erratic pay schedule. The second most common industry is people working in office and administrative. Of note, the third most common category is healthcare related.
Lastly, let’s look at the companies with the most payday loan recipients. As mentioned prior, keep in mind that this data reflects the employment base in areas where LendUp operates and that also larger employers will naturally show up more often on the below list:
Walmart, the largest employer in the United States, is the number one employer of payday loan recipients through LendUp. Twice as many payday loan recipients work at Walmart compared to the second most common company, Kaiser. The list is dominated by retail companies, but also healthcare, education, and government.
* * *
This analysis shows that the vast majority of payday loan recipients are employed full time. Despite earning a regular income, expenses come up that people do not have the bank account balances to cover. Many of these people work in school, hospitals, and the stores that have provided essential services throughout the pandemic. People get payday loans to cover urgent expenses, and for many Americans, these loans are the only source of funding available during times of emergency or when financial needs exceed available funds.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 21:40 - Emmy For Slow-Motion Career Trainwreck: Cuomo Stripped Of Emergency Powers As Sexual Assault Charges Mount
Emmy For Slow-Motion Career Trainwreck: Cuomo Stripped Of Emergency Powers As Sexual Assault Charges Mount
In November, the TV Academy presented Cuomo with the International Emmy Founders Award “in recognition of his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and his masterful use of TV to inform and calm people around the world.” It sure wishes it could take that day back.
Late on Friday, three days after NY legislators reached a deal to strip disgraced NY governor Andrew Cuomo – who now finds himself in a vortex of potentially criminal scandals involving both nursing home deaths and alleged sexual assaults – of his emergency powers, and two days after an “embarrassed” Cuomo told a disgusted TV audience (well everyone except for the virtue-signaling sycophants at CNN and MSNBC) that he was “very sorry” but was “not resigning” in the aftermath of his own sexual assault scandal, late on Friday, the New York legislature approved a bill to repeal the pandemic-era emergency powers afforded to the scandal-plagued Governor Cuomo.
The measure, which received final passage from the Assembly on Friday evening, revoked temporary powers given to Cuomo in March that effectively gave him dic(k)tator powers, allowing him to supersede the legislature, as well as local laws, to issue hundreds of sweeping emergency directives on everything from closing businesses and schools to mandating the use of masks. In retrospect, this was the worst – and deadliest – decision the legislature had made who may be just as culpable of crimes as Cuomo .
Under the new measure, the governor cannot issue any new orders. However, directives already in place can stand or be altered with approval by the legislature. The legislation, sponsored by Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, would require Cuomo to issue a notice five days before extending or modifying any directives. The Legislature, or local municipality if applicable, would review the order. The Legislature can terminate the directives at any time and no directive could be acted on unless the governor has responded to all comments from relevant legislative committee chairs, or municipal entities, according to the bill.
The governor is expected to sign the measure after saying he helped negotiate it.
As Bloomberg reports, the rebuke from lawmakers, where Democrats hold a supermajority in both chambers, follows public outcry over sexual-harassment claims by what are now three women against Cuomo and allegations that his administration deliberately covered up Covid-19 deaths of nursing-home residents.
In the latest twist which emerged late in the week, Cuomo’s administration said Thursday that officials had altered a July report of data on the deaths to exclude those who had died outside the facilities. The administration was responding to a New York Times report that said these changes show that the state had a fuller accounting of the deaths at the time, despite resisting requests for that data.
Meanwhile, in a remarkable sign of bipartisanship, a growing list of state lawmakers, including in his own Democratic party, have called for Cuomo’s resignation as scandal upon scandal mounted. The third-term governor has apologized for making women feel “uncomfortable,” and has acknowledged mistakes in reporting of the nursing-home data, but has refused to step down.
Earlier this week, Cuomo said he had brokered the emergency-power deal with lawmakers to focus just on curbing new directives. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a fellow Democrat, disputed Cuomo, saying lawmakers didn’t work with the governor to cut a deal.
Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris said on the floor that the governor lied to the public and was not involved in negotiations. Asked if he was bothered by the lie, Gianaris said: “There is so much that this governor has done that I’m bothered by.” Asked if he trusts the governor, Gianaris said: “I haven’t trusted this governor in a long time.”
Gianaris is a democrat. Imagine if he was republican. Currently, only the governor may declare and end a state of emergency. “For the first time ever, we are adding a power for the Legislature to nullify a state of emergency,” Gianaris said.
The just passed bill also would require Cuomo to publicly post all information justifying emergency directives online in a searchable format.
But Republican lawmakers argued that the bill doesn’t fully revoke Cuomo’s powers, and it allows previous directives to continue. They also said the measure should have an expiration date. “Let’s be clear about what this bill actually does and stop putting lipstick on a pig,” Republican Assemblyman Michael Lawler said on the floor. Senator Andrew Lanza, a Staten Island Republican, said his no vote was “not about Andrew Cuomo the person.”
“This is about the Senate and the Assembly having a say with respect to what happens with their constituents back home,” he said. “One-party rule is one thing. One-man rule is entirely another.”
As Bloomberg notes, Cuomo’s emergency powers were set to expire on April 30, but as the pandemic wore on, lawmakers bristled at Cuomo’s growing authority. Republicans introduced a number of measures to strip Cuomo’s emergency powers, but they had failed to take hold with enough of the Democrat-controlled Legislature. Lawmakers worried that revoking his authority would affect the state’s ability to quickly respond to the health crisis. Democrats’ united push to revoke Cuomo’s powers highlights growing tension against the governor among members of his own party. The move comes just four weeks until the state budget deadline, threatening to impede Cuomo’s agenda.
Calls to pull back Cuomo’s powers increased after a Jan. 28 report from Attorney General Letitia James said that more nursing-home residents died from the virus than the state Health Department had reported. A top Cuomo aide later admitted that the state withheld the data from state lawmakers while it was being investigated by the federal government.
“While early versions of the report included out-of-facility deaths, the Covid task force was not satisfied that the data had been verified against hospital data and so the final report used only data for in- facility deaths, which was disclosed in the report,” state Health Department spokesperson Gary Holmes, said in a statement. “DOH was comfortable with the final report.”
Senator James Skoufis, in a statement on Friday, said the latest revelation in the Times report “demands answers and accountability.” He called for an investigation into state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker’s handling of nursing-home deaths.
