Jan 07

Today’s News 7th January 2021

  • 79% Of Brits Supported Latest Nationwide Lockdown?!
    79% Of Brits Supported Latest Nationwide Lockdown?!

    As England and parts of Scotland have been put back into full lockdown mode in response to the recent escalation in the COVID-19 pandemic, a YouGov survey has revealed the public’s opinion on the latest countermeasures.

    As Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, a majority, 79 percent, say they support a nationwide lockdown to some degree, with a small majority, 51 percent, stating that they do so strongly.

    Infographic: Support for a UK national lockdown | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    In his announcement of the new rules, prime minister Johnson warned that the coming weeks would be the “hardest yet”. Key to the decision has been the increase in pressure on the health service in recent weeks, with record numbers of Covid-19 patients currently in UK hospitals. The lockdown is due to be in place until 15 February at the earliest.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 01:00

  • What To Expect In 2021: Madness, Mayhem, Manipulation, & More Tyranny
    What To Expect In 2021: Madness, Mayhem, Manipulation, & More Tyranny

    Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

    – George Orwell, Animal Farm

    What should we expect in 2021?

    So far, it looks like this year is going to be plagued by more of the same brand of madness, mayhem, manipulation and tyranny that dominated 2020.

    Frankly, I’m sick of it: the hypocrisy, the double standards, the delusional belief by Americans at every point along the political spectrum that politics and politicians are the answer to what ails the country, when for most of our nation’s history, politics and politicians have been the cause of our woes.

    Consider: for years now, Americans, with sheeplike placidity, have tolerated all manner of injustices and abuses meted out upon them by the government (police shootings of unarmed individuals, brutality, corruption, graft, outright theft, occupations and invasions of their homes by militarized police, roadside strip searches, profit-driven incarcerations, profit-driven wars, egregious surveillance, taxation without any real representation, a nanny state that dictates every aspect of their lives, lockdowns, overcriminalization, etc.) without ever saying “enough is enough.”

    Only now do Americans seem righteously indignant enough to mobilize and get active, and for what purpose? Politics. They’re ready to go to the mat over which corporate puppet will get the honor to serve as the smiling face on the pig for the next four years.

    Talk about delusion.

    It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.

    A perfect example of how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life has become in the America: while President Trump doles out medals of commendation and presidential pardons to political cronies who have done little to nothing to advance the cause of freedom, Julian Assange rots in prison for daring to blow the whistle on the U.S. government’s war crimes

    You’d think that Americans would be outraged over such abject pandering to the very swamp that Trump pledged to drain, but that’s not what has the Right and the Left so worked up. No, they’re still arguing over whether dead men voted in the last presidential election.

    Either way, no matter which candidate lost to the other, it was always going to be the Deep State that won.

    And so you have it: reduced to technicalities, distracted by magician’s con games, and caught up in the manufactured, highly scripted contest over which beauty contestant wears the crown, we have failed to do anything about the world falling apart around us.

    Literally.

    Our economy—at least as it impacts the vast majority of Americans as opposed to the economic elite—is in a shambles. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our government has been overtaken by power-hungry predators and parasites. And our ability—and fundamental right—to govern our own lives is being usurped by greedy government operatives who care nothing for our lives or our freedoms.

    Our ship of state is being transformed into a ship of fools.

    We stand utterly defenseless in the face of a technological revolution brought about by artificial intelligence and wall-to-wall surveillance that is re-orienting the world as we know it. Despite the mounting high-tech encroachments on our rights, we have been afforded a paltry amount of legislative and judicial protections. Indeed, Corporate America has more rights than we do.

    We stand utterly powerless in the face of government bureaucrats and elected officials who dance to the tune of corporate overlords and do what they want, when they want, with whomever they want at taxpayer expense, with no thought or concern for the plight of those they are supposed to represent. To this power elite, “we the people” are good for only two things: our tax dollars and our votes. In other words, they just want our money.

    We stand utterly helpless in the face of government violence that is meted out, both at home and abroad. Indeed, the systemic violence being perpetrated by agents of the government—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—has done more collective harm to the American people and their liberties than any single act of terror or mass shooting.

    We stand utterly silenced in the face of government and corporate censors and a cancel culture that, in their quest to not offend certain viewpoints, are all too willing to eradicate views that do not conform. In this way, political correctness has given way to a more insidious form of group think and mob rule.

    We stand utterly locked down in the face of COVID-19 mandates, restrictions, travel bans and penalties that are acclimating the populace to unquestioningly accede to the government’s dictates, whatever they might be (as long as they are issued in the name of national security), no matter how extreme or unreasonable.

    We stand utterly intimidated in the face of red flag laws, terrorism watch lists, contact tracing programs, zero tolerance policies, and all other manner of police state tactics that aim to keep us fearful and compliant.

    We stand utterly indoctrinated in the collective belief that the government—despite its longstanding pattern and practice of corruption, collusion, dysfunction, immorality and incompetence—somehow represents “we the people.”

    Despite all of this, despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to overthrow our republic and enslave the citizenry in order to expand their power and wealth.

    It is a grim outlook for a new year, but it is not completely hopeless.

    If hope is to be found, it will be found with those of us who do not rely on politicians that promise to fix what is wrong but instead do their part, at their local levels, to right the wrongs and fix what is broken. I am referring to the builders, the thinkers, the helpers, the healers, the educators, the creators, the artists, the activists, the technicians, the food gatherers and distributors, and every other person who does their part to build up rather than destroy.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, “we the people” are the hope for a better year. Not Trump. Not Biden. And not the architects and enablers of the American Police State.

    Until we can own that truth, until we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

    In that scenario, no one wins.

    There’s a meme circulating on social media that goes like this:

    If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?

    Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering. So before you get too caught up in the circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles that keep us distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, first ask yourself: who’s really shaking the jar?

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/07/2021 – 00:10

  • American Airlines Is Ending Support For Emotional Support Animals
    American Airlines Is Ending Support For Emotional Support Animals

    American Airlines is finally ending the literal circus that was becoming “emotional support animals” at airports and in airplanes nationwide. Hopefully, other airlines will follow suit.

    Back in the day, there were seeing eye dogs, sheep herding dogs and cadaver dogs that were specially trained and that was it. Every good doggo was an “emotional support animal” for its owner, which is one of the best parts of having a pet: they can calm you down, they can bring joy into your life and they can be your best friend.

    But if you don’t know someone that has wrapped their dog up in a military style pet-vest with the words “emotional support animal” written on it lately – as if their “specially trained” dog’s key goal is to somehow psychoanalyze you and offer you written notes on the “anxiety” you feel from capitalism or the patriarchy, versus simply eating, sleeping, farting and crapping – then you haven’t been paying attention. 

    It has become an epidemic across the U.S. – people using the “emotional support” excuse to gain access for their pets on flights and in airports – where they would usually not be welcome. And once the floodgates for emotional support dogs opened up, Americans starting carting around emotional support squirrels, emotional support clowns, emotional support peacocks and entire emotional support zoos with them as they traveled. 

    But American Airlines appears to have finally seen enough. The airline has made a policy change that “matches a new Department of Transportation regulation that says airlines aren’t required to treat emotional support animals as service animals,” according to CNN. The rules come into effect on January 11. 

    At that point, American Airlines says it will “will no longer authorize new travel for animals that do not meet that definition, such as emotional support animals.”

    Emotional support animals are supposed to be “prescribed by mental health professionals to provide comfort and support, but unlike service animals, they are not required to have training in specific tasks.”

    Jessica Tyler, president of cargo and vice president of airport excellence for American said: “We’re confident this approach will enable us to better serve our customers, particularly those with disabilities who travel with service animals, and better protect our team members at the airport and on the aircraft.”

    Among the airline’s concerns was that “passengers were fraudulently passing off their pets as the more loosely defined and fee-free category of emotional support animals”. 

    What gave it away, guys? Was it the peacock?

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 23:50

  • China's "Unrestricted War" On The United States
    China’s “Unrestricted War” On The United States

    Authored by Doug Dodge via AmericanThinker.com,

    In 1999 Colonel Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui wrote a book called Unrestricted Warfare.  In this book, these officers, who were both active-duty officers in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) discussed the lessons learned from the Gulf War action in 1990.  The book was published by the PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House in Beijing, which suggests official approval by the PLA Command. 

    Liang and Xiangsui recall the CNN broadcast of the dead American soldier in Mogadishu and how that broadcast caused an American pullout of Somalia, changing the world’s strategic situation. 

