Today’s News 7th April 2022

• Bill Introducing 'Mandatory Vaccination' For All Germans Over 60 Expected To Pass
  Bill Introducing ‘Mandatory Vaccination’ For All Germans Over 60 Expected To Pass

  The COVID pandemic has largely subsided in Europe (although health authorities have warned about an uptick in cases caused by subvariants and hybrid variants of the omicron strain). But this hasn’t stopped German lawmakers from pushing for a new law that would legally require people age 60 and older to be vaccinated.

  But that’s not all. The deal struck by members of Germany’s ruling “stop sign” coalition, which includes Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the ‘classical liberal’ Free Democrats, also includes an option for making COVID shots mandatory for everybody age 18 and older.

  

  That second provision will depend on how the next wave of the pandemic develops during the fall, according to Bloomberg, which cited a local report.

  According to other provisions in the proposed law, the government would initially try to “encourage” the unvaccinated to voluntary submit to inoculation (Germany still has millions of unvaccinated citizens, not unlike the US). Fortunately, even if the proposal becomes a law (it’s due for a vote on Thursday), it will also include provisions that would reverse the situation if enough people receive their COVID shots voluntarily before the summer.

  Lawmakers told Bloomberg that the goal of the proposal is “effective prevention.”

  “We are united by the goal of effective prevention through the highest possible level of basic immunity for all adults for the fall, because in this way we can prevent the health system from being overwhelmed,” they added.

  Germany is still recording more than 200,000 cases and more than 300 deaths from the virus on most days. But with more than 75% of its population vaccinated, the pressure on the country’s health-care system has significantly lessened since the depths of the pandemic.

  Most western countries have strongly opposed mandatory vaccination requirements (although the Biden Administration in the US has attempted to force millions of workers to either get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs before the Supreme Court to declare Biden’s executive orders unconstitutional). But Chancellor Scholz has decided that mandatory vaccination is permissible, so long as the Bundestag grants its blessing.

  Another lawmaker said compulsory vaccination for all Germans over 60 will help the German economy remain “free” during the fall wave. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/07/2022 – 02:45

• Finland Mulling NATO Membership After Russia Warns Of 'Serious Consequences'
  Finland Mulling NATO Membership After Russia Warns Of ‘Serious Consequences’

  Authored by Kyle Anzalone & Will Porter Via The Libertarian Institute,

  Finland is mulling whether to join the NATO military alliance, Prime Minister Sanna Marin said, noting that a decision could come by next spring while citing a new “security environment” in Europe following Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

  Speaking to fellow members of the ruling Social Democratic Party over the weekend, the PM said Moscow’s ongoing invasion is a “flagrant violation” of international law, arguing that “Russia is not the neighbor we thought it was.” She added that this has prompted the government to rethink its long-standing policy of neutrality toward the NATO bloc.

  

  “In this new situation and changed security environment, we’ll have to evaluate all means to guarantee the safety of Finland and Finns,” Marin said. “We’ll have to seriously mull over our own stance and approach to military alignment. We’ll have to do this carefully but quickly, effectively during the course of this spring.”

  Marin previously stated that NATO membership would be “very unlikely,” but has since changed her tune, now saying the assault on Ukraine had altered relations with Russia in “irreversible” ways. 

  While Finland maintained a strict stance of non-alignment throughout the Cold War, refusing to enter NATO as well as the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, recent polling indicates that Finns are increasingly favorable to membership in the North Atlantic alliance. A survey conducted in February showed a majority of respondents (53%) would back the idea, up from just 19% in 2017 – dubbed a “historic shift” by former Prime Minister Alex Stubb.

  Opposition leaders such as Petteri Orpo, who heads up the National Coalition Party, have also publicly supported NATO membership for Finland, arguing that it is not only necessary for the country’s defense, but would mean it had fully joined the West. 

  “In order to improve our security and guarantee our independence, we should join NATO. We still have a powerful and aggressive neighbor,” Orpo said, referring to Russia. “For me, NATO membership is not just about the pros and cons, it’s a bigger question of our identity. We are a western country… In this sense, our place is in NATO.”

  However, some in government have objected to the idea, with one senior official telling the Financial Times the move may be seen as a dangerous provocation by Russia. “Applying for membership carries awful risks for Finland, and for NATO,” they said. “I have always said that joining military alliances is something you do in quiet times, so that you do not import any instability into the organization you join.”

  If Finland and Sweden apply to join NATO, they would be welcomed, Stoltenberg says https://t.co/n6elOmy0uj pic.twitter.com/vCSkZoAUzZ

  — Reuters (@Reuters) April 5, 2022

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  In comments to CNN on Sunday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that both Finland and Sweden would be “very much welcomed by all 30 allies,” even suggesting their membership could be fast-tracked.

  Russia has long demanded an end to the eastward expansion of NATO, citing assurances from Washington that the alliance would not grow by “one inch” just before the fall of the Soviet Union. While it has vocally opposed membership for its neighbors Ukraine and Georgia, Moscow has also repeatedly warned that it would retaliate should Finland or Sweden join the bloc, though officials have yet to say how. 

  “It is obvious that [if] Finland and Sweden join NATO, which is a military organization to begin with, there will be serious military and political consequences,” said Russian Foreign Ministry official Sergei Belyayev. “[It] would require changing the whole palette of relations with these countries and require retaliatory measures.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/07/2022 – 02:00

• While You Were Distracted By Will Smith, The International Elitists Met At The World Government Summit
  While You Were Distracted By Will Smith, The International Elitists Met At The World Government Summit

  Authored by Derrick Broze via TheLastAmericanVagabond.com,

  While much of the “mainstream” world has spent the last week obsessing over and debating the celebrity spectacle surrounding American actor Will Smith slapping American comedian Chris Rock, the international elitists were meeting in Dubai for the 2022 World Government Summit.

  

  From March 28th to the 30th, corporate media journalists, heads of state, and CEOs of some of the most profitable companies in the world met for discussions on shaping the direction of the next decade and beyond. Anyone with a functioning brain should ignore the tabloids and instead pay attention to this little known gathering of globalist Technocrats.

  Let’s take a look at the speakers and the panels, starting with Mr. Great Reset himself, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum.

  Schwab gave a talk entitled, Our World Today… Why Government Must Act Now?.  “Thank you, to his excellency for enabling this initiative to define a longer-term narrative to make the world more resilient more inclusive and more sustainable,” Schwab stated during his address. The use of the term narrative is important because in January 2021, Klaus and the World Economic Forum announced the next phase of The Great Reset, The Great Narrative.

  As with The Great Narrative event, the World Government Summit was also held in Dubai. As I wrote during the Great Narrative meeting:

  “While the political leaders of the UAE and Klaus Schwab may promote themselves as the heroes of our times, we should judge them according to their actions and the company they keep, not the flowery language they use to distract us. The simple fact is the UAE has a horrible record on human rights. The nation is known for deporting those who renounce Islam, limited press freedoms, and enforcing elements of Sharia law.”

  During Schwab’s short talk he also mentioned his pet project “the 4th Industrial Revolution“, which is essentially the digital panopticon of the future, where digital surveillance is omnipresent and humanity uses digital technology to alter our lives. Often associated with terms like the Internet of Things, the Internet of Bodies, the Internet of Humans, and the Internet of Senses, this world will be powered by 5G and 6G technology. Of course, for Schwab and other globalists, the 4IR also lends itself towards more central planning and top-down control. The goal is a track and trace society where all transactions are logged, every person has a digital ID that can be tracked, and social malcontents are locked out of society via social credit scores.

  Immediately following Schwab was a panel which made no attempt to hide the goals of the globalists. The panel, Are We Ready for A New World Order?, featured Fred Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council since 2007, as well as an anchor for CNN and a former advisor to former US president George W. Bush. Before joining the Council, Kempe was a prize-winning editor and reporter at the Wall Street Journal for more than 25 years.

  In fact, the Atlantic Council had a fairly large presence at the World Government Summit, including appearances by Defne Arslan, senior director of the Atlantic Council IN TURKEY program, and Olga Khakova, Deputy Director of Global Energy Center of Atlantic Council.

  For those who are unfamiliar with the Atlantic Council, I first reported in May 2018 that Facebook had partnered with the thinktank connected to NATO. I wrote:

  “The Atlantic Council of the United States was established in 1961 to bolster support for international relations. Although not officially connected to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Atlantic Council has spent decades promoting causes and issues which are beneficial to NATO member states. In addition, The Atlantic Council is a member of the Atlantic Treaty Organization, an umbrella organization which “acts as a network facilitator in the Euro-Atlantic and beyond.” The ATO works similarly to the Atlantic Council, bringing together political leaders, academics, military officials, journalists and diplomats to promote values that are favorable to the NATO member states. Officially, ATO is independent of NATO, but the line between the two is razor thin.

  Essentially, the Atlantic Council is a think tank which can offer companies or nation states access to military officials, politicians, journalists, diplomats, etc. to help them develop a plan to implement their strategy or vision. These strategies often involve getting NATO governments or industry insiders to make decisions they might not have made without a visit from the Atlantic Council team. This allows individuals or nations to push forth their ideas under the cover of hiring what appears to be a public relations agency but is actually selling access to high-profile individuals with power to affect public policy. Indeed, everyone from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to the family of international agent of disorder Zbigniew Brzezinski have spoken at or attended council events.”

  Less than 6 months after Facebook and The Atlantic Council announced their partnership, more than 500 FB pages were accused of being “Russian disinformation” and deleted. The pages largely consisted of anti-war, police accountability, and independent journalism outlets. These pages and journalists directly challenged the narratives spun by the Atlantic Council stooges.

  Dissecting the World Government Summit: Ukraine, SDGs, ESG, Blockchain, and AI

  While many of the names in attendance might be unfamiliar to a western audience, the speakers are men and women who absolutely play a vital role in international geopolitics.

  Some of the featured speakers include:

  • – António Guterres, Secretary General of United Nations, giving a talk tiled Is Our World Today… Our World of Tomorrow?

  • – Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director General of World Health Organization

  • – David Pekoske, Administrator of USA Transportation Security Administration

  • – Dr. Kaitlyn Sadtler, an American immunologist and bioengineer and Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the US NIH. She gave a presentation about Re-engineering Immunity with Next Generation Technologies

  • – H.H. Sheikh Sabah AlSabah, Prime Minister of Government of the State of Kuwait

  • – Jeon Hae cheol, Minister of the Interior and Safety of Government of the Republic of Korea

  • – Supattanapong Punmeechaow, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy of Secretariat of the Prime Minister of Thailand

  • – Mrs. Belinda Balluku is the Minister of Infrastructure and Energy of the Republic of Albania

  • – Mohammad Sanusi Barkindo Secretary General of OPEC, speaking about “Oil and Gas in a Net-Zero World“

  The Russia-Ukraine conflict ​​​​​​​was also part of the discussions. Notably, Maxim Timchenko, CEO of DTEK, made an appearance. His bio states, “under his leadership, DTEK has evolved from a regional conventional energy company into Ukraine’s largest private investor as well as leading energy company.”