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki called the reports “troubling.” She said the Biden administration “certainly would support any outside investigation but this wouldn’t be a determination made by us.”
Meanwhile, things are just getting worse for Cuomo: on Thursday, one of the governor’s accusers, former aide Charlotte Bennett said in an interview with CBS News that the governor propositioned her and asked if a past sexual trauma continued to affect her intimate relationships, an exchange that left her “terrified.”
In response to the mounting allegations that their boss is a sexual freak with a Napoleon complex, at least four Cuomo aides have left their jobs since the allegations surfaced, including first deputy press secretary Will Burns and Gareth Rhodes, a senior adviser who often appeared at Cuomo’s televised virus briefings and helped lead the state’s vaccination effort. Rhodes’ wife on Monday tweeted her support for Anna Ruch, one of the governor’s accusers.
Then, on Friday, Cuomo’s office confirmed the latest departures of two women from his staff: interim policy adviser Erin Hammond and press secretary Caitlin Girouard. Girouard, who departed on Friday, had issued the statement last month denying sexual-harassment allegations of Cuomo’s first accuser, former economic aide Lindsay Boylan. She said Boylan’s claims were “quite simply false” in a statement issued on Feb. 24. In a December statement, she had also said “there is simply no truth to these claims.”
Girouard said she accepted a job offer in the private sector on Jan. 26 and that it was the “honor of a lifetime serving Governor Cuomo.” Hammond didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but an administration spokesman said her departure had been planned for several months.
The uproar over the various allegations has taken a toll. Cuomo’s approval rating dropped to 45% in a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday, from 72% in May 2020. While 59% say he should not seek a fourth term as governor, 55% of New York voters say Cuomo should not resign, as numerous Democrats in the Legislature have called on him to do.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 21:21 - Iran's IRGC Says It Thwarted Rare Airline Hijacking Attempt Midflight
Iran’s IRGC Says It Thwarted Rare Airline Hijacking Attempt Midflight
A bizarre story circulating widely in Iranian state media sources says the country’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) thwarted a rare attempt to hijack a passenger plane soon after it took off from an airport in the southwest city of Ahvaz.
An IRGC statement said a terrorist targeted an Iran Air Fokker 100 regional commercial jet that was bound for the northwestern city of Mashhad, and tried to force it to fly south across the Persian Gulf. The incident reportedly happened Thursday and resulted in the plane making an emergency landing at Isfahan Airport in the central part of the country.
There were no casualties or injuries reported, and few details given, but only that IRGC operatives neutralized and arrested the would-be hijacker during the flight, which the government statement described has having sought to divert to the “southern shores of the Persian Gulf.”
As The Times of Israel observed in reporting it, that description “would include the countries of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, three nations long suspicious of Iran’s intentions in the wider region.”
Such hijacking attempts are very rare in the Islamic Republic, particularly also because Iran typically stations undercover armed marshals aboard domestic flights. The last hijacking incident happened in 2000.
The IRGC statement issued Friday praised the swift response of IRGC air marshals:
“The noble and heroic nation of the Islamic Iran is informed that with the grace of God, the conspiracy to hijack a Fokker 100 aircraft belonging to Iran Air… which had taken off from Ahvaz airport to the holy city of Mashhad at 22:10 hours Thursday night was neutralized with the vigilance of the IRGC’s flight security team.”
The military says it continues to investigate “dimensions and angles of the conspiracy”.
Some of #Iran‘s media outlets–including IRIB & Mostaghel–are using this photo in reporting about the hijacking of the flight from Ahvaz to Mashhad yesterday that appears to be years old per a reverse image search. 🤔 pic.twitter.com/xSHvQBTto4
— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) March 5, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
In the past when there are unexpected terrorist disruptions in the country, Tehran has quickly laid blame on foreign plots and attackers, including routinely pointing the finger at Israel and Saudi-sponsored operatives.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 21:20 - "The Saudi-Led Coalition Is Struggling" – Ansar Allah's "Concerning" Success In Ops Against Riyadh
“The Saudi-Led Coalition Is Struggling” – Ansar Allah’s “Concerning” Success In Ops Against Riyadh
Submitted by South Front,
Yemen’s Ansar Allah are on the offensive on Marib city, once again. The Saudi-led coalition is struggling.
The Houthis, as Ansar Allah, are colloquially known, reportedly captured 10 out of 14 districts of the city in their latest push on March 4th.
The Houthi government deputy foreign minister, Hussein al-Ezzi said that apart from the significant central district of Marib city, every other significant location was under their control. A key strategic location, home to one of the largest oil infrastructures in Yemen, Marib has seen intensified fighting and a renewed military offensive. It is also the last Saudi stronghold in the relatively calm area of Central Yemen. If entirely lost by the Saudi-led coalition, the city would allow the Houthis to carry out even more attacks on targets within the Kingdom’s borders.
Saudi-led coalition airstrikes have continued bombarding Houthi positions, according to Houthi media. These manage to impede the swift movement of forces, but haven’t deterred the offensive. As it usually happens when the Houthis get the upper hand anywhere in Yemen, the so-called Western world begins yelling “foul”.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres immediately said that widespread fighting could lead to the displacement of thousands. He called on Ansar Allah to halt their offensive on every front, and primarily on Marib. No calls for the Saudi-led coalition to stop their airstrikes or continuous ceasefire violations in al-Hudaydah were made.
In addition to Marib City, the Houthis struck behind enemy lines. This included two attacks.
The first one targeted the King Khalid Air Base in the southern Saudi province with a Qasef-2K suicide drone. It was reportedly successful. Ansar Allah claimed to have had fired a cross-border missile and struck a Saudi Aramco facility in the Read Sea city of Jeddah.
According to the Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Sarea, the attack took place at dawn on March 4th, and was carried out with a Quds-2 winged missile. It reportedly struck its target.
Riyadh has not admitted either of the attacks, and there are no other details. The UN also said it has received unconfirmed reports.
The Axis of Resistance appears to be really pushing its enemies back, with 4 US convoys being targeted in the same day in Iraq, and Israel having a lull in its activity in recent days.
Tel Aviv accused Iran of carrying out an “eco-terrorism” attack by spilling oil in the Mediterranean Sea. There are concerns that a large-scale, heavy retaliation is coming. Time will only show if a response will really come and in what form it will be.