    This and other examples caused these officers to postulate another type of warfare they called unrestricted warfare, which crossed all of the spectrums of society and involved no rules.  The authors listed 15 types of new warfare to be used in order to avoid the standard military conflict.

    One of these new types of warfare is called New Terror Warfare (Xiangsui, 1999), where modern technology is used to cause terror, with a lessor emphasis on violence and a greater emphasis on terror.  The book specifically mentions the Aum Shinrkiyo Cult’s attempt to use sarin in Tokyo as an example of causing terror without a lot of violence.  An example of this might be the Wuhan Virus, which came from China and has been used to cause terror throughout the world.  This virus has resulted in lockdowns of countries, people demanding others wear masks at all times, and huge violations of American citizens’ constitutional rights. 

    Another new type of warfare is drug warfare, which is described as making huge profits by spreading health and social disasters in other countries. According to the New York Times, China is the largest producer of fentanyl coming into America.  The US Drug Enforcement Administration states that China and Mexico are the primary source countries for fentanyl.

    A third type of new warfare is listed as smuggling warfare, which is described as throwing the markets into confusion and attacking economic order. This warfare is being conducted, along with the drug war, by the use of counterfeit articles from China being shipped to the United States.  For example, the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) seized 500,000 counterfeit masks being sent from Shenzhen, China to the United States for people to use to try and stop the spread of the Wuhan Virus.

    A fourth type of new warfare is listed as economic aid warfare, described as bestowing favor in the open and contriving to control matters in secret. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is seen as an example of this warfare, where China aids other countries in return for those countries owing China, what exactly is owed is not known to the public. 

    A fifth type of new warfare is cultural warfare, which is described as leading cultural trends along in order to assimilate those with different views.  This is encapsulated by China’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement.  The Black Lives Matters movement is a movement that is admittedly Marxist in its leanings and is attempting to force everyone to bow to it or face their wrath. 

    Another type of new warfare is media warfare, which is described as manipulating what people see and hear in order to lead public opinion along. American media outlets, which are owned, co-opted by or indebted to China, have been distorting the story about the Wuhan virus.  The American media has been refusing to acknowledge the origins of the virus.  Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted to lying to Americans in order to manipulate their behavior.  Dr. Fauci has connections to China, including the funding of the lab where the Wuhan virus was being studied.  The media is also involved in covering up other scandals, such as the Hunter Biden money scandal

    In Unrestricted Warfare, the authors specifically state, “the goal should be to use all means whatsoever… to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.”   Obviously, the Chinese are actively engaged in various types of warfare against the United States, as shown by the examples cited.  The United States needs to decide to fight back and force the Chinese government to cease its offensive actions against us or face the consequences.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 23:30

  • "Vagina Mountain" Sculpture Fuels Culture War In Brazil
    “Vagina Mountain” Sculpture Fuels Culture War In Brazil

    A massive concrete sculpture that looks like a vagina in Brazil has fueled a cultural war between leftists and conservatives on social media. 

    The handmade 108-foot concrete sculpture, called “Diva,” was unveiled last week by artist Juliana Notari on the hillside of a former sugar mill in Pernambuco, a state in northeast Brazil. 

    Notari wrote in a Facebook post that the hillside vagina was intended to spark “dialogue with issues that refer to gender issues from a female perspective combined with a cosmopocentric and anthropocentric western society.” 

    “Currently, these issues have become increasingly urgent. After all, it is by changing perspective of our relationship between humans and humans and nonhuman, that will allow us to live longer on that planet and in a less unequal and catastrophic society,” she said, referencing the intolerant climate that Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency has created in Brazil. 

    Notari said it took “almost 11 months” of hard work by more than a dozen people to erect the “33 meters high, by 16 meters wide and 6 meters deep, covered by armed concrete and resin” hillside vagina. 

    Before long, it appears she succeeded at stirring up social media attention as tens of thousands of comments flooded the post. By Wednesday morning, 27,000 comments and 15,000 shares were seen. 

    “The sex organ wasn’t created to be admired, let alone be called art,” wrote one Facebook user. “It’s tasteless and unnecessary and there’s no meaning. You did this because you knew there would be criticism and that’s what you wanted, publicity.”

    “With all due respect, I did not like it. Imagine me walking with my young daughters in this park and them asking … Daddy, what is this? What will I answer?” another commenter said. 

    Someone asked: “Why did only men work to create your art ?” 

    A commentator called the sculpture “Vagina Mountain.” 

    Bolsonaro has long criticized liberal-designed art, and last year, he attempted to unsuccessfully freeze funding for movies with LGBTQ themes.

    The Western world appears locked in a culture war. This is the most evident in the US (read: here). 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 23:10

  • Capitol Declared 'Secured'; Woman Shot During Standoff Has Died; Confirmation Process To Resume Tonight
    Capitol Declared ‘Secured’; Woman Shot During Standoff Has Died; Confirmation Process To Resume Tonight

    Summary:

    • 100s of Pro-Trump protesters clashed with police after the president’s speech
    • A number of protesters breached security at The Capitol and are inside the building
    • The Capitol has been evacuated
    • VP Pence has been escorted from the Chamber to a secure location
    • 1000s are peacefully protesting outside’
    •  President Trump urges protesters (via Tweet) to “Stay peaceful”
    • Washington DC Mayor orders 6 pm citywide curfew
    • DoD refuses to call DC official for National Guard deployment
    • Federal Protective Service, Secret Service Deploying To Capitol
    • President Trump Orders National Guard To Capitol To Restore Order 
    • Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan Sends State Troopers To Capitol To Restore Order 
    • FBI Has Been Deployed To The Capitol 
    • President Trump Calls On Supporters To “Go Home” 
    • FBI SWAT Team Enters Capitol Building 
    • US Officials Say The Capitol Building Is Now Secure 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    *  *  *

    Update (2034ET): Trump supporters are still out in the streets despite the curfew. National Guard members are holding the line around the Capitol complex. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1904ET): Breaking moments ago, BNO reports the Capitol is back on lockdown due to a “security threat” within the building. 

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    *  *  *

    Update (1820ET): According to House majority whip, James Clyburn, one of the top Democrats in the House, despite the 6 pm curfew in Washington, the process to certify Joe Biden as the next US president will continue tonight.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed this, and said that they have decided to proceed with the Electoral College vote tally “tonight at the Capitol once it is cleared for use.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Meanwhile, as seen in the next clip, the National Guard has now arrived at the Capitol

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    * * *

    Update (1800ET): The Capitol was finally secured Wednesday evening, hours after supporters of President Trump raided the facility. Protesters walked the halls of the Capitol complex as encounters with police led to the shooting death of a woman. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

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    Update (1740ET): Hours after the Capitol building was raided by hundreds of Trump supporters, Reuters is now reporting the facility is “now secure.” 

    • US OFFICIALS SAY THE US CAPITOL BUILDING IS NOW SECURE

    Additional headlines from Reuters details how police are pushing protesters away from the Capitol. 

    • POLICE HAVE CLEARED PROTESTERS OFF OF STEPS OF U.S. CAPITOL -LIVE VIDEO
    • POLICE DEPLOYED AT U.S. CAPITOL ARE DRIVING PROTESTERS AWAY FROM BUILDING -REUTERS WITNESS

    *  *  *

    Update (1733ET): Trump supporters unleash hell on camera equipment owned by major media outlets – this reminds us of the printer scene from the movie “Office Space.” 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

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    Update (1722ET): Capitol buildings in Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Colorado, and California have been shut down, or have implemented increased security measures this evening following the events that unfolded in Washington, D.C., today. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1647ET): DC Mayor Muriel Bowser speaks at a press conference Wednesday evening about the events that unfolded this afternoon on the Capitol building. She says a citywide curfew will start at 1800 ET and continue through 0600 ET Thursday. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1631ET): As evening falls, NBC’s Leigh Ann Caldwell reports the FBI SWAT team has entered the Capitol building. 

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    Update (1620ET): In a prerecorded video published on Twitter, President Trump calls on his supporters to leave the Capitol building. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1610ET): President-elect Joe Biden delivers a statement on today’s chaos at the Capitol. 

    Biden calls on Trump’s supporters to end their assault on the Capitol: “This is not dissent… it borders on sedition. And it must end now.”

    *  *  *

    Update (1602ET): Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has tweeted that he is “sending troopers to assist the Metropolitan Police Department and the United States Capitol Police.” 