  The appearance of Mr. Timchenko should not be overlooked, especially because he appears in a discussion called Post-Crisis Ukraine: New Energy for a New Europe, featuring Olga Khakova of the Atlantic Council, and Paula Dobriansk, Senior Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School of Government of Atlantic Council. Again, the presence of the Atlantic Council should not be taken lightly. They are the representatives of the Western Bloc of the New World Order.

  The Russia-Ukraine conflict also factors into another panel title, Getting Off Russian Gas: Practical Steps for Europe, featuring more of the Atlantic Council goons, including Richard Morningstar, Founding Chairman of Global Energy Center, Atlantic Council, and Phillip Cornell, Senior Fellow of Global Energy Center, Atlantic Council.

  The World Government Summit also spent considerable time discussing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which form the core of the Agenda 2030, itself part of The Great Reset agenda. Some speakers discussing the SDGs include:

  • – Dr. Mahmoud Safwat Mohieldi, the United Nations Special Envoy for the 2030 Finance Agenda, who is speaking on a panel about Arab Nations and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

  • – María Sandoval, First Lady of Colombia of Government of Republic of Colombia, discussed “The Role of Women in Achieving the SDGs“. The first day of the summit was actually dedicated to the role women will play in rolling out the so-called New World Order and global governance schemes. Sandoval celebrated the fact that Colombian President Ivan Duque launched “the first national development plan that was directly aligned with the SDGs, and this of course was something that provided a wider spectrum for women to act react and participate in these achievements of the SDGs.”

  • – Catherine Russell, Executive Director of United Nations Children Fund, participated in a panel titled SDGs for Every Child

  The Summit also addressed the Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria (ESG) promoted by the UN in a panel entitled, Where does ESG Go From Here?. ESG investing is also sometimes referred to as sustainable investing, responsible investing, or socially responsible investing (SRI). The practice has become an increasingly popular way to promote the SDGs. The panel featured Neil R. Brown, Managing Director, KKR Global Institute and KKR Infrastructure. KKR Global Institute is the same organization that former US Army General and former CIA Director David Petraeus joined in 2013.

  Additionally, a panel entitled, Is the World Ready for A Future Beyond Oil?, featured H.E. Suhail bin Mohamed AlMazrouei, Minister of Energy and Infrastructure of Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure; H.R.H Prince Abdulaziz Al Saud, Minister of Energy of Ministry of Energy – Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; and H.E. Masrour Barzani, Prime Minister of Kurdistan Regional Government.

  Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence are a major piece of the Technocratic vision for 2030, so naturally there were several discussions on the use of blockchain, AI, and even 6G (the eventual successor to 5G technology).

  There was a discussion on blockchain technology in a panel entitled, The Future of Blockchain… A Perspective from Industry Pioneer, featuring Changpeng Zhao, Chief Executive Officer of Binance, among others. Other panels focused on De-Fi (decentralized finance) featured Jamie Crawley, Editor in Chief of Coin Desk, and Charles Hoskinson, Co-Founder of Ethereum. I have recently reported on Hoskinson’s statements regarding using blockchain to implement ESG and SDG programs and the danger they pose to privacy and liberty.

  There was also a panel focused on the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies entitled, CBDCs and Stablecoins: Can They Co-Exist?. The CBDCs schemes being rolled out in nations around the world are a crucial component of The Great Reset.

  One panel focuses on a concept called Human Meta-Cities, which sound like a rebranding or updating of the so-called Smart Cities. The panel description states,

  “in a world of change and rapid technological development, we shed light on a new vision for planning future cities centered around human needs and aspirations. This new framework will help governments refine their role in planning the new world taking advantage of the digital transformation opportunities that are taking place.”

  Another panel which makes clear the Technocratic dream was entitled, The Invisible Government: Eliminating Bureaucracy Through Technology. The description of the panel states:

  “Technology is creating new possibilities as it simplifies processes, enables instant feedback, and ultimately improves customer experience. In the public sector, digitalization and artificial intelligence are creating a new model of governance – “invisible” governments that are more agile, responsive, human-centric, and data-driven. In this session, global policymakers and experts will share their bold vision and experience in utilizing technology to eliminate bureaucracy and innovate government services for the future.”

  What goes unsaid in the panel description is that making the government “invisible” will actually lead to a world of no accountability for government and politicians. In reality, the Technocrats imagine a world where the tyrannical technological systems are invisible and the average person has zero recourse for preventing exclusion or punishment based on their social credit score.

  This is the world these technocrats — many of whom are unelected — envision. The only way this vision will not come to pass is if the people of the world throw their televisions away, ignore the celebrity drama, and start exiting from these slavery systems. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 23:40

• Chinese EV Manufacturers Grapple With Rising Raw Material Costs, Shrinking Margins
  Chinese EV Manufacturers Grapple With Rising Raw Material Costs, Shrinking Margins

  Chinese EV manufacturers are facing similar problems as the ones we pointed out that Japanese manufacturers are facing: rising raw material costs and shrinking margins.

  Many EV manufacturers are doing the only thing they can to help alleviate the pressure – and that means raising prices for consumers. 

  Bloomberg noted in a Monday morning wrap up that the problems China faces are slightly more unique to the country, because it is also trying to engineer a “soft landing” from EV subsidies, which Beijing has been rolling back – and will continue to roll back.

  

  “What makes China unique is its commitment to simultaneously rolling back EV subsidies, setting up a delicate balance between growth and profit in the world’s biggest market for clean cars,” Bloomberg wrote. 

  Companies like Tesla, BYD, Xpeng and Li Auto all hiked prices in March, the report says. Among the manufacturers raising prices was also Contemporary Amperex Technology, the world’s biggest EV battery maker. They said they were making “dynamic adjustments to the prices of some of our battery products”.

  Remember, we just wrote days ago that Japanese automakers were also grappling with the skyrocketing cost of raw materials and a shortage of semiconductors still. 

  Even as some parts have become unavailable, raw materials for other parts have skyrocketed in price. For example, palladium, nickel and aluminum have all surged to record highs this month. The metals are used in automobile catalytic converters, batteries and other car parts.

  

  The price hikes are likely due to the fact that 40% of palladium production comes from Russia, Nikkei noted last week. This has forced auto manufacturers to abandon buying from Russia and seek out alternative sources. 

  Hiroo Suzaki, president of South African metal producer Impala Platinum Japan, commented: “Losing Russian supply would leave a significant impact on the palladium market.”

  Some demand for palladium will eventually wane due to the adoption of electric vehicles, Mikio Fujita, senior market analyst for Johnson Matthey, said. But for now, that doesn’t help automakers. Fujita commented: “As the auto industry shifts to electric vehicles, catalyst demand is expected to gradually shrink in the long run.”

  Nickel, on the other hand, is expected to see a significant increase in demand thanks to the adoption of EVs. “This has led to an even tighter market and premiums are soaring to record high levels in Europe,” one trader told Nikkei. 

  Recall, Tesla reportedly signed a “secret deal” to obtain nickel from Vale that is helping it sidestep a spike in prices. 

  

  Gene Munster of Loup Ventures said: “What Tesla has done with nickel is a hidden competitive advantage. Tesla continues to be a couple of steps ahead of the rest.” And Munster is right, in that Musk has “repeatedly” flagged nickel as a concern for the company amidst broader sector demand that is expected to more than triple by 2030. 

  On an earnings call two years ago, CEO Elon Musk urged: “Please mine more nickel. Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”

  Meanwhile, other EV manufacturers are left scrambling. “The nickel price surge and the implications from the Russia-Ukraine invasion are likely to push battery manufacturers, particularly in the U.S., to secure alternate supply chains,” Bloomberg wrote.

  Tesla’s “secret deal” is one of many it has put in place over the last year, the report says. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 23:20

• Gen. Milley Says Risk Of 'Significant Conflict' Between Great Powers Is Increasing
  Gen. Milley Says Risk Of ‘Significant Conflict’ Between Great Powers Is Increasing

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley warned Congress on Tuesday that the chances of a “significant international conflict between great powers” are increasing. Milley warned that both China and Russia are threats to the so-called “rules-based” global order.

  “We are now facing two global powers: China and Russia, each with significant military capabilities both who intend to fundamentally change the rules-based current global order,” Milley told the House Armed Services Committee. “We are entering a world that is becoming more unstable. The potential for significant international conflict between great powers is increasing, not decreasing.”

  

  Gen. Milley further called Russia’s action the “greatest threat to peace and security of Europe, perhaps the world in my 40 years of service and in uniform.”

  “The Russian invasion of Ukraine is threatening to undermine not only European peace and stability but global peace and stability that my parents and a generation of Americans fought so hard to defend,” he described.

  The hearing was focused on the Pentagon’s $773 billion budget request for 2023, part of the $813 billion in military spending President Biden has asked Congress for. Milley said the budget is in alignment with the new National Defense Strategy (NDS) that was recently briefed to Congress but has yet to be declassified.

  In a fact sheet on the new NDS, the Pentagon named China as the top “threat” facing the US military, while Russia was second. The US military’s shift in focus towards “great power competition” was first outlined by the 2018 NDS, which put China and Russia as equal concerns.

  Gen. Mark Milley: “We are entering a world that is becoming more unstable and the potential for significant international conflict between great powers is increasing, not decreasing.” pic.twitter.com/ltNSF0gMYK

  — Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2022) April 6, 2022

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  The Pentagon has plans to boost the US military’s presence in the Asia Pacific to counter China and in Eastern Europe to face Russia. While done in the name of deterrence, US military buildups in the regions will only make a conflict more likely.

  This is demonstrated by the fact that one of Russia’s main justifications for invading Ukraine was Kyiv’s alignment with NATO and the military alliance’s presence in the region.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 23:00

• White-Collar New Yorkers Plan To Axe Time Spent In Office 
  White-Collar New Yorkers Plan To Axe Time Spent In Office 

  More than two years after the virus pandemic locked down New York City and upended the world of work, there are continued signs of storm clouds gathering over the office real estate sector. 

  According to Bloomberg, citing a new study by Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, the average white-collar worker plans to halve the time spent in the office and reduce discretionary spending in the metro area by $6,730. Before the pandemic, those in offices spent on average $12,561 in a pre-pandemic world. 

  

  On Thursday, Bloom revealed his findings at a Federal Reserve Bank of New York conference. He said hybrid and remote work could cost New York around 5-10% of its city-center population. The implications of declining white-collar workers traversing city streets from home to work could dampen the economic recovery. 

  The city’s unemployment rate is shockingly high (7.6%) compared with the rest of the country at 3.8%. High unemployment is due to the lack of white-collar workers because so many industries in the city are dependent on them using their services, such as the restaurant and entertainment industry. 

  “People used to live in cities because they had to come into the office five days a week,” said Bloom, who surveyed 5,000 workers and 1,000 businesses about pandemic-related changes to work habits. 

  “If they don’t have to, and they want a backyard, they move out to the suburbs. We see that across cities, and call it the doughnut effect,” he added. 

  Bloom’s survey comes as Manhattan landlords have struggled with a glut of commercial real estate properties. It was reported by Savills Research this week that office space available in the city is at 19%, the highest since the dark days of the Dot Com bust (2000). 

  There will be no recovery in the city’s office sector unless workers return to the office. 