Currently, the Houthis are pushing successfully and the US is suffering for its attack on the Iraqi-Syriain border, and Israel is plotting its next move.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 21:00 - The Four Day Work Week Is Catching On
The Four Day Work Week Is Catching On
As Covid has likely forever changed the work landscape for many companies, more and more institutions are even starting to experiment with a four day work week.
Awin Chief Executive Officer Adam Ross, who made the change at his company, allowing his workers to leave early on Fridays, recently told Bloomberg: “We firmly believe that happy, engaged, and well-balanced employees produce much better work. They find ways to work smarter, and they’re just as productive.”
And its not just Awin. It’s a trend that is growing much larger around the globe. For example, according to ZipRecruiter, postings that have mentioned a four day work week have tripled over the last three years, to 62 per 10,000 postings. Major companies like Unilever are even experimenting with the four day work week. Spain’s government is looking into whether to subsidize the idea and it is even catching on in Japan.
Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy, said: “The four-day week is picking up momentum. For the large majority of firms, reducing working hours is an entirely realistic goal.”
The question is will the new schedule catch on. Six or seven day work weeks have been the norm since the late nineteenth century, Bloomberg notes. Even nowadays, popular billionaires like Jack Ma have hailed a six day a week work week as “vital for long-term success”. Bloomberg also noted that “in the U.K., the Labour Party lost the 2019 general election even as it campaigned on a pledge to trim the standard workweek to 32 hours within a decade.”
The push to change workplace environments has been pronounced coming out of Covid. And the four day work week is showing improved productivity, according to a study from the University of Reading. There has also been a push to move to a four day work week to “rethink working patterns, and reduce energy consumption.”
Germany’s 2.3-million-member IG Metall proposed the idea when Covid started to wreak havoc on the auto industry, as did a group led by former U.K. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. Renault SA is giving about 13,000 of its workers Fridays off until mid-August as it looks to cut costs.
Ross said that at his company, he has an 80 employee task force helping with the transition – which includes deciding which employees will be off when and figuring out the logistics of having his finance department work five days a week.
“The experience has been so positive that he can’t imagine going back,” he told Bloomberg. “Companies used to make provisions for people’s physical health but never their mental health. I see that changing, and we want to be a driver for it.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 20:40 - There's Only One News Story, Repeating Over And Over Again
There’s Only One News Story, Repeating Over And Over Again
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone,
Doing daily commentary on world power dynamics feels a lot like staring up at the sky watching clouds. Sometimes you see a three-legged pony up there, sometimes a gargoyle, sometimes a laughing baby, but really you’re only ever watching tiny water droplets being moved around by atmospheric winds. They can take on any number of different shapes, but no matter how long you lay there staring up at them you’re really only ever seeing one dynamic play out with different appearances from moment to moment.
The daily news is very much the same, except most consumers of news media aren’t aware that they’re watching clouds. They really do think they’re looking at a three-legged pony, a gargoyle, a laughing baby.
“Ooh, there’s a doggy!” they squeal and clap their hands. “Ooh! Ooh now it’s a kitty cat!”
They don’t see the real underlying dynamics, they just see the forms those dynamics are taking from moment to moment. They don’t see the water droplets being moved around by the breeze, they just see the shapes.
Just as clouds are always water droplets in the air no matter what shapes they take, news stories are only ever one dynamic playing out with different appearances.
There is only ever one news story on any given day, and it is always the same news story: wealthy and powerful people seek more wealth and power, and narratives are spun to advance these agendas.
That’s it. That’s all you’re ever seeing when you read the news. There are sports scores and the occasional celebrity death mixed in for entertainment, but when it comes to major political and governmental events you’re only ever seeing the effects of wealthy and powerful people working to obtain more wealth and power and narratives being spun to promote these agendas.
Today it’s the Democratic Party killing the $15 minimum wage, protests in Haiti, US electoral shenanigans in Ecuador, bombings and sanctions on Syria, China bad, Russia bad. Appearances which taken individually at first glance look like breaking news stories, but when examined closely and integrated into the big picture are actually the exact same dynamics that were playing out yesterday with slightly different shapes. Tomorrow those same dynamics will play out again in different appearances. The shapes are different, but it’s always water droplets in the air.
It’s the exact same news story playing out over and over and over again, day after day after day. Alarm clock goes off at six AM, Sonny and Cher sing “I Got You Babe”, and Bill Murray wakes up to Groundhog Day once again.
“Well it looks like Jibby Jorpson is set to be the new leader, somehow staving off an early challenge from the popular socialist candidate,” reports the news man. “In other news, the ostensibly left-wing party will be unable to help the working class due to bliff blaff bloffa reasons, a dangerous dictator in a crucial geostrategic region urgently needs to be removed from power because widdle diddle doodad, and coming up: do we need more internet censorship to prevent wakka dakka dingdong?”
Next morning. Alarm clock. “I Got You Babe”, Bill Murray, Groundhog Day again.
“Well it looks like Miggy Morpson is set to be the the new leader, somehow staving off an early challenge from the popular socialist candidate,” reports the news man. “In other news, the ostensibly left-wing party will be unable to help the working class due to wing wang wappa reasons, a dangerous dictator in a crucial geostrategic region urgently needs to be removed from power because kooka kakka keeka, and coming up: do we need more internet censorship to prevent yope yap yimmy?”
Over and over and over again. And over and over and over. The excuses change, the narrative spin changes, the component parts of the agendas change, but it’s only ever the same one story: wealthy and powerful people seek more wealth and power, and narratives are spun to advance these agendas.
Once you see the clouds as clouds, you never again get confused about what those shapes in the sky really are. You see different iterations of the exact same dynamic where you used to see individual breaking news stories.
When you have this insight and realize it’s always the same story playing out over and over again, there’s a common temptation to give in to despair and bitterness. Maybe you keep fighting, but you do it with a bored, jaded and entirely uninspired mentality.
It doesn’t need to be this way though. Just because the fight isn’t happening the way you used to imagine doesn’t mean it’s hopeless or tedious, it just means you need to look at it differently. You don’t have a 50-fight career against 50 different opponents who you fought for 10 rounds each, you have a one-fight career against a single opponent who you’ve been fighting for 500 rounds.