    Hogan also said: “All Americans should be outraged by this attack on our nation’s Capitol. This is a heinous and violent assault on the heart of our democracy. I will not stand for this, and neither should any American.”

    *  *  *

    Update (1542ET): President Trump has ordered the National Guard to Capitol grounds to restore order. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1533ET): Several media outlets are reporting one person was shot on Capitol grounds about 30 minutes ago. 

    AP is reporting one person was shot; CNN is reporting a woman was shot in the chest on Capitol grounds. 

    Apparent gunshot victim being rushed out of the Capitol building. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    We are awaiting more information. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1520ET): Within the past hour, President Trump has tweeted again, this time urging “everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful.” 

    Trump continued: “No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!” 

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    *  *  *

    Update (1512ET): More views of protesters on the Senate floor. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Additional views from inside the Capitol.

    Just wow!

    Trump supporter stealing a podium? 

    Man walking with large Confederate flag in Capitol building. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1508ET): Here’s a stunning view of protesters using a window washing platform to get to higher floors of the Capitol. 

    *  *  *

    Update (1455ET): “Officers have drawn their firearms inside the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives after supporters egged on by the president breached the Capitol,” tweeted Reuters’ Brad Heath. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    *  *  *

    Update (1444ET): DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has ordered a citywide curfew starting at 1800 ET following the chaos at the Capitol. Also, reporters are saying tear gas has been deployed while President Trump urges supporters to remain peaceful. 

    “Lawmakers have been told to get ready to put on gas masks and have retrieved gas masks from under the seats. There is banging on the door to the chamber,” Bloomberg’s Emma Kinery tweeted. 

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    Moments ago, President Trump urged protesters to “support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement.”

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    *  *  *

    Update (1434ET): Trump supporters have breached the Capitol building. The mob is now inside the building. Security at the Capitol building has failed. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    *  *  *

    Following President Trump’s address to supporters at a rally in Washington on Wednesday afternoon, a group of demonstrators marched to the US Capitol and reportedly breached several layers of security barricades around the building.

    Just before 1300 ET, a group of Trump supporters “toppled the barricades, storming through them to the grassy fields leading to the Capitol,” according to WaPo. 

    Inside the Capitol, Congress is meeting to certify the electoral college votes for President-elect Joe Biden

    Amid the unfolding chaos, staff in the Cannon House Office building to evacuate, according to a notice obtained by Bloomberg. Madison office building staff have also been told to evacuate. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Demonstrators are becoming increasingly violent towards police.   

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    Trump supporters are attempting to break police lines at the Capitol. 

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    “Whoa: Trump supporters going at it with the police on the steps of the Capitol as Congress counts the Electoral College ballots inside,” HuffPost’s Philip Lewis tweeted.

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    Representative Haley Stevens tweeted that she is “sheltering in place in my office.” She said the building next to her is being “evacuated.” 

    Stevens wrote: “I can’t believe I have to write this.” 

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    Here are more views outside of the Capitol. The Daily Dot’s Zachary Petrizzo said police are now firing tear gas into the crowd. 

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    Apparently, the crowd outside the Capitol is increasing in size. 

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    CNN’s Kaitlan Collins has just tweeted the “US Capitol is now on lockdown.” 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Protesters are now at the steps of the Capitol. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Protesters have made it to the doors of the Capitol. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Protesters have made it inside the Capitol building. 

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 23:05

  • South Korean Warship Now Patrolling Persian Gulf After Iran Seized Tanker
    South Korean Warship Now Patrolling Persian Gulf After Iran Seized Tanker

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    A South Korean warship sailed into the Persian Gulf on Tuesday after Iran seized a South Korean-flagged tanker in the waters.

    South Korea’s defense ministry said the destroyer Choi Young was operating near the Strait of Hormuz. “It is carrying out missions to ensure the safety of our nationals,” South Korean Defense Ministry spokesperson Boo Seung Chan said of the destroyer.

    South Korean Navy’s Chungmugong Yi Sun Sin class destroyer Choi Young, via The Drive/RIMPAC

    South Korea has approximately 300 members of an anti-piracy unit that have been operating in the region since last year and are reportedly on board the Choi Young destroyer.

    According to The Drive, among its weapons systems include the following: 

    The primary armament on these ships are Mk 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS) arrays, with each of the destroyers having a total of 64 cells. These can be loaded with a mixture of U.S.-made Standard Missile 2 Block IIIA surface-to-air missiles or South Korean-designed Hyunmoo-3 land-attack cruise missiles, as well as the Korean Anti-Submarine Rocket (K-ASROC), also known as the Red Shark, an anti-submarine weapon that has a homing torpedo as its warhead. We don’t know what the Choi Young‘s exact loadout is on this deployment.

    Officials in Seoul insist that the situation with Iran will be resolved diplomatically, despite the deployment of the warship.

    South Korea is sending a delegation to Iran to negotiate the release of the tanker ahead of a planned visit to Tehran next week.

    Iranian media first reported the seizure of the South Korean tanker Hankuk Chemi on Monday. The ship was carrying about 7,200 tons of chemicals and sailing from Saudi Arabia to the UAE.

    Iranian officials said the ship was seized for violating environmental protocols and polluting the waters of the Gulf, but some suspect it is related to the $7 billion of Iranian funds South Korea has frozen due to US sanctions.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 22:50

  • China Makes It Harder For US Spy Satellites To Spot Hypersonic Missiles
    China Makes It Harder For US Spy Satellites To Spot Hypersonic Missiles

    China’s transporter erector launcher (TEL), which carries and fires DF-17 hypersonic missiles, has received a stealth camouflaged cover that makes it more challenging for the US and allies to identify via reconnaissance satellites, according to state-run newspaper Global Times. 

    TEL is a ground-based vehicle with an integrated prime mover (tractor unit) that can carry and elevate a DF-17 into a firing position. 

    The upgraded TEL was spotted in a video celebrating the founding of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force last week and was published initially on the Chinese website 81.cn. 

    According to the video, the camouflaged missile transporter has a hypersonic missile encased inside a shell as it traverses desert terrain. 

    Shanghai-based news website eastday.com said the TEL is an upgraded version specifically for hauling DF-17s. 

    The PLA debuted the DF-17 during a military parade in late 2019. At the time, the TEL hauling the DF-17 had no cover and the entire missile was exposed. 

    Camouflaged missile transporters come as DF-17s are being fielded at military installations in Southeast China. 

    The missiles have already been deployed in the Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, which are in striking range of Taiwan. 

    Beijing’s increased militarization of its southeast coast is very suggestive of preparations for an invasion. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 22:30

  • Iran Uses Its Grip On Strait Of Hormuz To Fight Back US-imposed Sanctions
    Iran Uses Its Grip On Strait Of Hormuz To Fight Back US-imposed Sanctions

    Submitted by South Front,

    Iran has found an original way of dealing with sanctions and limitations imposed on it by the so-called “maximum pressure” campaign launched by the Trump administration.

    On January 4, the Navy of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps detained a South Korea-flagged oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz over an alleged environmental pollution issue. The chemical tanker HANKUK CHEMI was inbound to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. Ahead of the incident, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations naval authority reported that an “interaction” between Iranian authorities and a merchant vessel in the Strait of Hormuz led the ship to alter its course and proceed into Iranian waters.

    Following the incident, the South Korean Defense Ministry said that it will send its anti-piracy Cheonghae unit, normally based in the Gulf of Aden, along with helicopters to the Persian Gulf. The 302-strong Cheonghae unit operates a 4,500-ton destroyer, a Lynx anti-submarine helicopter and three speed boats.

    The deployment of this unit is a rather a symbolic move than a practical step that should allow to protect South Korea-flagged ships in the region as Iranian forces have an overwhelming dominance there and using its conventional and asymmetric capabilities can even challenge the US military in the event of a limited military confrontation there.

    Two days before the seizure of the tanker, Iran said a South Korean diplomat was due to travel to the country to negotiate over billions of dollars in its assets now frozen in Seoul. The total amount of Iranian money blocked in South Korea is up to $8.5 billion and Tehran declared its readiness to barter its money for deliveries of a variety of goods and commodities, including raw materials, medicine, petrochemicals, auto parts, home appliances.

    Apparently, Iran thinks that South Korea needs some additional motivation to go contrary to the will of its Big Brother and accept the Iranian proposal.