  Keycard swipes tracked by security company Kastle Systems show NYC offices are about 36% occupied, far below pre-COVID levels.

  

  As vacancy rates continue to hit levels not seen since prior bust cycles, the world’s largest commercial real estate owner, Blackstone, is giving up on one of its Midtown Manhattan office buildings. There is trouble brewing in the office space market. 

  “That’s an indication that something not great might be starting to bubble up within the office sector,” Lea Overby, a Barclays analyst covering the commercial mortgage market, told Axios.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 22:40

• Taibbi: America's Sexual Red Scare
  Taibbi: America’s Sexual Red Scare

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

  On March 18th, the New York Times published “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” an editorial wrapped around a poll, asserting roughly 80% of the country withholds opinions over fear of “retaliation or harsh criticism.” The piece prompted outrage from Twitter’s moral police — “arguably the worst day in the history of the New York Times” cried blue-check analyst Tom Watson — some of whom claimed the article did so much to legitimize right-wing propaganda about speech suppression that the entire Times editorial board should resign or be fired.

  A day before the Times editorial, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article by author and longtime professor Laura Kipnis called “Academe is a Hotbed of Craven Snitches.” My first question upon reading this disturbing piece was why the excellent word “craven” isn’t used more by writers. The second, after digesting the content — a litany of horrific scenes of students, administrators, and academics destroying each other’s careers and reputations, often over consensual, legal sexual encounters — is how anyone familiar with even a fraction of what Kipnis writes about could quibble with the notion that America has a “speech problem.”

  

  This country doesn’t just have a narrow civil liberties dispute about speech. We’re in a crisis of communication and intimacy, compounded by a uniquely American terror of sex that probably dates back to the days of the Puritans, and seems at the core of what Kipnis calls the “carceral turn” in her world of higher education. Atop legitimate and necessary mechanisms for identifying and stopping campus predators — Kipnis stresses that “sexual assault is a reality on campus, though not exactly a new one” — we’re building new bureaucracies to prosecute an array of social or even just intellectual offenses.

  These range from consensual but “inappropriate” workplace affairs (the downfall of University of Michigan president Mark Schlissel), to explicitly permitted sexual relations with adult students not under one’s tutelage (among the reported crimes of University of Rochester professor Florian Jaeger), to trying to intervene on behalf of a lawyerless, accused student (the no-no of University of Colorado professor David Barnett, who was hit with a “retaliation” charge by an administration that then spent $148,000 investigating him), to countless other mania-inspired offenses, from “suspicious eye contact” to a female professor dancing “too provocatively” at an off-campus party, to a ballet teacher saying “I always wanted to partner a banana” in class.

  Kipnis was a canary in this speech-lunacy coal mine. She made history in 2015 by becoming the subject of two harassment complaints for the seemingly impossible offense of writing an article (also in the Chronicle, called “Sexual Paranoia on Campus”). Students accused Kipnis of creating a hostile environment via the piece, in which she’d questioned the harassment investigation against fellow Northwestern professor Peter Ludlow, criticized new campus prohibitions against relationships between professors and graduate students, and argued that the logic behind some new campus enforcement policies were politically regressive, re-imposing an old-school paternalism that cast women back in roles as helpless victims in constant need of saving. “If this is feminism,” she wrote, “it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama.”

  Kipnis was cleared of the charges, but not before being taken on a tour of the bizarre inquisitorial bureaucracy of Title IX, a federal law originally instituted in 1972 that most Americans associate with an effort to bar gender discrimination and achieve funding parity for women’s sports. The law expanded in the Obama years to encompass not just discrimination but sexual misconduct. The concept ended up being worded so vaguely that, as Kipnis discovered, Title IX was soon used as the broadest of political tools, to hammer out everything from office disagreements to parameters of acceptable thought. She later wrote:

  Perhaps you’re wondering how an essay falls under the purview of Title IX, the federal statute meant to address gender discrimination and funding for women’s sports? I was wondering that myself… The answer, in brief, is that the culture of sexual paranoia I’d been writing about isn’t confined to the sexual sphere. It’s fundamentally altering the intellectual climate in higher education as a whole, to the point where ideas are construed as threats —writing an essay became “creating a chilling environment,” according to my accusers — and freedoms most of us used to take for granted are being whittled away or disappearing altogether.

  Most Americans don’t know a whole lot about Title IX, among other things because the accused are encouraged/ordered to keep experiences secret. Kipnis’s accusers inadvertently did her an enormous favor here. Not only did they make a colorful writer with a keen satirical bent an eyewitness to a prosecutorial mechanism silly enough in its mindless destruction to have been written by the cast of Monty Python, they also spurred her to look into the case of Ludlow, a once-prominent philosophy professor accused of inappropriate behavior who ended up delivering to Kipnis a literary gold mine.

  Campus protesters marched against the possibility of any kind of settlement with Ludlow, so he resigned without a confidentiality agreement, which left him free to hand over to Kipnis the gold mine, i.e. the files from his cases. The transcripts of interviews conducted by Ludlow’s campus inquisitors, along with the mountain of emails and other materials introduced as evidence, painted a picture of a bureaucracy of pre-determined guilt, casual institutional cruelty, and ingrained sexual terror so extreme that the whole concept of viewing sex as anything but predatory appeared to have become taboo in the eyes of officialdom.

  Because Kipnis broke the seal on what had been a mostly secret national phenomenon, an avalanche of letters about Title IX incidents soon filled her inbox, offering a shocking sense of the scope of the problem. In her 2017 book Unwanted Advances, she writes that a biopic about disgraced screenwriter Dalton Trumbo “left me reflecting that sex is our era’s Communist threat, and Title IX hearings our new HUAC hearings.” A bold statement, given how ingrained a part of the national psyche the “communist threat” was for generations, but the idea holds up. The book opens by describing her experience and the Ludlow case in painful detail, moves on to recount scores of other incidents and statistics, and concludes with essays asking profound and uncomfortable questions about America’s deteriorating relationship toward sex and intimacy.

  Subscribers to TK News can read the rest here.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 22:20

• AccuWeather Warns La Nina To Spark Active Hurricane Season
  AccuWeather Warns La Nina To Spark Active Hurricane Season

  AccuWeather forecasters are predicting the seventh straight above-average Atlantic hurricane season because of La Niña and warmer ocean temperatures. 

  AccuWeather’s senior meteorologist and hurricane expert Dan Kottlowski is once again anticipating an above-normal season of tropical development in the Atlantic basin, along with higher probabilities of major hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. 

  Kottlowski forecasts 16-20 named storms and six to eight hurricanes. Of those hurricanes, he believes three to five could exceed Category 3 strength. 

  AccuWeather’s forecast of 16-20 named storms is higher than the 30-year average of 14 per year. The projection of six to eight hurricanes is in line with averages. 

  This year’s upcoming season could be identical to how 2020 and 2021 played out. Last season, there were 21 named storms, seven hurricanes, and four major hurricanes. Eight of those storms made direct impacts on the U.S. mainland. About four to six are expected to hit the U.S. this year. 

  

  Kottlowski said the climatological phenomenon known as La Niña will play a crucial role in the active hurricane season, which begins on June 1 and ends on Nov. 7. There’s also a risk of tropical storms before the season starts. 

  La Niña has been extremely active in the last two years and has reduced the amount of vertical wind shear in the atmosphere. Greater vertical wind shear can often stymie developing cyclones.  

  Kottlowski said La Niña and above-normal sea-surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean and off the U.S. East Coast would produce another active hurricane season.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 22:00

• Woke Medicine's Got A Tricky Operation: Grafting 'Systemic Racism' Onto Hard Science
  Woke Medicine’s Got A Tricky Operation: Grafting ‘Systemic Racism’ Onto Hard Science

  Authored b John Murawski via RealClear Investigations,

  Just a few years ago, concepts such as “white supremacy,” “systemic racism,” and “structural intersectionality” were not the standard fare of prestigious medical journals. These are now the guiding ideas in a February special issue of “Health Affairs” that focuses on medicine and race.

  

  Featuring nearly two dozen articles with titles such as “Racism Runs Through It” and “Sick and Tired of Being Excluded,” as well as a poem called “Identity,” the Washington, D.C.-based, peer-reviewed journal analyzes racial health disparities not through biology, behavior, or culture, but through the lens of  “whiteness,” along with concepts such as power, systems of oppression, state-sanctioned violence, and critical race praxis – a sampling of terms that come up in the February issue.

  Health Affairs, dubbed by a Washington Post columnist as “the bible of health policy,” represents something much more ambitious than woke virtue signaling. Its February issue reflects the effort of newly empowered “anti-racist” scholars to transform concepts that are still considered speculative and controversial – and some say unprovable – into scientific fact. This growing effort to document, measure, and quantify racism is being advanced by other high-profile publications, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Scientific American, which last year ran articles entitled “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy.”

  But this scientific aspiration faces major challenges. Science demands verification, testability, and replicability, whereas race is a social construct that can be difficult to separate from factors like class or culture, and explaining the data often remains dependent on academic theories about systemic racism. The articles in Health Affairs indicate that elevating the concept of systemic racism from moral certitude to scientific fact will require developing new tools and methods – and even more theories – in the face of skepticism and resistance from dissenters who view this direction in research as unscientific and ideological.

  For example, five co-authors of the Health Affairs article “Improving the Measurement of Structural Racism to Achieve Antiracist Policy” observe that “there is a disconnect between the conceptualization and measurement of structural racism in the public health literature” – that is to say that acceptance of the idea outpaces the evidence for it.

  In a Health Affairs paper titled “The Intellectual Roots of Current Knowledge on Racism and Health,” researchers from Harvard University and the University of Maryland argue that turning the study of systemic racism into a scientific enterprise will require the scientific community to embrace terminology and research that “can be unsettling to some”:

  Until recently, the language and terminology of racism has been contested, often ignored, and viewed as not relevant to, or acceptable for, accounting for and intervening on racial and ethnic inequities in health.

  The Harvard and Maryland scholars identify “the critical need for paradigmatic shifts that incorporate racism as a driver of inequities,” noting that “scientific language has the power to encourage normative standards.” In another article, a team of five scholars calls for “outlining specific methodological approaches that will move the field forward.”

  Those pushing the effort expect that it will take years to build up a knowledge base and critical mass of scholarly research. If successful, it would empower the anti-racist movement with what advocates expect to be recognized as unimpeachable scientific authority that could be used to support a myriad of diversity and equity policies and interventions that are now being advocated as moral and polemical arguments by legal scholars, educators, historians, and journalists.

  According to researchers now studying the relationship of medicine and race, racial inequalities in lifespans, health, income, and other metrics largely result from a single cause: cultural norms and unconscious beliefs that have the appearance of colorblindness but systematically privilege whites and males at the expense of groups that lack power and are oppressed.

  Since the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer in May 2020, the cultural elites advocating this view – whether one calls it wokeness, systemic racism, critical race theory, or just the truth – are no longer marginalized outsiders. They are now in charge of many leading institutions that produce culture and certify knowledge through the media, publishing, universities, scholarly journals, foundations and advocacy groups, large K-12 school systems, and the sprawling apparatus of the federal government.