Just because the fight is longer than you once thought and the opponent much more resilient than you once thought doesn’t mean that one long fight is without end, or that it is unwinnable. It just means it looks different than it used to. It was ponies and doggies, now it’s clouds. You still bite down on your mouthpiece and throw leather with all your strength.
But it’s important to do it with focus on the whole. When we oppose ruling power structures and the narratives that they are using to advance their agendas, it’s important to also zoom out and point to their place in the whole. It benefits no one to treat any of the manifestations of the recurring one news story as separate from all the other arrangements: you’ve got to tie it in to the greater dynamics of empire and oligarchy at every opportunity. Otherwise you’re just feeding into the illusion of doggies and kitties in the sky.
That’s all we’re ever doing here: trying to point to the recurring Groundhog Day story over and over again from as many different angles as possible to help people see the clouds. We can use individual news stories as illustrations to show people the bigger picture of what’s really going on, but really all we’re ever doing is helping them see it all as water droplets arranging in different shapes from day to day.
Help enough people see the big picture, and the fight is as good as won. Then, and only then, does Bill Murray awaken to a new day.
* * *
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Liked it? Take a second to support Caitlin Johnstone on Patreon!
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 20:20 - Japan Supercomputer Finds Double-Masking Doesn't Work
Japan Supercomputer Finds Double-Masking Doesn’t Work
Many Americans are asking themselves: Is double making offering more protection against COVID-19 than a single mask?
To answer that question, we ask readers: Does anyone wear two condoms?
The answer is probably no. But members of the Biden administration and at least one state governor are touting the extra benefits of double masking.
Last month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the president and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, initially said, “there’s no data that indicates that that is going to make a difference.” He then flip-flopped, saying that the CDC is investigating “whether two masks may be better than one” and added that “it makes common sense”… and added that the reason they have not recommended it until now is that “they are a science-based organization.”
Fauci then added, unscientifically, “if one mask serves as a physical barrier, it makes common sense, and certainly can’t hurt and might help to wear two masks.”
This week, California Governor Gavin Newsom also doubled-down (literally) on double making following Texas and Mississippi actions to go maskless.
“We will be doubling down on mask-wearing,” said Newsom on Thursday, “not arguing to follow the example of Texas and other states that I think are making a terrible mistake.”
According to Reuters, science doesn’t bode well for the folks pushing double masks.
A Japanese supercomputer simulation showed this week that wearing two layers of masks provided minimal benefit in blocking the virus.
A study released by scientific research institute Riken and Kobe University on Thursday contradict Fauci and Newsom’s recommendations that double masking is “common sense.”
“Researchers used the Fugaku supercomputer to model the flow of virus particles from people wearing different types and combinations of mask,” according to Reuters.
They found a single surgical-type mask had 85% effectiveness in blocking particles if worn correctly, and a polyurethane mask was around 89%.
Researchers said wearing two masks doesn’t help because it builds air resistance and causes leakage around the edges.
“The performance of double masking simply does not add up,” wrote lead researcher Makoto Tsubokura.
In this presentation slide supplied by the Riken Center for Computational Sciences. Red is a loosely fitted non-woven mask. Green is a fitted non-woven mask. Green and brown are a non-woven mask with a polyurethane one on top. The bar graph illustrates the “droplet collection efficiency”. The blue bar shows the results of wearing loose-fit non-woven (surgical) mask. while red shows a fitted non-woven mask, and purple shows a fitted non-woven mask plus polyurethane mask.
“Wearing two masks does not make them twice as effective but only slightly more so,” Tsubokura added cited by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
“Wearing one nonwoven mask is enough, and make sure it is put on properly without leaving a gap between the fabric and the nose.”
As JapanToday notes, the findings in part contradict recent recommendations from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that two masks were better than one at reducing a person’s exposure to the coronavirus.
So if two masks don’t work, proven by a Japanese supercomputer, then what is the underlying agenda by US government officials who parade themselves around media outlets touting double making is “common sense”?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 20:00 - As Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling To It More Desperately Than Ever
As Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling To It More Desperately Than Ever
Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,
Twice in the last six weeks, warnings were issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless.
First we had the hysteria over the violence we were told was likely to occur at numerous state capitols on Inauguration Day. “Law enforcement and state officials are on high alert for potentially violent protests in the lead-up to Inauguration Day, with some state capitols boarded up and others temporarily closed ahead of Wednesday’s ceremony,” announced CNN. In an even scarier formulation, NPR intoned that “the FBI is warning of protests and potential violence in all 50 state capitals ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.”
The resulting clampdowns were as extreme as the dire warnings. Washington, D.C. was militarized more than at any point since the 9/11 attack. The military was highly visible on the streets. And, described The Washington Post, “state capitols nationwide locked down, with windows boarded up, National Guard troops deployed and states of emergency preemptively declared as authorities braced for potential violence Sunday mimicking the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump rioters.” All of this, said the paper, “reflected the anxious state of the country ahead of planned demonstrations.”
But none of that happened — not even close. The Washington Post acknowledged three weeks later:
Despite warnings of violent plots around Inauguration Day, only a smattering of right-wing protesters appeared at the nation’s statehouses. In Tallahassee, just five armed men wearing the garb of the boogaloo movement — a loose collection of anti-government groups that say the country is heading for civil war — showed up. Police and National Guard personnel mostly ignored them.
All over the country it was the same story. “But at the moment that Biden was taking the oath of office in Washington, the total number of protesters on the Capitol grounds in Topeka stood at five — two men supporting Trump and two men and a boy ridin’ with Biden,” reported The Wichita Eagle (“With Kansas Capitol in lockdown mode, Inauguration Day protest fizzles). “The protests fizzled out after not many people showed up,” reported the local Florida affiliate in Tallahassee. “The large security efforts dwarfed the protests that materialized by Wednesday evening,” said CNN, as “state capitols and other cities remained largely calm.”
Indeed, the only politically-motivated violence on Inauguration Day was carried out by Antifa and anarchist groups in Portland and Seattle, which caused some minor property damage as part of anti-Biden protests while they “scuffled with police.” CNN, which spent a full week excitedly hyping the likely violence coming to state capitols by right-wing Trump supporters, was forced to acknowledge in its article about their non-existence that “one exception was Portland, where left-wing protesters damaged the Democratic Party of Oregon building during one of several planned demonstrations.”