    Another important diplomatic achievement was made by Qatar, which is known as not only a Turkish ally, but also the Gulf monarchy that has constructive relations with Iran. On January 4, Saudi Arabia lifted the 4-year air, sea and land blockade that it together with the UAE, Kuwait, Egypt and Bahrain imposed on Qatar. In June 2017, the blockading countries accused Qatar, among other things, of supporting terrorism and of being too close to Iran. They severed economic and diplomatic ties with Doha and imposed a land, sea and air blockade on it. Qatar rejected all the allegations and refused to comply with a long list of demands announced by the blockading countries. So, now the anti-Qatari coalition is in retreat. The main factors that contributed to this scenario are the following:

    • a deep crisis faced by Saudi Arabia due to the failed intervention in Yemen and its oil war adventure;
    • the UAE-Saudi tensions that reached a new level due to the declining power of the Saudi Kingdom;
    • the growth of the influence of Iran and its popularity among the population of the Middle East due to the public rapprochement of the Gulf monarchies with Israel;
    • the stern stance of Qatar itself that used the blockade to develop alternative alliances and strengthen relations with Turkey, Iran and even Russia to contain the pressure it faced.

    The Israeli-aligned Gulf monarchies will likely try to use the lifting of the blockade to convince Doha to officially join the US-led pro-Israeli coalition. However, even if Qatar does this under the pressure of the United States and with hopes of restoring economic relations with its neighbors, this does not mean that Doha would change its de-facto regional strategy as the previous years already demonstrated that the national-oriented approach is much more useful in times of crises than empty hopes on large revenues from Israeli love.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 22:10

  • C-SPAN Reinstates Journalist Steve Scully After He Was Caught Lying About Being Hacked
    C-SPAN Reinstates Journalist Steve Scully After He Was Caught Lying About Being Hacked

    It seems it’s only “cancel culture” when the mob wants to cancel someone on the right.

    We say that because there appears to be no outrage after C-SPAN announced that “never Trumper” Steve Scully would be keeping his job at the network after an embarrassing incident last October where Scully admitted he lied about his Twitter account being hacked. 

    The network wrote on January 5: “Steve Scully, who was placed on administrative leave in mid-October for Twitter-related controversies in conjunction with the second presidential debate, is returning to duty at C-SPAN beginning this week. His initial assignments will be off-air producing for C-SPAN television and resumption of his work on C-SPAN Radio’s ‘Washington Today’ program and ‘The Weekly,’ a podcast/interview program.”

    “We view October’s events as a singular episode in an otherwise successful 30- year C-SPAN career. And while it was appropriate in October for Steve to be immediately relieved of his duties leading our 2020 election coverage, we reiterate our belief that now, having completed a three-month administrative leave, he can continue to contribute to CSPAN’s mission,” C-SPAN wrote in a statement January 5.

    C-SPAN had suspended Scully indefinitely after he admitted to lying about his Twitter feed being hacked following an awkward incident in which he appeared to accidentally tweet an intended private message to former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci.

    Scully’s suspension came on the day he was set to moderate the now-canceled second presidential debate, which was to be ‘a career highlight for the 30-year C-SPAN veteran’ (and former Biden staffer).

    In October 2020, after Scully tweeted “@Scaramucci should I respond to Trump,” Frank Fahrenkopf, co-chairman for the Commission on Presidential Debates relayed Scully’s lie that his Twitter account was hacked. C-SPAN similarly issued a statement, confidently claiming “Steve Scully did not originate the tweet and believes his account has been hacked.”

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    Shortly after Scully’s ‘hack’ lie was peddled across the MSM by prominent voices, former Hillary Clinton staffer Yashar Ali noted that the C-SPAN veteran had previously blamed hacks twice before.

    Following that revelation, Scully apologized for lying. Via AP:

    Scully said that when he saw his tweet had created a controversy, “I falsely claimed that my Twitter account had been hacked.”

    He had been frustrated by Trump’s comments and several weeks of criticism on social media and conservative news outlets about his role as moderator, including attacks directed at his family, he said.

    “These were both errors in judgement for which I am totally responsible for,” Scully said. “I apologize.”

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    Scully acknowledged that he let his C-SPAN colleagues down, along with fellow news professionals and the debate commission.

    “I ask for their forgiveness as I try to move forward in a moment of reflection and disappointment in myself,” he added.

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    C-SPAN at the time said: “He understands that he made a serious mistake,” adding “We were very saddened by this news and do not condone his actions.”

    They left out “we look forward to re-instating him as soon as Joe Biden is elected president”. 

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    Regardless, it seems like lying is a pre-requisite to be a journalist nowadays anyway. Enjoy your second act, Steve, and good luck keeping those pesky hackers at bay.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 21:50

  • Meet The Censored: Mark Crispin Miller
    Meet The Censored: Mark Crispin Miller

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    Mark Crispin Miller, author and longtime New York University professor, has unconventional views. Even work he’s done that’s won mainstream praise is unconventional, upon close examination. If you came of political age during the Iraq war years, you probably remember him for The Bush Dyslexicon, a witty, challenging book that took a deep dive into the speech patterns of George W. Bush.

    .

    Unwrapping the thought processes behind famed “Bushisms” like “The question is, how many hands have I shaked?”, Miller found a metaphor for the broad illogic under American society. However, that book’s central idea — that “we Americans have been tricked out of our democracy by a vast and very smart conspiracy of stupid talkers” — was too rich for some mainstream commentators.

    Crispin Miller argued that when people like Donald Rumsfeld told us that “victory” in Iraq may not come “in a month or a year or even five years,” that in fact even fighting forever might be a “victory, in my view,” the joke was not that this message was garbled by Bush, but rather that it was conveyed clearly by “producers, anchors, editors, journalists, and pundits,” who were “fatally dyslexic in doping out the very spectacle it presents to us.” Presenting madness as sanity required a brokenness of mind that just happened to come of the president’s mouth as laugh lines.

    Since then, Crispin Miller has become known for blogging about official deceptions, and his attentions are often focused in directions that make even hardened skeptics like me nervous. On MarkCrispinMiller.com, he posts headlines like, “The Official Story of 9/11 is Based on a Gigantic Lie” and “‘Rogue’ Chinese virologist presents ‘smoking gun’ evidence that SARS-COV-2 was created in a lab.’” As noted in the interview below, he once suggested a student read Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, a book that inspired a $450,000 defamation award to the parent of a Sandy Hook victim.

    At the same time, his observations about the nature of media in America remain poignant and rare in a country whose citizens are trained to believe that propaganda is something only other people consume. Crispin Miller tries to undo those thinking patterns via a course in propaganda at NYU that, he says, urges them to evaluate material independently, and is what got him in trouble.

    There’s a paradox in the way we consume information in the U.S. Our country does not (yet?) insist that official lies remain accepted as truths forever. Even the U.S. Naval Institute is now allowed to write lengthy tracts about how “high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public” in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and it’s accepted that similar lies were told about everything from WMDs to the pretext for the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Even the Zero Dark Thirty account of how we supposedly killed and captured Osama bin Laden was a mess, with then-chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan saying initially that bin Laden used his wife as a human shield, only to have the government retract the claim shortly after.

    While already-proven deceptions are fair game, the penalties for those who raise the first questions grow higher all the time. The term “conspiracy theorist” is now applied equally to people like Alex Jones and Sy Hersh, whose objections to the story of bin Laden’s capture have been effectively memory-holed, as have his oft-denounced reports on reported chemical attacks in Syria (the subject of numerous recent whistleblower accounts claiming official deception).

    Additionally, the term “conspiracy theory” is now often wrapped in accusations of bigotry. In fact, the spreading of conspiracy theories is understood to be a key element of racist movements. There’s obviously some truth to that, as theories about Jews in media or disease-ridden immigrants are among the most common form of the genre. However, it shouldn’t follow that because racists spread conspiracy theories, all people who investigate conspiracies are racist.

    That faulty syllogism now means that the person who tries to take on an entrenched official story not only risks being called crazy, but a racist, sexist, Assadist, etc. The latter charges, if they stick, lead to an expanding array of consequences, from removal from the Internet to job loss. This effect has heightened during the pandemic, a period when we’ve been encouraged to forget how often conventional wisdom about Covid-19 has shifted:

    Crispin Miller’s recent troubles stem from being a skeptic about mask use. He points out that until 2020, studies were unenthusiastic about their benefits in stopping the transition of respiratory illness, and even the CDC only recently changed its mind on the issue. When he broached the subject in class, a student responded critically on Twitter:

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    Criticizing Crispin Miller for sending links to a site that in turn linked to The Charlie Kirk Show, Zero Hedge, Technocracy News, Global Research, “and more,” the student went on to tag the University leadership and wrote, “I hope they take immediate steps to relieve him of these duties.”