  Although medical research informed by critical race theory has been conducted for decades, its broad embrace by the field’s highest echelons has been both sudden and expansive.

  Alan Weil, Health Affairs’ editor-in-chief, committed the journal to “dismantling institutional racism” in January 2021. Scientists must question their assumptions about merit, quality, and excellence and make room for new research designs, methods, paradigms, and theories, Weil suggested, because traditional scientific protocols can make it impossible to study racism in the United States or recognize the problem within their own institutions.

  “The reason it’s relevant is because if you decide only certain [research] methods are valid, then you have also decided that certain questions cannot be answered – they can’t even be asked,” Weil said in a phone interview. “I view this as a call to researchers to try to look at questions that they might have historically passed by — or viewed as ones that couldn’t be studied.”

  

  The February issue of Health Affairs provides examples of how the new approach to research can be implemented to make the case for the pervasiveness of systemic racism in routine aspects of society.

  The first of the nearly two dozen articles in the February issue sets the tone. The article describes an anti-racist initiative at the Mass General Brigham health system, where measuring and attaining equity – an ideal of equal health outcomes across racial groups – is now a core component of the institutional culture, like patient safety.

  One thing that system leaders are not doing: studying whether or not racism actually affects health outcomes. “They believe that this fundamental question has already been answered,” the article states. The anti-racist initiative, called United Against Racism, will cost $40 million in the first year alone. “The initiative has no set end date,” the article states, and a system executive “expects their budget to increase every year.”

  Another article urges the need to teach white Americans “the truth” about racial oppression, “despite the discomfort that it generates.” True racial progress requires the “understanding by White people of how they have benefited from systemic racism” – and how much more they stand to gain from social justice.

  An article about the generational trauma of racism recommends respect for “Indigenous principles” and adopting a policy of federal reimbursement to traditional Native American healers who perform ceremonial and spiritual interventions.

  There are also articles about black women in low-wage jobs in the healthcare sector; about black people living farther from rural hospitals than whites; about racial and minority Medicaid enrollees reporting significantly worse experiences; an article titled “Addressing the Interlocking Impact Of Colonialism And Racism On Filipinx/a/o American Health Inequities,” and more.

  Medicine is just one of the major American institutions that has committed itself to equity. The seemingly overnight transformation has not been without its share of “cancellations” and controversy over such issues as prioritizing non-whites for Covid vaccines and suspending conventional academic standards to boost diversity.

  As high-profile journals advance the systemic racism argument, other influential institutions are putting the contested ideas into practice.

  The American Medical Association’s 86-page strategic plan for racial justice and health equity also challenges the morality of prevailing standards of quality and merit as a strategy of protecting the privileged domain of white males: The AMA condemns “equal treatment” and meritocracy as “malignant” white supremacist ideologies that obscure “true power and site of responsibility.”

  The Association of American Medical Colleges, which co-sponsors the accrediting body for U.S. medical schools, is working to establish an advocacy culture in medical schools that haven’t yet gotten with the program voluntarily. The AAMC is expected to issue an update this year to its recommended professional “competencies,”  the AAMC’s term for professional standards and best practices, that medical schools would be encouraged to adopt.

  The proposed competencies include practicing self-reflection, “allyship,” and cultural humility, as well as attaining fluency in the “various systems of oppression,” to wit: colonization, white supremacy, acculturation, and assimilation.

  For medical school faculty, the AAMC sets such professional expectations as teaching “how systems of power, privilege, and oppression inform policies and practices and how to engage with systems to disrupt oppressive practices.”

  Not surprisingly, the handful of people who are willing to risk their careers and reputations to publicly critique anything to do with systemic racism and equity say the medical establishment has become captive to a leftist ideological agenda. These dissenters argue that “anti-racism” can be hard to distinguish from anti-science when it fixates on a single variable (race), selectively seeks out data to prove a hypothesis (confirmation bias), ignores plausible alternative explanations – and worst of all – silences criticism. 

  “Confounding science with political ideology is never good,” said Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, whose monthly column was terminated at Scientific American after 18 years in a disagreement over what Shermer saw as woke ideology infecting the venerable publication.

  “They’re saying we already know the answer – the answer is racism,” Shermer said in a phone interview with RealClearInvestigations. “We’re going to ignore all the other variables. They’re just reducing complex problems to one variable.”

  

  This embrace of systemic racism is piggybacking on a long tradition of public health research that attributes population health disparities to social conditions, going back to a study by Friedrich Engels in the 1840s that said life expectancies in Liverpool, England, varied by the occupation of the city’s residents. For generations, however, the mainstream medical establishment understood racial health disparities to be a matter of genetics, behavior, culture, class – or a combination of these factors. Public health scholars, meanwhile, have been pouring forth hundreds of scholarly articles that attribute racial disparities in heart disease, diabetes, mental illness and other key metrics to societal conditions.

  Health Affairs traces the evolution of racism as medical scourge through the release of “Unequal Treatment,” the groundbreaking 2003 Institute of Medicine (now National Academy of Medicine) report that said black people received inferior care in nearly every medical category. More recent is the 2019 declaration by the Pan American Health Organization, a regional arm of the World Health Organization, that structural racism is a key driver of health inequity, followed by the 2021 declaration from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that racism is a public health threat.

  The Health Affairs articles in the February special issue rely on sociological theories, personal testimonials, and even poetry to augment traditional scientific protocols. Because there is no single correct way to measure structural racism, the five scholars “encourage the use of a theory-driven approach” to interpret data that would otherwise have to be treated as random or inconclusive.

  For such scholars, theory is often the connective tissue that can link practices or events that, to the untrained eye, might seem too remote or speculative or simply unrelated. Within the narrative structure of a productive theory, facts fall neatly into place, and hidden patterns emerge. Thus, theories are the key to linking sociological phenomena separated by 50, 100, and even 200 years.

  “Future studies should examine how modern health is shaped by a wider array of past forms of structural racism, such as slavery, lynching, unequal treatment in the criminal-legal system, forced sterilization, and other manifestations of racialized violence,” according to the quintet of academic scholars.

  “Theory suggests inextricable links,” they say, “with historical forms directing, constructing, and molding contemporary structural racism.”

  Researchers from Duke University and Florida State University argue that depriving African American felons of the right to vote affects the health of the entire community. The co-authors acknowledge they can’t directly prove that voting prohibitions for convicted felons harmed community health, but they noted that “there is a strong theoretical basis on which to expect that racialized disenfranchisement affects health.” 

  The article states that living in states with higher levels of “racialized felony disfranchisement” is “associated with” worse physical and mental health among black people, such as more symptoms of depression and functional limitations. The article concludes that “enacting laws to dismantle racialized felony disenfranchisement would likely improve the health of Black people and make progress toward achieving health equity.”

  That claim includes footnotes that take the reader to three other articles – one based on “ecosocial theory,” another drawing on sociologist Bruce Link’s theory of “stigma power,” and another resting on the theory of “fundamental causes.” These articles provide the so-called theoretical basis for concluding that stripping felons of the right to vote affects community health. (The Link theory posited that “stigma is a form of power” used to control, exploit, and dominate people with mental illness.) 

  “Skeptics dismiss structural racism as a slippery concept for which robust empirical evidence documenting its effects is lacking,” the two researchers declare in their paper. “This study provides empirical evidence that makes it harder to dismiss the links between health and structural racism manifested as disproportionate Black felony disenfranchisement.”

  Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a kidney specialist who retired last year from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, agreed to review this article for RCI. A former associate dean of curriculum at Penn’s medical school, Goldfarb said the Health Affairs article contains all the mandatory caveats about its methodological limitations, and then ignores them.

  “This approach just drives me crazy. It’s basically finding associations and claiming it proves causality,” Goldfarb said. “They are going to find evidence for their theory because they are trying to do everything they can to prove their theory. That’s why they keep saying: We have to find the evidence.” 

  Alan Weil declined to discuss critiques of individual Health Affairs articles, and the lead author of the felon study and of the hospital study didn’t respond to RealClearInvestigations’ emails. But Weil, and others, say the anti-racist imperative in medicine is no more of an ideological “agenda” than the quest to discover a cure for cancer. Moreover, the advocates assert that the imperative to dismantle systemic racism is more urgent because it is more lethal than cancer.

  “These sociopolitical exposures are exposures, just like we study in cancer research,” said Katherine Theall, a social epidemiologist and professor of public health at Tulane University. “And they’re even more powerful in many ways across a host of health outcomes.”

  One way of summarizing this dispute is that traditionalists like Goldfarb are suspicious of scholarly activism as a corrupting influence on science, whereas researchers like Weil and Theall are suspicious of neutrality and colorblindness as an invisibility cloak for systemic racism.

  “We want objective science, but there’s a point in public health, too, where we need to be doing more consequential work,” said Theall, a co-author of one of the Health Affairs articles. “We should be doing more advocacy, we should be trying to change these factors that we know matter for health.”

  Weil describes researchers as “heroic” for trying to make sense of a complicated problem for which there is no single measure, but whose existence is beyond dispute.

  “I don’t find the existence of systemic racism to be a controversial or difficult question to answer,” Weil said. “I see it around me all the time. I think the evidence base is so clear that I don’t want to spend a lot of my time trying to figure out whether or not the problem exists.”

  Other articles in Health Affairs seek to document evidence of systemic racism in unexpected places. The team of scholars that includes Theall suggests that urban policing, specifically stop-and-frisk encounters, can lead to domestic violence and violent crime, as well as to poorer community health.

  Theall said there are a number of theories scholars can “pull off the shelf” to analyze the effect of stop-and-frisk encounters on community health and local crime. But the causality is complicated, she said, because some effects, like heart disease and obesity, can take years to develop. Other effects, like rates of smoking or inadequate physical activity, could happen relatively quickly.

  And taking this tack requires scholars to connect smoking for the alleviation of stress, or a reluctance to go outside for exercise, to police harassment – as opposed to connecting it to, say, gang terror. Theall said it takes years of effort and reams of studies to create a convincing case, patiently building evidence and refining methods.

  “Our thesis is that even if you’re not a perpetrator of violence, for example, that level of community stress, of over-policing, is important for health,” Theall said. “And it’s important for that production of violence, whether that’s additional violent crime in the neighborhood or maybe the stress of living in a stressful neighborhood and what that might do for domestic violence.” 

  Theall’s article focuses on data from New Orleans. The article notes that the city had the fourth-highest murder rate in the United States in 2019 – a rate five times the national average.

  Much of the action in Theall’s article takes place in the substratum of footnotes. The cited research relies on an array of sociological, psychological, and criminological theories that associate cops with harmful effects, including stress and distrust, the latter presumably causing residents not to call 911 for police assistance when they need it.

  One of the articles cited by Theall (in footnote 27), in turn, cites previous articles that have been passed down from paper to paper. And it is here, burrowing into the footnotes, where one can find explanations and theories that speculate on how policing can lead to crime and poor health.

  “Policing may also have epigenetic implications,” the reader learns, “whereby chronic exposure to stress from a particularly imposing police presence can lead to altered gene transcription/expression and epigenetic changes that can be passed on to subsequent generations.”

  But with so many theories to choose from, could a researcher be tempted to cherry-pick a theory, or just make one up, to make the data tell a coherent story about how cops are escalating crime and violence and community illness?  