Completely undeterred by that debacle, Democrats and their media spokespeople returned with a new set of frightening warnings for this week. The date of March 4 has taken on a virtually religious significance for the Q-Anon movement, announced NBC News’ Ben Collins, who was heard on NPR on Thursday speaking through actual, literal journalistic tears as he recounted all the times he called Facebook to plead with them to remove dangerous right-wing extremists on their platform (tears commence at roughly 7:00 mark). Valiantly holding back full-on sobbing, Collins explained that he proved to be so right but it pains and sorrows him to admit this. With his self-proclaimed oracle status fully in place, he prophesized that March 4 had taken on special dangers because Q-Anon followers concluded that this is when Trump would be inaugurated.
This is how apocalyptic cult leaders always function. When the end of the world did not materialize on January 6, Collins insisted that January 20 was the day of the violent reckoning. When nothing happened on that day, he moved the Doomsday Date to March 4. The flock cannot remain in a state of confusion for too long about why the world has not ended as promised by the prophet, so a new date must quickly be provided with an explanation for why this is serious business this time.
This March 4 paranoia was not confined to NBC’s resident millennial hall monitor and censorship advocate. On March 3, The New York Times warned that “the Capitol Police force is preparing for another assault on the Capitol building on Thursday after obtaining intelligence of a potential plot by a militia group.” All this, said the Paper of Record, because “intelligence analysts had spent weeks tracking online chatter by some QAnon adherents who have latched on to March 4 — the original inauguration date set in the Constitution — as the day Donald J. Trump would be restored to the presidency and renew his crusade against America’s enemies.”
These dire warnings also, quite predictably, generated serious reactions. “House leaders on Wednesday abruptly moved a vote on policing legislation from Thursday to Wednesday night, so lawmakers could leave town,” said the Times. We learned that there would be further militarization of the Capitol and troop deployment in Washington indefinitely due to so-called “chatter.” NPR announced: “The House of Representatives has canceled its Thursday session after the U.S. Capitol Police said it is aware of a threat by an identified militia group to breach the Capitol complex that day.”
Do you know what happened on March 4 when it came to violence from right-wing extremists? The same thing that happened on January 20: absolutely nothing. There were no attempted attacks on the Capitol, state capitols, or any other government institution. There was violent crime registered that day in Washington D.C. but none of it was political violence by those whom media outlets warned posed such a grave danger that Congress has to be closed and militarization of Washington extended indefinitely.
Perhaps the most significant blow to the maximalist insurrection/coup narrative took place inside the Senate on Thursday. Ever since January 6, those who were not referring to the riot as a “coup attempt” — as though the hundreds of protesters intended to overthrow the most powerful and militarized government in history — were required to refer to it instead as an “armed insurrection.”
This formulation was crucial not only for maximizing fear levels about the Democrats’ adversaries but also, as I’ve documented previously, because declaring an “armed insurrection” empowers the state with virtually unlimited powers to act against the citizenry. Over and over, leading Democrats and their media allies repeated this phrase like some hypnotic mantra:
But this was completely false. As I detailed several weeks ago, so many of the most harrowing and widespread media claims about the January 6 riot proved to be total fabrications. A pro-Trump mob did not bash Office Brian Sicknick’s skull in with a fire extinguisher. No protester brought zip-ties with them as some premeditated plot to kidnap members of Congress (two rioters found them on a table inside). There’s no evidence anyone intended to assassinate Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or anyone else.
Yet the maximalist narrative of an attempted coup or armed insurrection is so crucial to Democrats — regardless of whether it is true — that pointing out these facts deeply infuriates them. A television clip of mine from last week went viral among furious liberals calling me a fascism supporter even though it did nothing but point out the indisputable facts that other than Brian Sicknick, whose cause of death remains unknown, the only people who died at the Capitol riot were Trump supporters, and that there are no known cases of the rioters deliberately killing anyone
(Two FBI operatives have since anonymously leaked that it is looking at a “suspect” who may have engaged with Sicknick in a way that ultimately contributed to his death. But nothing still is known; Sicknick’s mother claims he died of a stroke while his brother says it was from pepper spray; and all of this is worlds away from the endlessly repeated media claim that a bloodthirsty pro-Trump mob savagely bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.)
What we know for sure is that no Trump supporter fired any weapon inside the Capitol and that the FBI seized a grand total of zero firearms from those it arrested that day — a rather odd state of affairs for an “armed insurrection,” to put that mildly. In questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Thursday’s hearing, a senior FBI official, Jill Sanborn, acknowledged this key fact:
(The “one lady” who died referred to by this FBI official was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed Trump supporter who was killed when she was shot point blank in the neck inside the Capitol on January 6 by an armed Capitol Police Officer).
The key point to emphasize here is that threats and dangers are not binary: they either exist or they are fully illusory. They reside on a spectrum. To insist that they be discussed rationally, soberly and truthfully is not to deny the existence of the threat itself. One can demand a rational and fact-based understanding of the magnitude of the threat revealed by the January 6 riot without denying that there is any danger at all.
Those who denounced the excesses of McCarthyism were not insisting that there were no Communists in government; those denouncing the excesses of the Clinton administration’s attempts to seize more surveillance power after the Oklahoma City courting bombing were not denying that some anti-government militias may do violence again; those who objected to the protracted and unhinged assault on civil liberties by the Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations after 9/11 were not arguing that there were no Muslim extremists intent on committing violence.
The argument then, and the argument now, is that the threat was being deliberately inflated and exaggerated, and fears stoked and exploited, both for political gain and to justify the placement of more and more powers in the hands of the state in the name of stopping these threats. That is the core formula of authoritarianism — to place the population in a state of such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of power which security state agencies and politicians demand and which they insist are necessary to keep everyone safe.
There is, relatedly, a massive political benefit from convincing the population that the opponents and critics of those in power do not merely hold a different ideology but are coup plotters, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists. That is the same political benefit that accrued from trying to persuade the population that adversaries of the Democratic Party were treasonous Kremlin agents. The more you can demonize your opponents as something monstrous, the more political power you can acquire.