    Crispin Miller’s department responded by promising, “We have made this a priority and are discussing next steps.” This in turn led to a now-standard cancelation ritual. A denunciation letter from academic colleagues asked the school to complete a review of Miller’s “intimidating tactics, abuses of authority, aggression and microaggressions, and explicit hate speech, none of which are excused by academic freedom and First Amendment protections.”

    The faculty letter began with complaints about Crispin Miller’s blog, which they said includes “direct mockery and ridicule of trans individuals” and a “characterization of transgender surgery as a eugenic form of sterilization.” They went on, however, to say that no matter how “damaging” these very “visible” views may be to the department, he has a “right to his opinions” that we “must uphold.”

    The signatories then shifted and argued that by mentioning that tweeting student, Crispin Miller moved out of the realm of mere damaging opinion, and into the crime of creating an “unsafe learning environment.” Through this bait-and-switch, the opinions on the blog that colleagues only a few paragraphs before said must be upheld, were now re-entered as part of the argument against him.

    The letter says Crispin Miller through his blog “used his position of authority to intimidate students who choose to wear masks and abide by NYU policy,” which implies but does not exactly say he was telling students not to wear masks. Crispin Miller insists he did not do the latter, and notes that he wears a mask “in discharge of his professional duties.”

    Near the end, the signatories wrote:

    We support the queer, transgender, and non-binary members of the NYU commüñity. We support those in our community who are Black and Indigenous people of color, and immigrants, and who come from marginalized and historically underrepresented communities, particularly those who have been targets of ongoing and systemic racism and violence. We unequivocally condemn white supremacy, anti-trans/nonbinary bias, and any hate speech.

    With this language, protesting faculty moved the Crispin Miller issue from a technical violation of campus mask policy, or even just an accusation of unsound or “non-evidence-based” teaching, and into an argument that positioned him additionally as a defender of white supremacy. This double-whammy construction has become a regular part of the accusatory formula in such cases.

    Crispin Miller responded with a petition to defend his academic freedom that so far has gained over 26,000 signatures, as well as a lawsuit against academic colleagues for libel and defamation, charging among other things that the letter by faculty members, in espousing their liberal credentials, led “any reasonable reader to falsely believe that plaintiff holds regressive views, opposing social equality for insular minority groups and espousing hatred toward them.”

    I disagree with a lot of things Mark has written over the years, but he’s exactly the kind of person whose teaching style tends to benefit college students: a smart person who thinks for himself and challenges students to do the same. By encouraging the school to sack him over a complaint, Crispin Miller’s colleagues are telling students that it’s faster to eliminate or suppress unpleasant ideas than find successful arguments against them. This feels like the opposite of teaching.

    Katie Halper and I interviewed Mark for Rolling Stone’s Useful Idiots podcast. An abridged transcript of the interview is included below:

    MT: What happened?

    MCM: I’ve been teaching at NYU since 1997. Media studies is my field basically. And one of the courses I’ve taught every year, every semester, really, and sometimes even more than that, is a course on propaganda…

    I began the course, as I always do, by making clear that my approach to the subject of propaganda is not to treat it as some ancient thing where we look at the Nazis, we look at the Bolsheviks, maybe we talk about World War I, maybe we talk about McCarthyism, right?

    We definitely look at those earlier examples, but the focus of the course, the mission of the course is to try to teach students how to recognize it in real-time, make an effort to assess its claims impartially, even if you agree with them, and then see if you can discern the hallmarks of a propaganda drive, because it always comes disguised as news or entertainment or something like that. Figure out who’s behind it, and what its purpose is.

    And I make this abundantly clear, it is a difficult thing to do, intellectually difficult. It can even be socially and psychologically difficult to be skeptical, to that degree. So I said, as I always do, we would naturally focus on some of the things that are going on now. For example, look at the way we’re meeting. We’re meeting via Zoom. This is an eloquent testimony to the success of the whole COVID crisis propaganda. And propaganda does not have to be—

    MT: False?

    MCM: Right. Pejorative… Nefarious, as you said. A campaign to get you to wear your seatbelt in a car, that’s propaganda, but propaganda it is anyway. And so we would want to deal with it. For example, we might want to look at the mask mandates. I would encourage you to look at a body of very interesting scientific studies, eight randomized controlled studies conducted over the last 15 years or so among healthcare professionals of the effectiveness of masks against respiratory viruses, because the consensus of those studies, and those are the most rigorous kind of scientific study, randomized controlled studies. The consensus is that they’re not really effective. I would encourage you to read those…

    I also think you should read more recent studies finding otherwise. And I gave some guidance as to how a layperson can assess the soundness of scientific studies because I mean, I’m not a scientist, right? And they’re not scientists, most of them. I said, for example, there are scientific reviews of these studies. You can find them. In some cases, there’s actual press coverage of very public objections to studies. And you’ll want to look at the universities where these studies were done and see if they have financial arrangements with big pharma companies or get money from the Gates Foundation, because this might suggest some kind of conflict of interest. I said, all this. I want to add, I said pointedly, “I am not telling you not to wear masks.” NYU has a strict rule. I observe the rule. This is an intellectual exercise, or would be, if you did it.

    The following week, or maybe a little later, a student emailed me and asked to join late. And as I always do, I said sure, the more the merrier. And she joined us. And the second day she was there, she had spoken up at one point the first day about Edward Bernays’s book, Propaganda, which we were discussing. The next day, the mask thing came up again. So that little bit resumed. And she didn’t say anything. That was on a Thursday.

    Early the next week, I get a call from my department chair asking me, in a kind of accusatory tone, if I had discouraged them from wearing masks, or did I have them read something that suggested they don’t work? Whatever he asked me, I said, “Well, this is what I said, this is what happened.” And he said, “Oh, well, I’m going to have to tell the Dean’s COVID task force,” or whatever it’s called. I said, “Okay, what’s up?” And he told me that a student had gone on Twitter and demanded that I be fired.

    MT: Do you suspect that there are views that you’ve held previously that your colleagues disagree with, and that this has become a pretext? And if so, what might those things be?

    MCM: First of all, I think my colleagues are sincerely outraged by some of my views or what they think my views are. Now see, if they were in my class, I could actually engage them in a conversation about some of the things they think I said. One of the things they claim in their letter is that on my website I’ve denied Sandy Hook happened. On my site, Markcrispinmiller.com, anyone can do a search on Sandy Hook, and they’ll see that it doesn’t come up once. I don’t mention it.

    What they’re referring to, and what incensed them, apparently, [was] that in a class, in a propaganda class… someone mentioned Sandy Hook, which was the first in the series of school shootings that have been so high profile in this last decade. Columbine was much earlier, and that was very different. I said, “There is some very interesting research on Sandy Hook that is troubling and very challenging, and I dismissed it out of hand until I read it. And I have to say, there’s something to it. And so if you’re interested in this, you might read it.” And I mentioned this book, a collection of essays. That was my denying that Sandy Hook happened.

    So clearly, a student in the class reacted in precisely the way I urged them to try not to act in the class, i.e. just heard me say that about Sandy Hook, and went and told some of my colleagues, “He’s denied Sandy Hook occurred.” And then they all said, “See? Typical. He’s denied Sandy Hook…” So that’s an example of what I take to be their sincere discomfiture with my engaging precisely the sort of subject that most academics and journalists and others are, sort of, trained to avoid, because you get in trouble if you talk about them.

    But the whole course, as your question implies, is about that. We can always easily spot the propaganda that we don’t agree with. You ask any liberal, what’s propaganda? They’ll say, “Oh, Fox. Fox News.” You ask any conservative what’s propaganda? They’ll say, “MSNBC.” They’re both right. Both are propagandistic, but what they can’t see is the propaganda that they agree with because they think it’s just information. They think it’s just the truth.

    MT: Isn’t the academic world struggling with whether the appropriate way to go about teaching is to encourage kids to read everything and discover things for themselves, or to just give them the right texts and tell them to avoid the wrong texts? There’s a school of thought that believes strongly that some things are just aren’t worth reading, versus the traditional notion that a student should read everything, even things that are horrible.