  “I don’t know the best answer for that, but I see where it can be a critique,” Theall said. “I would just think that’s probably not the route most researchers are taking in terms of analyzing their data, and then finding a theory to fit it.” 

  To the contrary, Theall believes some scholars are so scrupulous that they “overcontrol” for random factors and end up with research findings that are inconclusive. She said that because papers with negative findings tend not to get published as often as papers with splashy results – a research phenomenon called publication bias – a misimpression can result, that anti-racist scholars find racism everywhere they look.  

  Still, there is a theory in criminology called “the Ferguson effect,” developed after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that posits the opposite of Theall’s: that crime increases when cops reduce pro-active policing.

  Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla. (not related to the Ferguson effect theory), agreed to read Theall’s paper for RCI. He described this scholarship as a classic example of stubborn data being shoehorned into an uncooperative theory.

  “This feels like an example of institutional capture, where you’re only good if you buy into the theory,” he said, “and therefore everything is seen through the lens of that theory, no matter how much you have to torture the data to make that happen.”

  Ferguson is a hardcore skeptic of this sort of research. In a Quillette article last December, he described his resignation from the American Psychological Association as a protest against the organization’s embrace of wokeness. In the long run, Ferguson predicted, this research approach will prove unsustainable.

  “We’re in this confirmatory mode where people try to find evidence and not look at alternative explanations,” he said. “That’s the best way to form a consensus – just exclude the scholars who disagree.

  “What happens is, other scholars begin to pick at it and it falls apart,” Ferguson added. “Twenty years out this is going to look like a huge embarrassment.”

  email: jmurawski@realclearinvestigations.com

  Twitter: @johnmurawski

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 21:40

• How Much Living Space Does $1,500/Mth Get You In The US?
  How Much Living Space Does $1,500/Mth Get You In The US?

  A RentCafe analysis of Yardi Matrix data has revealed the U.S. city where renters get the most space on average for a monthly outlay of $1,500.

  

   

  Wichita, Kansas offers the most square feet of real estate, at 1,597.

   

  The city, with a population around the 400,000 mark, is accompanied in this part of the ranking by places like Oklahoma City (1,431) and El Paso, Texas (1,305).

  

  On the other end of the scale, the New York borough of Manhattan would yield the least space for renters in 2022 – a small but still very livable 262 square feet.

  If it has to be NYC, Brooklyn may be a slightly better option with 357.

  

  The west coast is also in a similar league – San Francisco would offer an average of 345 and Los Angeles 454.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 21:20

• "Pushed To The Brink Of Collapse": Leaked Recording Of Shanghai CDC Expert Describes Chaos Behind Lockdown Measures
  “Pushed To The Brink Of Collapse”: Leaked Recording Of Shanghai CDC Expert Describes Chaos Behind Lockdown Measures

  Authored by Li Jing and Luo Ya via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  While Shanghai continues its lockdown and massive PCR testing campaign as COVID-19 surges through the city, a CDC expert’s complaint about chaotic PCR test reports that have confused people was recently exposed online. Shanghai CDC issued a notice demanding staff answer public inquiries “in line with the policy.”

  

  There have been complaints about the conflicting PCR test results on Chinese social media because people receive a negative test result on their cell phones but then receive a positive test result from the CDC.

  Shanghai adopted the Healthcare Cloud app as its integrated Internet and Healthcare services platform. Locals register through the app for a PCR test and receive the test result on their cell phones. However, many people received a negative test notice via the app but still were then notified by CDC that they had tested positive and were thus subject to quarantine.

  Complaints have flooded the Shanghai CDC hotline.

  A recently leaked recording of a CDC expert responding to a caller revealed how the app has been problematic, how overloaded health workers have been stymied by a lack of transparency in pandemic prevention, and how the pandemic has become a political issue.

  The Test Negative Is Fake

  In the recording, the expert said, “We have received hundreds of calls every day, but our jobs are epidemiological investigations. We can’t solve your problem.”

  She said, “Let me tell you the facts: There’s no ward, the quarantine sites are filled, and there’s no ambulance.”

  A male was heard complaining, “But we have no way to address our issue, even Weibo is blocked.”

  The expert said, “I have brought this up too many times; as an expert, I have suggested that the mild to no symptom patients stay at home. Does anyone listen? No!”

  She continued, “Let me reiterate, do not bother checking your health cloud, it’s all a negative result. Only we will notify you when you have tested positive.”

  The caller responded, “So what we see is all fake?”

  She said, “That’s right.”

  In the recording, the expert encouraged making public the recording.

  

  A Pandemic Turns Political

  The expert explained that she had complained to her leader that CDC staff should not be contacting people about their testing positive while people have received a negative test message on the app. It has only exhausted the staff at the CDC and confused the public.

  She said, “We, as the professionals, are pushed to the brink of collapse by the situation. This pandemic has become a political issue that’s consuming so much manpower, resources, and money, just to solve this flu-like disease. What other country do you think is doing this kind of epidemic prevention now?”

  The expert also suggested to the caller, “The quarantine site is not up to standard, and there’s no medical service at the site. If you are forced to go to the isolation ward, ask them for proof of a positive test result before they can enforce it. Let me tell you, they won’t have it.”

  After the recording was leaked, multiple online articles confirmed that the Shanghai CDC expert was Zhu Weiping, director of the Infectious Disease Prevention and Control Section of Shanghai Pudong New Area CDC. The Epoch Times has not been able to independently verify the authenticity of the recording.

  According to the Chinese article, her comments drew criticism from those who support the communist regime, calling it a serious political incident—an advocate of “coexistence with the virus,” an aggressive attack on the party, and sabotaging and shaking the anti-epidemic deployment. Many netizens have supported her saying “protect Zhu Weiping.”

  The leaked recording was soon deleted from the Chinese internet.

  At the same time, the Shanghai CDC issued a notice to relevant departments demanding the hotline to be answered only by trained staff, and answers should be provided only in line with the current policy.

  On March 28, Shanghai imposed a two-stage lockdown of four days, first for the eastern side of the city, and then the western side of the city, divided by the Huangpu River, with two rounds of nucleic acid tests, until April 5.

  The city decided on April 4 to extend the lockdown with no known date to lift the restriction that affects more than 26 million people in the city.

  Mary Hong contributed to this report.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 21:00

• America's Largest Farm Cooperative Warns Sanctions May Spark Fertilizer Shortages
  America’s Largest Farm Cooperative Warns Sanctions May Spark Fertilizer Shortages

  America’s largest farmer cooperative sounded the alarm Wednesday about possible disruptions of fertilizer supplies from Russia due to Western sanctions on Moscow.

  CHS Inc., the largest agricultural cooperative in the US, said in an SEC filing that it’s concerned about obtaining Russian fertilizer because of sanctions making it “more expensive and difficult to do business with Russia.” 

  CHS warned that sanctions could “cause delays with respect to, or prevent, shipments of fertilizer to us, cause inflationary pressures on and impact our ability to purchase fertilizer, disrupt the execution of banking transactions with certain Russian financial institutions and result in volatility in foreign exchange rates and interest rates, all of which could have a material adverse effect on our business and operations.”  

  The cooperative said it holds no operations in Russia. However, it has $30 million in grain inventories sitting in silos in Ukraine and will have to take an “impairment charge” because of its inability to access those stockpiles. 

  CHS warns there’s a risk the conflict in Ukraine “could lead to a much larger conflict and/or additional sanctions imposed by the United States government and other governments that restrict business with specific persons, organizations or countries or with respect to certain products or services.” And said if such an event did occur, it would wreck more global supply chains and “could materially adversely affect our business operations and financial performance.” 

  For some context, Russia is one of the world’s largest fertilizer exports. Countries already afflicted by food insecurity, such as emerging market economies, will experience some of the first fertilizer and food shortages first. By the way, violent inflation protests are already beginning in Peru. 

  

  The farming industry is being clubbed like a baby seal by the Ukrainian conflict and Western sanctions against Moscow. It’s the sanctions causing fertilizer prices to soar, diesel prices to erupt, and the cost of everything to inflate. Also, international shipping companies are steering clear of trade with Russia — making it even hard to acquire fertilizer products. The Ukrainian conflict and resulting sanctions make no food supply chain safe.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 20:40

• "What Have We Done To Our Kids?"
  “What Have We Done To Our Kids?”

  Authored by Suzy Weiss via Bari Weiss’ “Common Sense” Substack,

  The Teen Girls Aren’t Going to Forget

  “It’s like a sci-fi show where people went to sleep and woke up two years later.” Lockdown is over, but the scars of isolation aren’t going away…

  

  Cheerleaders at high school football game, Melrose, Massachusetts, 1969. (Photo by Spencer Grant/Getty Images)

  Lily May Holland, 16, remembers the long, lonely days during lockdown when her parents, both doctors, were at work. She’d watch “Gilmore Girls” and “Gossip Girl” and “Grey’s Anatomy” over and over. She stopped eating and started doing Chloe Ting workouts. “I’d have gum and a smoothie all day,” she said. They lived in the sticks north of Charlottesville, Virginia, on a dirt road between farms and trailer parks and the occasional Baptist church, and she didn’t have a license, so she couldn’t go anywhere or meet any friends. Teachers would post assignments online, but it was like—who cared? Everything happened in isolation, like they were atoms. “I would’ve gone to parties, and me and my friends were planning to go to concerts, and homecoming,” Lily said. “I had crushes freshman year. But all that fell away.” 

  Teenagers need a social life. Every single study and report and piece of data tells us so. But we don’t need studies to tell us what we all already know. Ask yourself: What would it have been like if you had spent your thirteenth year in solitude? 

  It was more than a year, actually. Millions of American kids had gone a year-and-a-half mostly alone. And every single girl I spoke to said the same thing about the experience: They felt like they were sinking, or being swallowed up. 

  So it almost seemed like an understatement when, in December 2021, the Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said the effect of the lockdowns had been “devastating” for young people’s mental health. 

  “Usually, kids would be learning to disobey their parents and stay out late and figure out the consequences, but there was just none of that,” said Regine Galanti, a clinical psychologist in New York who specializes in adolescents with anxiety disorders. The impact of all that emptiness—the zig-zagging from one hazy, blue-ish screen to another and then to another—was starting to come into focus, and it was scary. Lily said that, at some point mid-lockdown, she got sick of communicating with other human beings via iPhone. So then she stopped communicating at all. Galanti said, “It’s almost like a volcano that we set ourselves up for.”

  It was an unprecedented volcano. In the past, Earth-shaking events—the Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam—had forced kids to grow up. Teenagers got jobs or were deployed overseas, and when they came back they settled down and had kids or left home and fled to the big city. The point is that they started their lives. 

  Covid did the opposite. Instead of nudging young people out the door, it anchored them to their parents, to their bedrooms and to their screens. And now that the madness is finally ebbing, they’re unsure how to proceed. Galanti said, “it’s like a sci-fi show where people went to sleep and woke up two years later, and the world has moved on but they haven’t.”

  Holland said that, when school started up again in person, “I didn’t feel like I belonged. I felt like I should still be a freshman.” 