And as Democrats and liberals now gear up to demand a new War on Terror, this one domestic in nature, it should be no surprise that the rhetorical leaders of their effort now are the same lowlife neocon and Rovian slanderers — Bill Kristol, David Frum, Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, Rick Wilson — who demonized everyone who questioned them as part of the first War on Terror as traitors and terrorist-lovers and subversives. It is not a coincidence that neocons are leading the way now as liberals’ favorite propagandists: they are the most skilled and experienced in weaponizing and exaggerating terrorism threats for political gain and authoritarian power.
“The House announced it was canceling its Thursday session and security officials urged staffers who could to work from home. Meaning that domestic terrorists have succeeded in shutting down the government again.” https://t.co/dOAPLjoJce
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) March 4, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Ultimately, if this “armed insurrection” and threat of domestic terrorism are so grave, why do media figures and politicians in both parties — from Adam Schiff to Liz Cheney — keep lying about it and peddling fictions? Politicians and media figures do that only when they know that the threat, in reality, is not nearly as menacing as they need it to be to fulfill their objectives of political gain and coercive power.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 19:40 - Rampant Shoplifting Forces Ten Bay Area Walgreens To Close
Rampant Shoplifting Forces Ten Bay Area Walgreens To Close
The effects of the virus pandemic and socio-economic implosion that followed compounded with failed liberal leadership could soon transform San Francisco into an empty ghost town.
Such is the case with pharmacy giant Walgreens fleeing the metro area amid a rash of shoplifting. Since 2019, Walgreens has closed ten stores in the city, with the latest store set to close later this month. The closure is the third since October 2020.
According to Washington Examiner, the Walgreens at the corner of Bush and Larkin streets posted a notification on their front windows announcing the closure on Mar. 17.
“All of us knew it was coming. Whenever we go in there, they always have problems with shoplifters,” a regular customer, Sebastian Luke, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Last October, a news reporter with Inside Edition captured the moment when a man jumped over a Walgreens counter and stole an air bed. The video shows the man taking off on an electric scooter as he escaped without any intervention from employees or customers.
“I feel sorry for the clerks, they are regularly verbally assaulted,” Luke said. “The clerks say there is nothing they can do. They say Walgreens’ policy is to not get involved. They don’t want anyone getting injured or getting sued, so the guys just keep coming in and taking whatever they want.”
At one location, the San Francisco Chronicle said it loses about $1,000 per day in merchandise because of shoplifting.
San Francisco Chamber of Commerce told SFGATE that complaints of shoplifting at drugstores are “frequent.”
Theft of less than $950 in goods is treated as a nonviolent misdemeanor under California law. But in most cases, for shoplifting, the criminal is released.
The San Francisco Police Department told the Washington Examiner that it is “aware of incidents of retail theft where groups of suspects enter stores, grab product and merchandise and flee.”
… and with the exodus of city residents, the decimation of small and medium-sized enterprises (due to pandemic), and soaring socio-economic problems in the metro area, San Fran could one day be a hallowed out town, sort of like Baltimore and or Detroit if these trends persist.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 19:20 - The Myths Of Green Energy
The Myths Of Green Energy
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via The Daily Reckoning,
Finance is often cloaked in arcane terminology and math, but the one dynamic that governs the future is actually very simple. Here it is:
All debt is borrowed against future supplies of affordable hydrocarbons (oil, coal and natural gas).
Since global economic activity is ultimately dependent on a continued abundance of affordable energy, it follows that all money borrowed against future income is actually being borrowed against future supplies of affordable energy.
Many people believe that alternative “green” energy will soon replace most or all hydrocarbon energy sources, but this belief is not realistic. All the “renewable” energy sources are about 3% of all energy consumed, with hydropower providing another few percent.
There are unavoidable headwinds to this appealing fantasy…
Reality Check
1. All “renewable” energy is actually “replaceable” energy, analyst Nate Hagens points out. Every 15-25 years (or less) much or all of the alt-energy systems and structures have to be replaced, and little of the necessary mining, manufacturing and transport can be performed with the “renewable” electricity these sources generate. Virtually all the heavy lifting of these processes require hydrocarbons and especially oil.
2. Wind and solar “renewable” energy is intermittent and therefore requires changes in behavior (no clothes dryers or electric ovens used after dark, etc.) or battery storage on a scale that isn’t practical in terms of the materials required.
3. Batteries are also “replaceable” and don’t last very long. The percentage of lithium-ion batteries being recycled globally is near-zero, so all batteries end up as costly, toxic landfill.
4. Battery technologies are limited by the physics of energy storage and materials. Moving whiz-bang exotic technologies from the lab to global scales of production is non-trivial.
5. The material and energy resources required to build alt-energy sources that replace hydrocarbon energy and replace all the alt-energy which has broken down or reached the end of its life exceeds the affordable reserves of materials and energy available on the planet.
6. Externalized costs of alt-energy are not being included in the cost. Nobody’s adding the immense cost of the environmental damage caused by lithium mines to the price of the lithium batteries. Once the full external costs are included, the cost is no longer as affordable as promoters claim.
7. None of the so-called “green” “replaceable” energy has actually replaced hydrocarbons; all the alt-energy has done is increase total energy consumption. This is what’s called Jevons Paradox: every increase in efficiency or energy production only increases consumption.
Here’s a real-world example: Building another freeway doesn’t actually reduce congestion in the old freeway; it simply encourages people to drive more, so both freeways are soon congested.
All Future Income Is a Claim on Future Energy
Setting aside the impracticalities of replacing most or all hydrocarbons with “replaceable” energy, the real issue is all debt service/repayment is ultimately funded by future energy.
On the face of it, future income is used to pay back borrowed money, but all future income is nothing more than a claim on future energy.
“Money” without access to affordable energy is worthless.
Imagine being air-dropped into the Sahara desert with a backpack of gold and $100 bills. You’re wealthy in terms of “money” but if there’s no water, food and transport to buy with your money, you’ll die.
The point is that “money” is only valuable if the essentials of life are available at affordable prices.
Right now the average full time wage in the U.S. is about $19/hour, and the average cost of a gallon of gasoline is $2.25. So a mere 7 minutes of (pretax) labor will buy a gallon of gasoline.
But what happens if inflation increases the cost of oil but wages continue stagnating? What happens to the economy if it takes one hour of labor to buy a gallon of gasoline instead of 7 minutes?