    Katie Halper: Even Mein Kampf…

    MCM: Calling it a school of thought I think is dignifying it because it’s not thought at all. It’s thoughtlessness, the school of thoughtlessness. And it’s not a school, therefore, because you’re not teaching anybody anything except groupthink, and that’s what’s happening. It’s very oppressive.

    It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s like going to school during the Cultural Revolution or Gleichschaltung, which was the Nazi term for streamlining. It’s when they made all the cultural institutions, they Nazified them all. Of course, there was stuff you couldn’t read. It would be a crime to read it or even bring it up, and it’s kind of like that now. Many of the people who’ve been attacked by their colleagues, as I have, tend to be toward the right. Scott Atlas was attacked by the Stanford faculty for working under Trump on health policy, and Alan Dershowitz has been attacked by the Harvard faculty for his legal advice to that effort after the election…

    But as my case shows, you don’t have to be on the right to be attacked this way. I’ve heard from many people, professors at other schools, who’ve had their slings and arrows, had those shots at them, risked getting fired. Some have been fired. And they’re long-time left people, but… the left today is… not the left that I remember, that I have long considered myself part of, which is antiwar, which is about rectifying grotesque income inequality, strengthening the working class, certainly civil rights… Those are, I see them as left issues. Many of them are also libertarian issues. So what the left has now become is a pro-censorship army. It wants censorship, so the left has changed immensely, and I think that I’m sort of a casualty of that.

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 21:30

  • Trump Supporters Swarm Governor's Mansion In Washington State
    Trump Supporters Swarm Governor’s Mansion In Washington State

    On Wednesday afternoon, supporters of President Trump breached the gates at the Governor’s Mansion in Olympia, Washington. 

    According to local news KING 5, “hundreds of protesters gained access to the property, with flags, signs, and megaphones.” 

    KING 5 reporters were on scene and confirmed Gov. Jay Inslee was home as protesters, some armed, were at his doorstep. 

    The Daily Beast’s Shauna Sowersby said, “protesters are now standing outside of Gov. Jay Inslee’s mansion on the Capitol campus chanting, “open the gates!” Some are banging their flags on the metal gates.” 

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    Sowersby captured the moment when protesters broke through the security gate and stormed the grounds of Inslee’s mansion. 

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    Protesters swarmed the front yard of the mansion.

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    They were met by police officers in riot gear at the front door of the home. 

    Near Inslee’s mansion, a Fox News reporter shoved a Trump supporter. We assume the Trump supporter will be watching One America News Network from now on.

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    The incident at Inslee’s mansion follows a chaotic afternoon at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., when hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the building, gaining access to the Senate floor. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 21:10

  • Senate Rejects Ted Cruz's First Objection To Electoral College Certification
    Senate Rejects Ted Cruz’s First Objection To Electoral College Certification

    Update (2305ET): The Senate voted down Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) first objection to the Electoral College certification process, lodged against Arizona. While over a dozen senators had pledged to object, just six ended up voting yes following Wednesday’s violence in the U.S. Capitol; Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Roger Marshall (R-KS.) and John Kennedy (R-LA) joined Cruz in objecting according to Axios.

    *  *  *

    Wednesday’s historic protest at the Capitol (described by some far-left outlets like Buzzfeed as a legitimate act of domestic terrorism) is working out for both of America’s establishment political factions, the Nancy Pelosi-led Democrats, and the establishment GOP. Only in the modern bifurcated media environment could Thursday’s protest be described as both a “coup d’etat” and a peaceful, non-violent demonstration (though, to be fair, one woman died after being shot in the chest).

    In reality, however, it was neither. And now that it’s over (instead of setting up an anarchist commune, the pro-Trump protesters mostly dispersed after they felt their point had been made), we’re starting to see how Wednesday’s protest has created a critical opportunity for Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Congressional leadership: it has given them a way out.

    Following reports from NBC News that some Republicans were reconsidering their decision to support a challenge to the election, the Hill is reporting that many senior Republicans are “hopeful” their colleagues have changed their minds.

    But we probably won’t know for certain how many lawmakers have changed their minds until the day of the big vote.

    “There’s gonna be probably 30 or 40 more minutes of debate, and one vote,” Rand Paul said. “I just don’t think there’s going to be another objection. I think it’s over at that point.”

    Paul says he expects the Senate will vote on the objection to Arizona’s Electoral College votes on Wednesday evening, but didn’t expect Republican senators to object to the results from Georgia or Pennsylvania as previously planned.Congress has already returned to continue with the debate and votes.

    When the Hill tried to contact them, spokespeople for Sens. Josh Hawley and Kelly Loeffler, who were expected to object to vote tallies in Pennsylvania and Georgia, respectively, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

    Whatever happens, the public will know soon enough. But there’s nothing like a failed “coup” to ratchet up the pressure on an increasingly isolated Trump.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 20:57

  • Peter Schiff Exposes America's Dysfunctional Economy
    Peter Schiff Exposes America’s Dysfunctional Economy

    Via SchiffGold.com,

    Peter Schiff appeared on the Lions of Liberty podcast with Marc Clair to look back at the Trump economy and ahead to what the Biden years might bring. Along the way, Peter and Marc talk about the stock market bubble, Peter’s move to Puerto Rico, the looming dollar collapse, and bitcoin.

    The Trump economy will probably be most remembered for the surging stock market. The president constantly pointed to record stock values as a measure of his success. But Peter reminds us that we also had a strong stock market in the last couple of years of the Obama presidency. In fact, Trump ran a campaign attacking that stock market bubble. He promised he was going to fix Main Street by addressing the trade deficit and the budget deficit, rebuilding America’s manufacturing economy, and draining the swamp.

    And none of it happened. Instead, all Trump is doing is pointing to the stock market bubble, which is now bigger than the one he inherited, and claiming a successful presidency based on the stock market. Meanwhile, the budget deficits he’s leaving to Biden are far greater than the ones he inherited from Obama. The trade deficits he’s leaving Biden are much bigger than the ones he inherited from Obama. In fact, the trade deficit with China has never been larger. So, to the extent we were losing on trade before Trump, we’re losing even bigger than ever with Trump — and this is even before COVID.”

    Of course, it wasn’t all bad.

    Trump did deliver promised tax cuts. But he also increased spending.

    Trump made government a bigger burden on the economy than it was before. He just changed the way that burden is borne by the public. Instead of paying for government with income taxes, we’re paying for it through inflation. The government is printing more money and taking the purchasing power. I mean, the dollar is just beginning to fall.”

    Ultimately, everything Americans buy will become more expensive thanks to the inflation created to finance the huge expansion of government during the Trump years.

    Of course, Peter doesn’t think things will improve with Biden in the Oval Office. In fact, he said Trump has left the Republican Party in a weak position to act as the opposition to the Biden agenda. And what is that agenda? Grow government more substantially and pay for it with bigger deficits and more money printing.

    Republicans didn’t object to the bigger deficits when Trump policies produced them. They didn’t object to larger deficits when they were cutting taxes on the rich. So, how would they object to bigger deficits for all these social programs that are going to benefit the middle class and the poor? At least that’s the Democratic rhetoric. So, I think it’s going to be difficult for the Republicans to really have the type of roadblocks in front of Biden that they did successfully erect in front of Obama.”

    Peter also noted that the far-left “Bernie Sanders-AOC wing” of the Democratic Party is far more popular than it was when Obama was in office. Even though Biden is a more mainstream Democrat, he will have to make some concessions to the far left for political reasons. Peter said he thinks we may well see a federal $15 an hour minimum wage, implementation of some aspects of the Green New Deal, and perhaps even a move toward student loan forgiveness, “Medicare for All” or a universal basic income.

    Marc followed up with a key question: how can we protect our wealth given what is likely coming down the pike? For one thing, Peter recommends avoiding the US stock market. But he doesn’t suggest keeping your wealth in cash.

    If the choice was between US cash and US stocks, I’d hold my nose and buy US stocks. Because I think at the end of the day, the biggest losers are going to be the people who hold cash. And the worst thing you could do with your cash is buy bonds. So, it’s going to be the bondholders who suffer the most, not the stockholders. But I think that foreign stocks, emerging markets will dramatically outperform the US stock market over the next five to 10 years. In fact, over the next one year.

    And you know, the only way the US or the Federal Reserve, the US government, could prevent the stock market from crashing, which it should do because it’s so overvalued, but the only way to save the stock market is to sacrifice the dollar. And that is what they’re doing. They’re keeping on printing money and keeping rates artificially low to prevent the air from coming out of these bubbles. They don’t want stock prices to crash. They don’t want real estate prices to crash. So instead, the dollar is going to crash.”