  

  High school students at a Denver prom, 1976. (Denver Post via Getty Images)

  “Lately she has expressed some other unusual anxieties which we are seeking help for her to deal with. I am left to wonder if they are related to the general amount of elevated anxiety in our culture, especially among teenage girls.”

  This came from Amy Volk, a former state senator and mother of four in Saco, Maine, which is an hour-and-a-half north of Boston and known for its amusement park, Funtown Splashtown USA. Volk had posted a comment, in January, in response to a Common Sense essay by a teacher worried about her kids. Volk was worried about her youngest, Serena, who is 18.

  Recently, I spoke with Serena. She’d spent the previous few days in bed watching “Euphoria” and “Shameless.” The week before, she’d tested positive for Covid for the second time. “Monday I had a brutal headache for about four hours,” Serena told me. Her mom left sandwiches, ibuprofen, and vitamins at the bottom of the stairs. “I didn’t have any energy to do my hair or make TikToks or anything.”

  We were chatting on the phone as she drove back from a solo trip to the beach—her first excursion out in four days. “I just sat in my car for a while, then I got Panera,” she said. 

  Before the pandemic, Volk was a cheerleader. She’d been cheering since second grade, but she quit at the end of her sophomore year, when the cheering team stopped traveling to compete because of Covid. “There was no pride in winning,” she said. “I started to hate going to practice.” It was the same with class, which became an ambient, digital, white noise machine—an iPad tuned into English, geometry, chemistry or American history, but with the camera off.

  The tangibleness of high school—sweaty locker rooms, polyester prom dresses, the cool metal of a first-place trophy, the puff of a contraband cigarette—was gone. It no longer mattered how high schoolers dressed, or whether they dressed, or even whether they showered. 

  Volk described that time as “just so much emptiness.” 

  “All of their freedom and autonomy went away with the lockdowns,” said Lily’s mom, Dr. Eliza Holland, a pediatrician who sees teenage girls suffering from suicidal ideation, eating disorders, and drug overdoses. “I recently had a patient who was sent up from the Emergency Department who kept telling me, ‘I will kill myself if you send me back to my family.’” 

  It’s hard to know how seriously to take that kind of threat. Eliza Holland pointed out that the share-it-all, hyper-vulnerable format of the internet has different mores than real life. “When you say something like that online, you get a lot of positive reinforcement and you never have to look anyone in the eye. Even if you’re joking, it lands very differently in person.” 

  Holland spends a few weeks each summer as a volunteer physician at Lily’s sleepover camp in North Carolina. The past two summers, more girls have been homesick than usual. For the older teens, she’s had to send a few home who expressed desires to hurt or kill themselves.

  This didn’t start with Covid. “People are growing up more slowly,” said Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University and the author of the 2017 book “iGen.” Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist and author of “The Coddling of the American Mind,” traces the downward spiral to 2013 and the explosion of social media. That’s when the helicopter-parented 18-year-olds started to leave home with their iPhones and not much else.

  But Covid has dramatically compounded these forces. Being hermetically sealed off from bad dates, bad breakups, awkward conversations, tough teachers and mean bosses has left young people even less capable of navigating the hiccups of daily life. 

  The CDC said that, from 2019 to 2020, the incidence of girls ages 12 to 17 who were rushed to the Emergency Room after attempting suicide jumped by 51 percent. E.R. admissions for eating disorders doubled among the same group, according to the CDC, and tripled for tic-related disorders, which experts trace in part to TikTok. (During roughly the same period, the overall U.S. suicide rate, which skews heavily male, dropped by about 3 percent.)

  “I got really into social media during lockdown,” Haley Shipley, a 14-year-old in Springfield, Missouri, told me. “I changed how I did my makeup. I’d stop eating.” 

  Haley’s mom, a medical coder, and her mom’s boyfriend were always stressed about money. One time, her mom threw a chair across the room. Haley got headaches from staring at the Chromebook her district had sent to every student. She had to take on more chores, and she could barely hear the teacher on Zoom while her siblings were running around and screaming. 

  In September 2020, Haley started cutting her arms. “A lot of girls did,” she told me, saying that social media “gave a lot of us depression.” She added, “I couldn’t sleep without feeling pain.” She retreated into her room except for meals and chores. She would wear hoodies to hide her cuts and scars. She checked out from friends. “I had visions of drowning in the bathtub,” she said. 

  Toward the end of summer, her mom saw her cuts. “I forgot to wear a sweatshirt one day, and my mom freaked out,” Haley said. She got her a therapist, and she texted the suicide hotline, which suggested that Haley journal and write down things she liked about herself on sticky notes, which helped her feel better and work through her emotions. 

  Courtney Connolly, 50, a mom from the Chicagoland area who has filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Chicago over its vaccine mandate, said her three kids “missed out on everything, and I don’t even think they understand how fucked they got.” She said her younger daughter, Emma, now 16, went from A’s in eighth grade to failing her fully-remote freshman year. “I asked her, ‘What’s going on? You haven’t turned in 20 Spanish assignments,’ and she would say, ‘So what?’”

  Around Christmas 2020, Connolly said, she’d find her older daughter, then-16-year-old Maisy, sobbing alone in her room. “She felt like she was rotting in her bedroom.” Connolly offered to move Maisy, then a sophomore, to another school, or pull her out of school, or anything. “I called her academic counselor and said, ‘Maisy is dying,’” she said. 

  When she was going to school online, Maisy told me she wouldn’t get out of bed all day. 

  One day, her math teacher took her aside to check in on her. “Technically, she just put me in a breakout room on Zoom,” Maisy said. That’s when the floodgates opened, and she couldn’t stop crying. One of her friends drank a bottle of vodka alone in her room and had to get her stomach pumped. Another tried to overdose on her parents’ pills. 

  Maisy was lucky. Her dad is in tech. Her mom doesn’t work. The family went to Arizona for a month in mid-April to do distance learning from there, and eventually bought a house in Naples, Florida so the youngest could go to school in-person. The big question is what comes next.

  Serena Volk’s mother, Amy, in Maine, was worried about that, too. The future. Serena had lost a ton of weight during the lockdown. One day, at her boyfriend’s place, she spotted her ribcage and spine in a mirror. She’s supposed to go to the University of New Hampshire next year. But she’s not a motivated student, her mom said. “I have massive concerns about the gaps in her education, especially in math,” Amy Volk told me.

  

  High schoolers in a cafeteria,1983. (Denver Post via Getty Images)

  Adam lives in the Washington, D.C., area with his wife and two daughters, now 15 and 17. He didn’t want his name in print for fear of upsetting them. It had been a long, horrible two years, unimaginable really, and the last thing he wanted was to upset them. They seemed fragile. 

  When he was their age, in the mid-eighties, he said, “I was focused on soccer, Van Halen, and tear-assing around Long Island with my friends and my 16-year-old girlfriend.” He said it seems as though his girls “have the weight of the world on them.” 

  He didn’t know how bad things had gotten with his older daughter until softball practice started up in the fall of 2020—she plays second base—and he noticed that her uniform was hanging off her body. “She could barely pick up the bat,” he said. “An irrational being crawled into my wonderful, cooperative, never-lied, straight-A student daughter,” he said. “There would be an hour-and-a-half breakdown over an English muffin with margarine.” His younger daughter would hide under her bed to escape the screaming and the tears.

  Around Thanksgiving of that year, Adam rushed his daughter to the hospital. It was Sunday morning, and they called their doctor since she seemed like she was about to pass out. He told them that if they didn’t get her to a hospital soon, her heart might stop.

  When they got there, they learned she was 74.6 pounds. “I’ll never forget that number as long as I live,” he said. They gave her a feeding tube, and she stabilized after a week. She was supposed to star in the play at summer camp, but camp was canceled. She was supposed to go out for debate, but that was off, too. She was supposed to do Model UN, but then Model UN went remote, and it was just sad. She was supposed to go to the beach with her grandparents, but would she ever put on a bathing suit again? There were so many things that were supposed to happen and just didn’t, and now everything was going back to normal, but it wasn’t. 

  Adam says, “I say to my wife all the time, ‘What have we done to our kids?’”

  *  *  *

  If you appreciate stories like this one, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today to Bari Weiss ‘Common Sense’ Substack here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 20:20

• Major Banks Consider Zelle For Merchant Payments In Nod To Competing With Visa, MasterCard
  Major Banks Consider Zelle For Merchant Payments In Nod To Competing With Visa, MasterCard

  Big banks look like they could be devising a plan to try and take on credit card giants Visa and Mastercard. And that plan is shaping up to look like it will depend on money transfer service Zelle, which saw its growth explode during the pandemic.

  Banks are considering bringing Zelle to the checkout counter at big retailers, a new report from the Wall Street Journal noted Wednesday morning. 

  

  The payment service posted 1.8 billion transactions in 2021 amounting to $490 billion in cash changing hands. In 2021, it posted “more than double” of its prepandemic levels of both number of transactions and dollar amount of transactions, the report said. 

  Banks like JP Morgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are weighing whether or not that explosion of activity can be used to create a payment option that competes with Visa and Mastercard.

  Moving away from Visa and Mastercard would give banks more say over fees for transactions, and potentially increase fees that wind up directed to the banks. 

  “Bank of America customers made more Zelle transactions than wrote paper checks for the first time ever last year,” the Journal noted in its writeup. There’s currently about 1,450 financial institutions that offer Zelle for their customers. 

  

  Banks have already begun reaching out to select merchants to see whether or not they would be interested in such a change. A spokesman for the company that owns Zelle said the company is “working with financial institutions to explore more opportunities”. 

  Zelle saw a 162% increase in small business payments in 2021, the report says. 

  Three banks are also planning on launching a pilot that will allow Zelle to send rent payments to large property managers. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 20:00

• A Dark Day In Economic History; Could It Happen Again?
  A Dark Day In Economic History; Could It Happen Again?

  Via SchiffGold.com,

  Yesterday (April 5) was the anniversary of a dark day in US economic history.

  

  On April 5, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued EO-6102. It was the beginning of the end for the gold standard.

  Many people refer to EO-6102 as a gold confiscation order. But confiscation is probably not the best word for what happened in practice.

  In effect, the executive order criminalized owning gold. People caught with more than small amounts of gold could face a fine of $10,000 or 10 years in prison for hoarding the yellow metal. The order required private citizens, partnerships, associations and corporations to turn in all but small amounts of gold to the Federal Reserve at an exchange rate of $20.67 per ounce.

  In effect, EO 6102 nationalized gold. But in practice, this did not lead to gold confiscation in the true sense of the word.

  Americans turned in gold to the government, but they did so voluntarily as an act of patriotism. And the government gave people dollars in return for their gold. The feds never made any concerted effort to confiscate gold by force. They never went door to door looking for gold. And few were prosecuted under the law. Most of the prosecutions involved people caught trying to sell gold in sting operations.

  Today, you’ll sometimes hear people warn against owning gold because the government can just confiscate it again. Some numismatic coin dealers and precious metals pundits also use Roosevelt’s moves in 1933 to instill fear and bolster the sale of what they claim are “confiscation-free” products.

  Of course, it is theoretically possible for the government to confiscate gold. It’s also theoretically possible for the government to confiscate cell phones. That doesn’t mean it will.