The Hidden Costs of Alternative Energy
Economics claims that cheaper substitutes will appear to replace whatever is expensive, so cheap electricity will replace costly oil, or transport will switch to cheap natural gas, etc.
But these proposed transitions are not cost-free.
The cost of replacing 100 million internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles is non-trivial, as is building the “replaceable” energy infrastructure needed to power all these vehicles.
The true costs of “replaceable” energy have been fudged by not counting external costs or replacement costs; the full lifecycle costs of “replaceable” energy are much higher than promoters are claiming.
There are supply constraints that are also not included. For example, all the plastic in the world is still derived from oil, not electricity. (Note that each electric vehicle contains hundreds of pounds of plastic.)
Energy in any form is not magically pliable. Just as we can’t turn electricity into jet fuel, we can’t turn a barrel of oil into only diesel fuel. Coal can be turned into liquid fuel but the process is non-trivial.
All of which is to say that the cost of energy in hours of labor is likely to increase, possibly by more than the global economy can afford.
There may also be supply constraints, situations where the energy people want and need is not available in sufficient quantities to meet demand at any price.
As “software eats the world” and automation replaces costly human labor, it’s also likely that the erosion in the purchasing power of labor that’s been a trend for 20 years will continue and accelerate.
Analyst Gail Tverberg has done an excellent job of explaining that it’s not just the availability of energy that matters, it’s the affordability of that energy to the bottom 90% of consumers.
Central Banks Can’t Print Energy
Again, “money” is nothing but a claim on future energy, because energy is the foundation of the global economy. Without energy, we’re all stranded in the desert and all our “money” is worthless because it can no longer buy what we need to live.
Central banks can print infinite amounts of currency but they can’t print energy, and so all central banks can do is add zeroes to the currency. They can’t make energy more affordable, or guarantee that a day’s labor will buy more than a fraction of the energy that labor can buy today.
The global financial system has played a game in which “money” is either printed or borrowed into existence, on the theory that energy will be more abundant and more affordable in the future. If this theory turns out to be incorrect, the “money” used in the future to pay back debts incurred today will have near-zero value.
The question is: how much energy, water and food will the “money” created out of thin air in the future buy?
If the lender can only buy a tiny sliver of the energy, water and food that the “money” could have bought at the time the “money” was borrowed, then it won’t really matter how many zeroes the “money” will have. What matters is how much purchasing power of essentials the “money” retains.
Borrowing trillions of dollars euros, yen and yuan every year expands the claims on future energy at a rate that far exceeds the actual expansion of energy in any form.
This has created an illusion that we can always create money out of thin air and it will magically hold its current purchasing power for ever greater amounts of energy, food and water.
The monumental asymmetry between the staggering rate of expansion of “money” — claims on future energy — and the stagnant supply of energy means this illusion is only temporary.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 19:00 - Manhattan Office Rents Plunge To Lowest Since 2018 Amid Record Supply Glut
Manhattan Office Rents Plunge To Lowest Since 2018 Amid Record Supply Glut
Whether “working from home” is a temporary fad or a permanent “new normal” remains to be seen, but for New York’s office market, the vacant present is as ugly as it gets.
According to a new report from Colliers, office rents in Manhattan are plunging amid as the glut of available office space has hit the highest on record going back 20 years. In a desperate scramble to lock in tenants, In February the average asking rent fell for an eighth straight month to $73.12 a square foot, the lowest since March 2018.
And ensuring that prices will stay low for a long time, at the same time vacant space continues to pile up. The office availability rate rose for a ninth consecutive month to 15.5%, a record in data going back to 2000, the brokerage said; the amount of space listed by tenants for sublease jumped by 1.1 million square feet.
In a stark testament to the post-pandemic world, leases were signed for less than 1 million square feet of Manhattan office space last month, a whopping 51% drop from January. Not surprisingly, the five biggest agreements were in Midtown.
The Manhattan office market continues to struggle nearly a year after the pandemic hit, which has emptied Manhattan’s skyscrapers. And since most employees are still working from home, just 14% of workers in the New York metropolitan area were back at their desks as of Feb. 17, according to data from Kastle Systems.
“The sublet spaces currently on offer at deeply discounted rates is a veritable flood of biblical proportions, with more likely to come online soon,” Ruth Colp-Haber, chief executive officer of brokerage Wharton Property Advisors told Bloomberg.
Even with the vaccine rollout, reaching at least 16.3% of the total population, companies opt for “hybrid” work as remote working dominates.
Jim Wenk, a vice chairman at Savills North America, said commercial real estate in the borough will have a “very choppy period for the foreseeable future.”
As more proof of the hard times, major magazine publisher Conde Nast (who owns brands such as ARS Technica, GQ, Teen Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired, among other popular magazines) is a major anchor tenant in the new World Trade Center, recently skipped out on rent as it asked for rent discounts and a reduction in square footage.
Earlier this week, JP Morgan is reportedly looking to sublet hundreds of thousands of square feet at 4 New York Plaza in the financial district and 5 Manhattan West in the Hudson Yards area.
To make matters worse, Hudson Yards, a massive complex on Manhattan’s Far West Side with condos, office space, and retailers built over an enormous railroad yard, had investors panic because the company refuses to open its books. The combination of work-at-home and folks moving to suburbs has left Hudson Yards, and other places across the borough a ‘ghost town.’
Meanwhile, in a world where traditional offices are undercutting each other’s prices at a record pace, WeWork is somehow hoping to make a splash when it re-emerges from the dead, this time in the form of a SPAC. Good luck to them.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 18:40 - Baltimore Student Who Failed All But Three Classes In Four Years Was Ranked In Top Half Of His Class
Baltimore Student Who Failed All But Three Classes In Four Years Was Ranked In Top Half Of His Class
As teacher unions fight to keep schools closed, the true cost is being felt by students who are racking up failing grades, dropping out of virtual classes, increasing drug use, and, in rising numbers, committing suicide. In response, some union officials like the President of the Los Angeles Teacher’s Union has labelled calls to return to class examples of white privilege despite overwhelming science supporting resumption of classes. However, for minority students, this shutdown has taken a dire situation and turned into a freefall disaster. The pandemic led to the closure of an already failing public school system, as evident in a shocking story out of Baltimore. As recently reported, a high school student almost graduated near the top half of his class after failing every class but three in four years. He has a 0.13 GPA. His mother finally went public in exasperation with the failures in the public schools.