    In effect, the real value of stocks and real estate will come down. But you can’t see that when you’re measuring it in dollars because the dollar loses value faster than your stocks.

    If I keep shrinking the value of the dollar, it makes it look like your stock portfolio is growing. But if you then take your stock portfolio and measure it in gold — how many ounces of gold can I afford with the stock portfolio? — that’s where you’ll see the falling value of your stock, or your real estate, or whatever you happen to have.”

    Peter said ultimately, he thinks we will see a major macroeconomic transition as the world moves away from the dollar as the reserve currency.

    The dollar is going to collapse and that is going to turn the world upside down, because now Americans can’t live beyond their means anymore. Americans can only consume if they produce. Americans can only borrow if they save. And our dysfunctional economy is so screwed up now from all these years of having the benefit of being the issuer of the reserve currency that we’re no longer going to be able to function in a different world where we have to pull our own weight.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 20:50

  • Israeli Airstrikes Rock Damascus At Moment All Eyes Are On US Capitol
    Israeli Airstrikes Rock Damascus At Moment All Eyes Are On US Capitol

    At a moment international media and political leaders are focused on watching the mayhem unfolding on Capitol Hill, Israel has again attacked Syria, hitting southern Damascus with a series of airstrikes Wednesday night. 

    This is the third such Israeli attack in three weeks, during which Syrian air defenses were active and said to have intercepted some of the inbound missiles. 

    Via Arab News

    State-run SANA said the strikes were launched from the direction Golan Heights region, and that many missiles were successfully intercepted.

    According to The Jerusalem Post: 

    An alleged Israeli airstrike targeted locations in southern Syria as explosions were heard in the skies over Damascus on Wednesday night, according to Syrian state media SANA.The strikes were launched from the Golan Heights, a Syrian military source told SANA, claiming that most of the incoming missiles were intercepted by Syrian air defenses.

    While it’s likely that Israel already had the targets in mind – given also such attacks have become almost “routine” – it appears the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) intentionally conducted the operation at a moment the world’s eyes are fixated on watching events unfold in Washington D.C.

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    Casualties are as yet unknown, with the extent of damage further unconfirmed. During a prior Christmas Eve attack on the Syrian countryside there were multiple casualties reported. 

    Israel has long claimed its attacks are primarily against Iranian troop positions and weapons smuggling operations connected to Hezbollah.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 20:30

  • South Carolina Legislation Looks To Ban Mandatory Vaccines
    South Carolina Legislation Looks To Ban Mandatory Vaccines

    Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

    Lawmakers in South Carolina have pre-filed a bill proposing a ban on mandatory coronavirus vaccines.

    WCNC News reports that four state reps. have proposed the legislation to ensure that people may opt out of vaccination and not be discriminated against for doing so.

    The proposal states that those refusing the vaccine would not face “adverse employment action” or any form of societal restrictions for doing so.

    The legislation will also state that vaccines “may be provided only to those individuals who agree to vaccination.”

    Currently in the state it is legal for employers to mandate vaccinations. This legislation would overturn that.

    The proposed bill, which has been referred to the Committee on Medical, Military, Public and Municipal Affairs, is being sponsored by one Democratic representative, and three Republicans. They are Reps. Steven Long, R-Spartanburg, Leola Robinson, D-Greenville, Mike Burns, R-Greenville, and Sandy McGarry, R-Lancaster.

    Rep. Burns told reporters “We want people to be able to go to their jobs, go to schools, go about their business, and not be mandated to do something that they feel is not in the best interest health-wise for themselves.”

    “There should be no negative consequences for those opting out of the vaccine,” Rep. Burns added.

    Representative Stephen Long said that the legislation was proposed following concerns from multiple constituents that “vaccine cards” could be introduced, effectively segregating society.

    “Taking a vaccine should be a personal, private choice, and requiring ‘vaccine cards’ to board planes, attend school, etc is a very dangerous idea,” Rep. Long urged.

    “I encourage everyone to speak with a physician about the benefits and risks of taking a vaccine, but it should never be mandatory,” Long added.

    The proposal could progress through to committee next week, according to reports.

    There has been much hype around potential ‘COVID passports’, especially concerning the fact that employers are currently allowed to mandate vaccination in many states.

    Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases stated that mandatory vaccinations are still ‘on the table’, and that he is “sure” that institutions such as hospitals and schools will mandate all who work there to be vaccinated.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 20:10

  • Hank Paulson Returns To Wall Street To Run 'Climate-Focused' PE Fund
    Hank Paulson Returns To Wall Street To Run ‘Climate-Focused’ PE Fund

    Since overseeing the near-destruction of the global financial system, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has kept a low profile, appearing in public every now and then to laugh in the face of worsening economic inequality – “We made it wider!” – or bemoan the deteriorating US-China bilateral relationship.

    But from here on out, the public might be seeing and hearing more from the septaugenarian who once ran Goldman Sachs, before he was tapped to run the Treasury Department by President George W Bush.

    As NYT editor and CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin reported on Wednesday, Paulson has been tapped by – of all people – U2 frontman Bono to lead a new climate-focused investment fund at private equity firm TPG Capital. The 74-year-old will now return to the private sector for the first time since leaving Goldman in 2006.

    Here’s more from the NYT:

    This past fall, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, got a call from Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono. The musician-activist-investor had an idea and “an ask”: Bono, who helped found TPG’s $5 billion Rise funds focused on “impact investing,” told Mr. Paulson that the investment firm wanted to create an even bigger platform to focus exclusively on combating climate change — and he wanted Mr. Paulson to run it.

    Mr. Paulson, who has spent the last 12 years since leaving his post at the Treasury away from the private sector running his nonprofit institute and working on climate change initiatives, demurred.

    “He told me, ‘My dance card is full,’” Bono said of the call. “I thought he’d be amazing,” Bono added, but said he’d been warned by Mr. Paulson’s associates, “There’s just no way.”

    This week, after months of calls and meetings that followed with Jon Winkelried, TPG’s co-chief executive – Mr. Paulson’s friend and former colleague when he ran Goldman Sachs – Mr. Paulson will become the executive chairman of a new global fund, TPG Rise Climate.

    But why tap Paulson for such a role? As it turns out, the former Treasury Secretary has dedicated himself to combating climate change via various nonprofits over the past decade or so. Paulson and TPG co-founder Jim Coulter said their goal with the fund is to “to make investments in climate that are as profitable as any other kind of investment.”

    Paulson plans to dedicate roughly 50% of his time to this new role. Right now, he’s focused on meeting with power players around the world to try and drum up some investment for the fund. But given all the hype around ESG investing, we suspect Paulson won’t have much trouble recruiting investors.

    Unsurprisingly, when prodded to offer up an example of a successful ESG investment, Paulson pointed to Tesla. But unless Paulson plans on dumping the fund’s money in OTM $TSLA calls, he will need to find some other ESG-focused companies who are still in the early stages of running their business.

    The early returns from TPG’s existing Rise funds — $2 billion of which are in climate-related investments — appear to suggest that socially responsible investing can be just as profitable as other approaches. Mr. Coulter said that with the reduction in the cost of solar energy — for example, bringing it to parity with the cost of building a new gas plant in some places in the United States — the opportunity to make attractive new investments has fundamentally changed. He said he was seeing similar opportunities in electric vehicles and the energy grid that powers them, in agriculture and in consumer packaged goods.

    In the public markets, investors are throwing money at companies like Tesla and others that have positive environmental, social and governance models. However, there is not enough of a pipeline of climate-focused businesses ready to go public, Mr. Paulson said: “We need more high-quality investment opportunities from private equity investments that have the potential to become scalable public companies.”

    Asked by Sorkin to explain why he thought Paulson would be best suited to lead such a fund, Bono explained that his years of work combating global poverty and AIDS have taught him that sometimes you need “the unusual suspects” to come in and do things differently.

    Bono said of his new partnership with Mr. Paulson, “My work on global poverty and then the AIDS fight taught me that we don’t just need the usual suspects, we need some ‘unusual suspects,’ if you like, and some unexpected partnerships in the conversation as well.”