  Even if you view the Roosevelt executive order as a warning sign, it’s important to understand the political and economic dynamics are much different today than they were in 1933. The world was on a gold standard and the economy was in a deep recession. The nationalization of gold was all about controlling the monetary system.

  And it worked.

  Today, the Federal Reserve has complete authority to expand the money supply and control interest rates. This is done with or without gold reserves. In other words, the government doesn’t need your gold.

  There are numerous reasons to believe gold confiscation is highly unlikely. We outline them all in our new report, “Confiscation Con: Will the Government Take Away Your Gold?” The report outlines six facts you need to know before you get caught up in government gold confiscation hysteria.

  You can download the free report HERE.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 19:40

• Wait-Times For Semi Chips Rise As China Lockdowns Re-Ignite Supply Chain Congestion
  Wait-Times For Semi Chips Rise As China Lockdowns Re-Ignite Supply Chain Congestion

  In March, the wait times for semiconductor deliveries increased again, an ominous sign that shortages persist and global supply chains remain congested. 

  Lead times — the lag between when a semiconductor chip is ordered and delivered — increased by two days to 26.6 weeks last month, according to Bloomberg, citing new data from Susquehanna Financial Group. 

  

  Susquehanna blamed increasing wait times on lockdowns in China and an earthquake in Japan that reduced the ability of major semiconductor manufacturers to increase output. In January, the group reported delays were diminishing, one of the first signs of improvements since 2019. However, that has since reversed as lead times rose in February. 

  China’s Zero-COVID policy and resulting lockdown since mid-March have sparked economic turmoil as China’s Caixin Services PMI crashed to 42.0 in March from 50.2 in February, the largest single-month decline since February 2020. 

  

  Taking a look at Goldman Sachs’ proprietary Effective Lockdown Index increased by more than ten points on average in March from February as tens of millions of people are in lockdown and factories are shuttered. 

  

  Susquehanna analyst Chris Rolland said lead times for power management, microcontrollers, analog, and memory chips increased the most. He said the Ukraine conflict, COVID lockdowns in China, and an earthquake in Japan “will have a short-term impact in the first quarter but may have lingering effects on the severely constrained supply chain through the year.” 

  The global shortage of semiconductors began more than two years ago in early 2020, driven mainly by the virus pandemic as the government showered Americans with helicopter money and work-at-home became widespread, pushing people to buy consumer electronic goods. Then there was a scarcity of chips as COVID shutdowns in China shuttered factories. At this rate, and considering the new developments at play, such as the war in Ukraine and China lockdowns, chip industry executives are now saying lead times might not alleviate until 2023. 

  As lockdowns were being implemented in China last month, our analysis suggested the world should brace for more supply chain pain. 

  Goldman Sachs’ transportation and logistics analyst Jordan Alliger wrote in a recent note to clients that weekly bottleneck metrics of the global supply chain remain elevated. 

  

  Alliger remains “somewhat concerned over the recent Covid lockdowns in China — while ports remain open, the impact to warehouses and trucking (i.e., driver testing requirements) could create some near term backlog in loading ships/sending them to the USA, which could eventually cause the West Coast to see renewed backups if too many ships leave China all at once.” 

  Even though Goldman and others had said global “bottlenecks have eased versus ‘peak’ levels in December/January (when our scale was at ’10’), we are still far from ‘normal’ congestion levels.” It appears congestion (but maybe not as severe) will be sticking around for the remainder of this year. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 19:20

• Citing Racial Discrimination, Black Leaders Target Roe v Wade
  Citing Racial Discrimination, Black Leaders Target Roe v Wade

  Authored by Alex Newman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A major lawsuit on behalf of unborn black babies making its way through the courts in Alabama has legal abortion in the crosshairs, alleging that the abortion industry is deliberately targeting black Americans and other minorities.

  

  If successful, the attorneys and activists behind the case told The Epoch Times that it might ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court opinion that struck down state laws against abortion.

  Even if the case does not succeed in court, legal analysts and experts in the field say the implications for the court of public opinion are hard to overstate.

  The lawsuit was filed by pro-life leader Amie Beth Shaver, named Miss Alabama in 1994, on behalf of “Baby Q,” an African American baby in Alabama who was unborn when the case began. Baby Q represents all other similarly situated black babies in the womb across the state.

  According to the complaint, Baby Q and other members of the “class” are being unlawfully discriminated against and targeted for abortion by the industry. Abortion giant Planned Parenthood acknowledges its roots in the eugenics movement, but says it is working to rectify that legacy.

  “About 80 members of Baby Q’s class, which is African American babies in the womb, lose their lives in abortion every week in Alabama,” Sam McClure, the lead lawyer representing the babies, told The Epoch Times in a phone interview. “Enough is enough. This has to stop.”

  Several leaders involved in the case told The Epoch Times that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry more broadly have a long history of racism and support for eugenics, the highly controversial idea that humanity should be “improved” by weeding out allegedly inferior genes from the population.

  “This case really boils down to the question of whether states have the right to prohibit eugenics abortion,” added McClure.

  Many of the black leaders involved in the case were also behind the Equality Proclamation, signed in 2020 on the 158th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, to shine the spotlight on what they describe as the systematic targeting of black babies.

  Why Alabama?

  Conservative Alabama is the best jurisdiction in America to wage this fight, McClure said.

  Thanks to a measure approved by around 60 percent of voters in 2018, Alabama has one of the strongest protections for the unborn in its state Constitution. It says the policy of the state is “to recognize and support the importance of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life.”

  The Alabama Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized the personhood of unborn babies in other cases not directly involving abortion, McClure and other attorneys involved in the case told The Epoch Times.

  The Baby Q case also hinges on a state law known as the Human Life Protection Act, which makes committing an abortion a felony punishable by up to life in prison.

  Signed into law by Governor Kay Ivey in May of 2019, the measure bans all abortions in the state except to protect the health and life of the mother.

  That law is widely seen as one of the strongest in the nation prohibiting abortion. It is even stronger than the Mississippi statute currently being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case many legal experts on both sides of the debate believe could overturn or at least scale back Roe v. Wade.

  In October of 2019, a federal court issued a preliminary injunction against the Alabama law, arguing that it violates existing Supreme Court precedent.

  As a result, Ivey and Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall have declined to enforce it, for now, as the U.S. Supreme Court once again takes up the issue of abortion.

  Legal filings and attorneys in the Baby Q case also point to the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects unenumerated rights, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing for equal protection under the law.

  Finally, plaintiffs in the case cite the U.S. Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states or the people all powers not specifically surrendered to the federal government, as authorizing or even requiring state action in defense of the right to life.

  Intervening in the case on behalf of Baby Q are almost 50 state lawmakers and a supermajority of the state Senate, as well as dozens of black leaders from across America alleging that the abortion industry is targeting people based on race.

  State GOP leaders are also active on the issue, with the executive committee calling on all Republican officials to use every tool at their disposal to stop abortion in Alabama, including shutting down clinics.

  The Objective

  The Baby Q case, originally filed in October of 2020, is aimed at forcing the government “to protect preborn African-American children from discrimination and to ensure their equal protection under the law,” according to court filings.

  “The abortion industry has systematically targeted the African American community for extermination by abortion, and this history is undisputed,” said attorney McClure, citing historical evidence and even recent statements.

  Over 20 million black babies have been aborted in America so far, and are three to five times more likely to be aborted than white babies, continued McClure. This sort of racial targeting is clearly prohibited under state and federal law, he added.

  “In New York City, more black babies are killed in abortion than are born alive,” he continued. “In Alabama, black Americans make up 27 percent of the population, and yet they make up more than 60 percent of the abortion cases. Nobody can argue that this is not deliberate.”

  The plaintiffs in the case are asking the court to order Gov. Ivey to enforce the Human Life Protection Act and protect unborn children in the state from abortion and discrimination based on their race.

  Eventually, the goal is to completely overturn Roe v. Wade and restore protections for the unborn that the landmark Supreme Court case undermined nearly 50 years ago.

  Because equal protection and prohibitions on racial discrimination are so firmly established in American jurisprudence, the activists and attorneys behind the case believe it could be a game changer in the abortion debate.

  The next major milestone will come on April 20, when the judge will hold a hearing on the issue after more than a year of no action on it.

  “Finally, on April 20th, these African American babies are going to get their day in court,” said McClure.

  The previous hearing, which took place on Zoom, dealt with whether the case should be public. The abortion industry is seeking to keep it behind closed doors, but the state judge expressed a willingness to having it in the open.

  Attorney Brent Helms, who is representing the legislators seeking to intervene in the case, explained part of the rationale in a phone interview with The Epoch Times.

  “If the judge denies this case, that offers us the opportunity to get to the Alabama Supreme Court,” he said.

  “When the legislature looks at this case, Alabama’s law is more strict and says that the unborn child is a person with constitutional rights,” Helms continued. “Those rights cannot be denied without due process and equal protection.”

  Helms added: “That means the child’s right to life would supersede or at least compete with the mother’s alleged right to privacy, as the right to life is an enumerated right, while the mother’s privacy rights to obtain an abortion were discovered in the penumbras as opposed to actually being written down.”

  Regardless of how the state circuit court judge rules, the losing side is expected to immediately appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court. The court is known as one of the nation’s more conservative state supreme courts.

  From there, it is practically certain that the losing side will appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  The Role of the US Supreme Court

  Numerous legal experts told The Epoch Times that the courts involved in the Alabama case may wait until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks before making any major decisions.

  However, the Mississippi statute only protects unborn babies after 15 weeks, while Alabama is seeking to protect them from the time of conception. The Baby Q case also deals with racial discrimination, while the Mississippi case does not.

  The plaintiffs and intervenors hope the apparent conflict between the Alabama State Supreme Court’s positions and the federal district court’s rulings will be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of protecting the right to life of the unborn in Alabama and beyond.

  McClure, the lead attorney for Baby Q, said justices from the Supreme Court have been leaving “breadcrumbs” in their opinions regarding what elements they would like to see in a major abortion case.

  In his concurring opinion issued in the case of Box v. Planned Parenthood, for example, Justice Clarence Thomas raised the issue of racial targeting as an important component.

  “We think the type of case the U.S. Supreme Court wants to take on to return abortion issues back to the states involves eliminating the abortion industry’s history of racial targeting, a purely state law claim, and a reliance on the Ninth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” McClure said, noting that the Baby Q case had all of those.

  “Obviously, we care about all life in the womb, but this case in particular deals with the racial targeting of children of African descent and this is a key issue,” he added.

  The U.S. Supreme Court’s own 1973 ruling on abortion acknowledged that if the “suggestion of [a fetus’] personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [Fourteenth] amendment.”

  The people of Alabama, as well as many medical and scientific experts, have concluded that unborn children are indeed persons, attorneys and leaders involved in the case said. Thus, under the reasoning in Roe v. Wade, the high court must act.

  The hope is that, through the courts, the abortion industry can be prevented from targeting unborn persons based on race, and eventually, state governments can regain the authority to protect all unborn lives, McClure said.