Tiffany France is understandably upset. She is a mother of three who works three jobs to support her family. She was never told that her son failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days over his first three years of high school. She was called for only one teacher-student meeting and that meeting never occurred at Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts.
France ultimately had to pull her son out of the school and enrolled him in an accelerated program to allow him to graduate in 2023.
For decades, we have spent huge amounts of money in school districts like Washington, D.C. and Baltimore as these cities and their leaders have failed to address these failures. We have had a lost generation of kids who have neither the education nor the trained skills to succeed in society. Yet, there is no accountability for the political and educational leaders in these cities.
In the meantime, school officials seem intent on driving top performing students from their systems in Boston, New York and other cities where advanced programs are being shutdown or suspended. Mayor Bill deBlasio proclaimed that public schools are a means to redistribute wealth as students continue to fail on every level in the system. Other education officials have denounced “meritocracy” as racist. These officials, including a recent congressman, attack standardized tests as racist rather than make real progress to improve performance on such tests for these children.
The top spending public school districts are also some of the worst performing school districts. New York topped the per capita spending at $24,040 per kid. Washington, D.C. is close at $22,759. Baltimore is often ranked in the top three per capita spending districts.
According to a 2019 study, over half of the New York City public schoolkids cannot handle basic math or English. On tests, Asian kids shows a 74.4 percent proficiency in math with a 66.6 proficiency for whites, a 33.2 percent proficiency for Hispanics, and a 28.2 percent proficiency for African Americans. Thus, more than two third of African American kids were not able to handle basic math in a school system with one of the highest per capita expenditures for students in country. Thus, public schools may be a vehicle for deBlasio to “redistribute wealth” but he is not distributing education or learning to those who need it the most.
In Washington, with the highest per capita spending on students, education officials “celebrated” a small improvement of scores in 2019. However, the scores would make most people cringe. Only 21.1 percent of black students were proficient in math (as opposed to 78.8 percent for white students).
In Wisconsin, the 2019 scores (for students in grades 3 to 8 and grade 11) showed only 39.3% of students tested proficient or better in English/language and only 40.1% demonstrated a proficient or better understanding of math. Both showed drops. However, the racial disparity was particularly shocking. Ironically, the gap slightly narrowed due to white students declining in scores. However, in the eighth grade, only 12.1 percent of black students were proficient or advanced in English. There was still as 30 point gap for black students.
In the meantime, the pandemic has led to delays, reductions, or outright cancellations of standardized testing in many districts. So now students will not be going full-time to school and also not be tested on their proficiency in subjects in some districts. It is as if they did not exist, which is precisely the problem. Politically, they do not seem to register in terms of importance or influence. They are useful objects for politicians who use them for campaigns for more money or power. Yet, they seem utterly detached from any actual benefits as these leaders allow public schools to continue on the same course of proven failure.
Watching this happen to the public schools has been particularly hard for many of us who are ardent supporters of public education. Growing up in Chicago during the massive flight of white families from the public school system, I remained in public schools for much of my early education. My parents organized a group to convince affluent families remain in the system. They feared that, once such families left, the public schools would not only loose diversity but political clout and support. They also wanted their kids to benefit from such diversity. My wife and I also believe in that cause and we have kept our four kids in public schools through to college. We believe public education plays a key role in our national identity and civics. They shape our next generation of citizens. My children have benefitted greatly from public schools and the many caring and gifted teachers who have taught them through the years.
Reading accounts like that of Tiffany France is a disgrace. She is working three jobs and counting on the school system to give her three children and education . . . and a chance. Yet, Baltimore and other cities have failed such children for decades. There is no accountability in the system. These leaders are failing whole generations and leaving them to an endless cycle of poverty and crime. Yet, they are reelected or reappointed every year. Educational leaders demand more money but show little progress or success. The money evaporates and nothing seems to change for Tiffany France or her children.
The problem is not standardized testing. It is the lack of education where a student with below a 1.0 GPA could qualify for cum laude recognition in Baltimore. Decades and billions of dollars have been exhausted without significant improvement. However, the real cost of our failure is born by these students who find little solace in knowing that their per capita expenditures continue to rise as their scores continue to fall. If we ran our highway system like this, we would have billion-dollar gravel roads for highways. In our education system, we are spending billions but kids like Tiffany’s son are going nowhere fast.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 18:20 - Tom Brady Rookie Card Fetches Record $1.32 Million At Auction
Tom Brady Rookie Card Fetches Record $1.32 Million At Auction
Yet another record for Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, yet this one is not on the football field. His rookie card just sold for $1.32 million in an online auction, which is by far the highest price ever paid for an NFL card, according to the auction house.
This followed on the heels of Patrick Mahomes’ autographed rookie card in February going for $861,000 at an online auction. And just two years ago an autographed card from Brady’s rookie season sold for over $400,000 – which was the highest at that time.
PWCC Marketplace confirmed the final record price on its Instagram account Thursday, featuring an image of the ultra-rare card:
The auction house, considered the largest trading card marketplace in the world, announced, “This month we had the pleasure of brokering a record-breaking sale on a 2000 Playoff Contenders Championship Ticket Tom Brady.”
“Only one of 100 cards in the world, even less if you consider grade – this incredible card was picked up by James Parker, a long-time Brady fan,” the statement added.
Widely considered the greatest player of all-time, Brady recently added a 7th Super Bowl win to his already record career.
Via Bucswire The purchaser described what motived him to shell over such a large sum in the auction house press release…
“I lived in Boston for 10 years and so am a huge fan of Brady. The last Super Bowl win was just a mind-blowing accomplishment.”
Park added, “I’ve also had a love of collecting cards since I was a kid. Given Brady’s uncontested status as GOAT (greatest of all time) in football, this card is an important piece of sports history and of any collection.”
Sports Illustrated describes further of what’s behind the record-smashing price tag: “The piece is being dubbed the ‘Holy Grail’ of Brady football cards, much in the way the Wayne Gretzky O-Pee-Chee has defined the hockey great’s collectible market.”
We’ve not yet quite reached Picasso auction prices, but given that 43-year old Brady has said he’s already thinking about chasing a number eight Super Bowl win, it might not take long at this rate for his memorabilia to skyrocket further to such levels.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/05/2021 – 18:00
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...