    And just like that, Paulson has become the most important ESG investor in the world. Now, all he needs to do is hire Greta Thunberg as chief analyst.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 19:50

  • Medical Errors And The Cult Of Expertise In The Age Of COVID
    Medical Errors And The Cult Of Expertise In The Age Of COVID

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    Ever since the covid panic began in February of this year, medical personnel such as doctors and nurses have been treated to a level of hero worship generally reserved for the government’s soldiers and cops. We were told they were heroically slaving away to treat covid victims. And although many of these nurses were apparently spending their time choreographing TikTok videos and dancing in hospital hallways, we were assured by government officials and their obedient allies in the media that medical staffers are the new model for self-sacrifice and civic virtue. 

    Yet in the two decades leading up to 2020, researchers were repeatedly alarmed by the extent to which medical errors were a persistent problem in American clinics and hospitals. Beginning at least as early as 1999, an increasing number of studies suggested that perhaps nearly a hundred thousand patients per year were dying due to medical errors.

    Numerous articles appeared in mass media outlets suggesting that medical training was insufficient, that systems devised by hospitals were error prone, and that malpractice was not as rare as doctors would have us believe. 

    Not surprisingly, politics also intervened. Many outlets took the apparent prevalence of medical errors to prove that more government regulation and government funding were necessary. Others noted problems in how government agencies count deaths. 

    But then the covid panic happened. Not surprisingly, concerns over medical competence have receded into the background, and medical personnel have instead been treated to a status of near apotheosis, with the opinion of every run-of-the-mill nurse or physician on everything from racism to “essential businesses” being of the utmost gravity. 

    Moreover, with a focus on the maximization of counting covid deaths, it is likely we’ll see fewer deaths due to medical errors in official counts. And lobbying groups devoted to representing doctors and nurses are likely to use the current political situation to their own advantage. As has long been the case with police and soldiers, the medical profession is pressing the “never question us, we’re experts” line. The actual record, however, suggests the level of “expertise” ought to receive more scrutiny. 

    How Many Deaths Are Caused by Medical Errors? 

    After years of growing discussion on the topic, Johns Hopkins University in 2016 released a study concluding that “medical errors” were the third leading cause of death:

    Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year.

    A death caused by a medical error is defined as a death caused by poorly skilled staff, errors in judgment, a preventable adverse effect, or systemic problems such as computer malfunctions or mix-ups over medication.

    The Hopkins study concluded that the methods of reporting deaths in the United States are inadequate to account for the full role of medical errors. 

    The Hopkins statistic was widely reported in the media, such as in this 2018 article at MSNBC. MSNBC even notes that other studies have reported medical errors as the cause of over four hundred thousand deaths per year. 

    Closer to 100,000 per Year?

    Since then, some researchers have expressed dismay and disbelief over the notion that deaths caused by medical errors could be so numerous. For example, researcher and medical doctor David Gorski insists that many who believe the Hopkins number of 250,000 are no better than “quacks.”

    Gorski suggests that only fifty-two hundred deaths per year result from medical errors. But in this Gorski relies on a very narrow definition of medical errors as the overwhelming and obvious cause of death. He nonetheless admits that more than 108,000 deaths per year are cases in which “adverse effects of medical treatment” (i.e., medical errors) are “contributory.”

    Gorski’s number of fifty-two hundred is likely little more than wishful thinking. While 250,000 may be on the high end, it’s unlikely medical errors are nearly as rare as Gorski hopes.

    In this study published in 2020 at the National Institutes of Health, for example, the authors take for granted that “[m]edical errors in hospitals and clinics result in approximately 100,000 people dying each year.”

    And it is also widely assumed, as noted in this study by the Washington Medical Commission that “Medical errors remain vastly underreported.” After all, medical personnel are often reluctant to report errors so as to avoid potential legal problems or sanctions from supervisors.

    But while some doctors insist they’re being unfairly targeted, others have been sounding the alarm for years. Today, a commonly accepted number is between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand deaths per year.

    These are not small numbers. A total of one hundred thousand medical-error deaths makes medical errors among the top cause of deaths. If the current covid-19 pandemic plays out like previous pandemics, the total number of deaths will be much lower in 2021 than 2020’s official total of approximately 350,000. But deaths due to medical errors will continue to number around a hundred thousand year after year after year. 

    Covid and Medical Errors

    Gorski slams the practice in which cases where medical errors were only contributing factors in deaths are potentially counted as deaths due to medical errors. The debate has long been over how much medical errors must contribute to death before they are reasonably counted as the cause of death.

    In 2020, however, look for the final tally to show that counting medical errors has been swept aside in the mortality documentation in favor of attributing more deaths to covid-19.

    After all, it is now common practice to count any death in which covid-19 was a contributing factor as a death due to covid. That is, anyone who dies “with covid” is reported to be a death caused by covid.

    A nurse gave a covid patient the wrong medication, which led to a severe adverse reaction? That’s a covid death. A doctor mixed up two covid patients and administered inappropriate treatment to both? That’s two covid deaths right there.

    In other words, unless steps are taken to ensure accurate recording somewhere, if covid deaths are being overreported, we can expect medical-error deaths to be underreported.

    Seizing a Political Advantage

    Meanwhile, trying to take advantage of the current goodwill showered on medical personnel, many medical professionals are seeking additional legal protections from malpractice suits. Reuters reports:

    State chapters of the powerful American Medical Association and other groups representing healthcare providers have been pressing governors for legal cover….More than half a dozen emergency room doctors and nurses told Reuters they are concerned about liability as they anticipate rationing care or performing unfamiliar jobs due to staff and equipment shortages caused by the outbreak.

    Yet, there is no reason to assume covid treatments will make doctors and nurses easy targets. States already have standards in place which require plaintiffs to show that medical personnel “negligently deviated from the reasonable standard of care.” The fact that a doctor made a mistake is not enough to make a malpractice lawsuit successful.

    Thus, some attorneys who represent victims of medical error and negligence worry that covid will be used as an excuse to further shield healthcare workers from legitimate lawsuits:

    Joe Belluck, a New York lawyer who brings medical malpractice cases, said he’s concerned the coronavirus crisis could be used to enact a wish list of changes sought by doctors, hospitals and the medical industry to curb unrelated lawsuits.

    Given the way that medical personnel have been treated by media and government personnel in the age of covid-19, it’s not hard to see how this current state of hero worship could be employed to ram through legislation favored by longtime rent-seeking special interest groups like the AMA.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 19:30

  • Iran Showcases Suicide Drones During Large-Scale UAV Combat Exercise
    Iran Showcases Suicide Drones During Large-Scale UAV Combat Exercise

    Iran is conducting two day large-scale drone exercises in Semnan province and in coastal waters which started Tuesday, involving hundreds of domestic built UAVs, and notably including suicide drones. 

    According to the Iranian Army chief overseeing the combat exercises, Admiral Mahmoud Mousavi, naval drones will fly from warships in the country’s southern waters, while suicide UAVs will additionally conduct long-range sorties.

    Via Reuters, Iran state media

    Underscoring the nature of the exercise as a ‘show of strength’ at a moment US forces are in the region, including the USS Nimitz carrier strike group which days ago was called back to its Mideast area of operation after it was initially pulled out, Mousavi emphasized that “the Islamic Republic of Iran is one of the able and most powerful countries in the field of drone production.”

    State media described that it was the first exercise of its kind in terms of extent and the variety of drones deployed for the combat simulations.

    “UAV combat operations including air interception and destruction of aerial targets using air-to-air missiles, destruction of ground targets using bombs and pinpoint missiles, as well as widespread use of suicide drones, are among the measures that will be carried out in the operational part of this exercise,” Adm. Mousavi described further.

    The commander added, “The flight of naval drones from a vessel in southern waters of the country, long-range flight of pinpointing suicide drones to destroy vital targets in the depths of enemy’s soil will be one of the drone combat exercise plans.”

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    Official footage showed what are commonly called Kamikaze drones crashing into targets to deliver munitions after previously circling above. These deadly advanced drone types were recently deployed by Azerbaijan during the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

    On Sunday the Pentagon reversed its decision to remove the USS Nimitz carrier from the Gulf region, reportedly after President Trump intervened to rescind prior orders that it would return to the US. Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller said in a statement: “Due to recent threats issued by Iranian leaders against President Trump and other government officials, I have ordered the USS Nimitz to halt its routine redeployment.”

    Washington is now likely closely monitoring Iran’s drone activities in and near the Persian Gulf, and will likely view the two-day exercises as a potential provocation, particularly if any drones circle near US vessels.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/06/2021 – 19:10

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