  Racism in Planned Parenthood and Abortion

  Dozens of prominent black leaders from across America are involved in the case, arguing that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry have been deliberately targeting the nation’s African American population and other minorities.

  It started at the very beginning with Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, black leaders told The Epoch Times.

  In her writings and her speeches to groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Sanger openly advocated for eugenics to control the reproduction of populations she believed were less desirable.

  Indeed, in 1939, Sanger launched the infamous “Negro Project” to pay and train black leaders to promote birth control and other measures in the black community.

  Eventually, when Alan Guttmacher took the helm of Sanger’s organization, abortion became a major element of the campaign, Georgia gubernatorial candidate and Baby Q intervenor Catherine Davis told The Epoch Times in a phone interview.

  After Guttmacher and his allies were able to get the Supreme Court to strike down state laws protecting the unborn, “Planned Parenthood established their abortion clinics primarily in communities of color across America,” Davis said.

  Among other evidence, she pointed to an investigation using 2010 Census data showing that about 80 percent of the organization’s abortion clinics were located in minority neighborhoods.

  Planned Parenthood would claim that their clinics are located where there is “the greatest need,” said Davis.

  “But if you look at their marketing, they are regularly targeting black Americans,” she added. “On Halloween they even tweeted out that it was safer for a black woman to have an abortion than to carry the baby to term. This is outrageous.”

  According to Davis and the dozens of other black leaders involved in the case, this is racist population control and eugenics.

  “The closest example of this is what Hitler did in Nazi Germany,” she added. “Look at Planned Parenthood: this is exactly what Hitler was doing to Jews, but Sanger’s program was more successful because they take care to disguise their agenda as ‘helping’ women and protecting their ‘right’ to abortion.”

  Another prominent leader involved in the case, Martin Luther King’s niece and pro-life leader Alveda King, called this battle “the civil rights issue of our time.”

  “No racial group in America has ever been more left out of societal protection nor suffered more deliberate discrimination, dehumanization, agonizing dismemberment, and death legally imposed upon them than black children,” said King.

  “The Baby Q case is a gauntlet,” King told The Epoch Times in an email. “Pray that the hammer of justice will rule in favor of life.”

  The controversial racial component of abortion was also highlighted nationally in the 2009 documentary “Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America,” which argued that the targeting of black Americans in abortion constitutes a genocide.

  Planned Parenthood Confesses, Data Speaks Too

  In recent years, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained prominence, almost 20 Planned Parenthood affiliates with operations across 3 out of 4 states have issued public admissions of racism within the organization.

  Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, for instance, condemned Planned Parenthood founder Sanger’s “racist legacy” while announcing that her name would be removed from its building.

  “There is overwhelming evidence for Sanger’s deep belief in eugenic ideology,” the group said. “Removing her name is an important step toward representing who we are as an organization and who we serve.”

  Planned Parenthood of Pacific Southwest, meanwhile, acknowledged “white supremacy of the past and present,” including “our own organization” and the “implicit bias” that it said still exists within Planned Parenthood today.

  “Planned Parenthood has been complicit in upholding systemic racism,” the group’s Illinois affiliate said.

  Similar statements confessing to “present participation in white supremacy” and acknowledging that Sanger’s “racist ideals” have “shaped Planned Parenthood today” were issued by numerous other affiliates.

  And yet the massive disparities continue, advocates say. According to a legal filing by black leaders in the Baby Q case citing state health statistics, 63 percent of the 7,538 “unborn children killed by abortion providers in Alabama” in 2019 were black.

  This shows abortion providers “intentionally target African American children,” the black leaders said in the legal filing. And this “violence” based on race would never be tolerated in any other context, they argued.

  Where the Case Goes Now

  Later this month, a hearing on the case will be held in state court in Alabama to hear arguments from the various parties involved.

  In its response to the lawsuit, Planned Parenthood Southeast asked the court to dismiss the case based on lack of jurisdiction and Baby Q supporters’ alleged failure to identify a claim where the court would be able to provide relief.

  Neither the national Planned Parenthood office nor the Southeast office responded to requests for comment from The Epoch Times on the allegations of racism or the ongoing litigation.

  The governor’s office is taking the same position as the abortion industry, urging the court to dismiss Baby Q’s case and refuse to allow legislators behind the Human Life Protection Act to intervene.

  Gov. Ivey’s office did not respond to requests for comment on why the governor has declined to enforce the Human Life Protection Act or why she is asking the court to dismiss the case.

  Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office also did not respond by press time.

  Colonel John Eidsmoe, a prominent constitutional scholar in Alabama who has worked closely with multiple state Supreme Court justices, told The Epoch Times that he did not anticipate a ruling by the Alabama courts until after the U.S. Supreme Court issues its opinion in the Mississippi case. That ruling is expected by this summer.

  “The general feeling is that the Supreme Court will uphold the Mississippi law, but it is not clear yet whether it will overturn or simply modify Roe v. Wade,” added Eidsmoe, a professor of Constitutional Law at Oak Brook College of Law & Government Policy as well as senior counsel for the Alabama-based Foundation for Moral Law.

  Alabama’s Supreme Court, he said, would likely want to wait for a favorable decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on the Mississippi law before moving on this.

  Eidsmoe also believes that, with its current makeup, the U.S. Supreme Court would be likely to uphold Alabama’s law protecting the unborn as well.

  Potentially even more important than the legal issues is what this case could do in the court of public opinion, said Eidsmoe.

  If Americans broadly recognize the facts in the abortion controversy and especially the racial targeting, the political and cultural implications would be beyond profound.

  Multiple experts and leaders involved in the case told The Epoch Times that these may be the last days for Roe v. Wade, legal abortion, and racial targeting of minorities by the industry. The outcome of the Baby Q case may play a key role in that historic shift.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 19:00

• US Approves $95 Million Patriot Missile Systems Boost For Taiwan
  US Approves $95 Million Patriot Missile Systems Boost For Taiwan

  At a moment the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Congressional leaders Tuesday that “significant international conflict between great powers” is now “increasing, not decreasing” – the US has announced approval of the sale of up to $95 million in new training and equipment for Taiwan.

  Crucially and quite provocatively from Beijing’s perspective, this new sale is focused on supporting Taiwan’s Patriot missile defense system, seen as key to defending the island in the event of an invasion.

  

  The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency confirmed in a statement, “The proposed sale will help to sustain (Taiwan’s) missile density and ensure readiness for air operations.”

  The statement called the items important as a “deterrent to regional threats and to strengthen homeland defense,” and outlined it will include training, planning, fielding, deployment, operation, maintenance, and sustainment of the Patriot system, associated equipment, and logistics support elements, as well as ground support equipment and spare parts, according to the DSCA statement.

  Taiwan’s foreign ministry thanked the Biden administration and welcomed the deal, which marks the third such approved arms package of the Biden administration. Taipei emphasized it’s needed to defend against China’s “continuing military expansion and provocation.” 

   “In the face of China’s continuing military expansion and provocation, Taiwan must fully demonstrate its strong determination to defend itself,” the foreign ministry said. “Our government will continue to strengthen our self-defense and asymmetric combat capabilities.”

  Meanwhile, one top US Navy commander says China is watching the Russia-Ukraine war closely, with an eye on Taiwan:

  As the Russia-Ukraine war continues, a senior US commander stated that Washington must remain vigilant on the Taiwan issue as China is increasing its capabilities and making adjustments to its plans to forcefully unite the island nation.

  U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Samuel J Paparo said, “China is undoubtedly watching what’s happened in Ukraine, taking notes, and learning from it.”

  “And there will be learning and there will be adjustments to the extent that they’re able to learn from it. And they will improve their capabilities based on what they learn at this time,” he told a gathering of Washington-based journalists from Indo-Pacific countries.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 18:40

• 450GB Of 'Deleted' Hunter Biden Laptop Material To Be Released Within Weeks
  450GB Of ‘Deleted’ Hunter Biden Laptop Material To Be Released Within Weeks

  A whistleblower who’s fled the United States for Switzerland has vowed to drop ‘450 gigabytes of deleted material‘ from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which he says he also gave the the Washington Post, New York Times, and Sen. Chuck Grassley – all of whom he says sat on it for months.

  

  For the past two weeks, former Steve Bannon War Room co-host Jack Maxey has been hiding in Zurich, where he told the Daily Mail he’s been working with IT experts to dig more data from Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell,’ and that he’ll post it all online in a searchable database in the coming weeks.

  Maxey says the data includes 80,000 images and videos, and more than 120,000 archived emails.

  “I came here so that we could do a forensic examination of Hunter’s laptop safely in a country that still respects human liberty and the ideals of liberal democratic principles,” he told the Mail. “I do not believe this would have been possible inside the United States. We had numerous attempts on us from trying to do things like this there.”

  Maxey said that after contacting DailyMail.com about the laptop last year, black suburban SUVs appeared outside his house, and former US intelligence officer friends he shared copies with told him they received strange calls.

  ‘I showed this to a friend of mine in desperation in February [2021] because nobody would listen to me. No news organizations would take it. In fact, the very first major news organization to take it was the Daily Mail,’ he said.

  ‘Very dear friends of mine, the sharp tip of the spear, were making welfare calls to me every day, basically to see if I was still alive.‘ -Daily Mail

  One former intelligence agency senior staffer allegedly told Maxey after he received the hard drive two years ago “If you don’t release enough of this, so that they know you can release all of it, I’m telling you brother, you’re a dead man.”

  

  After receiving this advice, he began posting caches of emails and other material from the laptop on various file sharing sites – only to find the links removed within an hour.

  “There were five drop boxes: two in the United States, one in New Zealand, two in the UK. All the same drop boxes in which they tell us child pornography is shared around the globe without any consequence because they can’t look at it,” he said, adding: “These are all Five Eyes countries, English speaking countries in an intelligence sharing agreement. And they were all ripped down.”

  “​​So this means that our intelligence services, who still have not even acknowledged that they have Hunter Biden’s laptop, were obviously diligently doing cache searches across the internet to find out if any of this stuff was being released. That should terrify every single decent person in the West.”

  

  According to Maxey, he went to Switzerland because they are home to the only file sharing site that didn’t nuke the laptop files – Swiss Transfer.

  The former Bannon podcast co-host said he is livid at the FBI, who he believes slow-walked their investigation into Hunter and failed to enter the laptop they received from Mac Isaac into evidence for months.

  According to the New York Times, files from the laptop are now part of the evidence in Hunter’s federal prosecution for alleged tax fraud, money laundering and illegal foreign lobbying.

  Among the files on the laptop are a raft of emails and documents showing Hunter’s dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian gas firm that became the center of Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019.

  The then-president was accused of pushing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into the Bidens and Burisma for alleged corruption. -Daily Mail

  “The FBI had this on the ninth of December 2019,” said Maxey. “‘I suppose the first person betrayed was a sitting US president in an impeachment hearing, when the FBI had the exculpatory evidence in their hands to have that end instantly, and they did nothing.”

  “The second group of people to be betrayed were all of the Democratic candidates in the spring primaries that year,” he continued. “The American people were utterly betrayed, because I guarantee you that Joe Biden couldn’t run for dog catcher if the American people knew about this laptop.”

  Read the rest of the report here.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/06/2022 – 18:20

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