Today’s News 7th November 2023

• Young, Bold, & Angry: The Youth-Led Revival Of The Palestinian Cause
  Young, Bold, & Angry: The Youth-Led Revival Of The Palestinian Cause

  Authored by Mohamad Hasan Sweidan, op-ed via The Cradle,

  Global youth are smashing Israeli propaganda constructs to champion justice and humanity as they throw their support behind the armed struggle for Palestinian national liberation.

  

  For years, there’s been a prevailing notion that the Palestinian cause is losing its grip on the younger generations. This perception stems from the belief that, as globalization tightens its hold, the youth in West Asia, particularly in occupied Palestine, might become more disconnected from their historical roots and national affiliations. 

  With the spread of liberal ideas, many speculated that economic opportunities, technological advancements, and global exposure would shift their focus away from the Palestinian cause. Some even anticipated that the younger generation would turn against armed resistance to the Zionist occupation, owing to the small tide of Arab-Israeli normalization.

  But recent events, especially the US-backed Israeli genocidal war against Gaza, have shown a different story. Three weeks of nonstop atrocities have rekindled the flame of Palestinian identity, ensuring that at least three generations stand united against the west’s ‘rules-based order’ and in support of any resistance against the occupation state.

  Youth in West Asia

  Prior to the Hamas-led Al-Aqsa Flood military operation on 7 October, many believed that young Arabs were leaning more toward normalizing relations with Israel, prioritizing economic prosperity over solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians. 

  However, the stark contrast between Iranian-aligned Arab states, which struggle with sanctions and insecurity, and those Arab countries that have normalized relations and enjoy a better quality of life has made the youth question the old assumptions about resistance.

  The role played by Arab youth after the events of 7 October has reinforced the need to confront Israel. Tel Aviv’s behaviors, rife with criminality, aggression, and lies, have embarrassed its Arab partners, and now challenge the narrative that sought to separate Hamas from the rest of the Palestinian population.

  According to Pew Research Center’s generational divisions based on age, today’s younger generations can be categorized into two groups, and current children can be classified into a single category:

  

  After the launch of Al-Aqsa Flood, the west attempted to frame the narrative around the specific event – leaving out historical context – sought to characterize Hamas as ISIS, and emphasized Israel’s “right to self-defense” against “terrorism.” Ironically, it has been Israel’s brutal actions that countered these efforts, leading to the deaths of over 8,525 Palestinians, including 3,542 children and over 2,000 women. 

  This devastating toll was enough to label Israel as the real perpetrator of terrorism, and the images of innocent martyrs, especially children, became a powerful symbol in the defense of Palestinian rights.

  Agents of change 

  What’s truly remarkable is that the leaders of the new narratives are the youth of Generation Z, Y, and Alpha. Leveraging social media, and speaking directly to their peer groups, they conveyed the grievances of the Palestinian people to the world. Many had limited knowledge of Palestine, but their unfiltered sense of justice fueled their collective anger against Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

  Social media has also given rise to a new form of journalism, known as citizen journalism. Ordinary individuals on the ground have become frontline reporters, sharing live audio and video updates that effectively sideline mainstream news reporting. When traditional media fails to provide the full picture, platforms like X and Instagram became invaluable sources of information. For instance, during the first two days of the Gaza offensive, over 50 million posts flooded the X platform and provided real-time coverage of events on the ground.

  On social media, the younger generation is playing a crucial role in raising awareness about the Palestinian cause, galvanizing people across the globe to mirror their outrage. Today, in many countries, populations are taking to the streets in protest, boycotting companies supporting Israel, and expressing their solidarity across a wide variety of social media platforms. 

  Videos advocating for Palestinian rights appear in dozens of languages, reaching millions. Weeks after the aggression, hashtags like #فلسطين and #إسرائيل had billions of views on TikTok, leading the US to pressure Meta to ban influential accounts supporting the Palestinian cause.

  Crucially, the scenes of Israeli brutality on social media have led to widespread, unprecedented criticism of the US, a key partner in Tel Aviv’s war plans, oddly, from Jewish American youth. Thousands of critical Jewish voices have emerged, condemning Washington’s policies. Instead of fading, the Palestinian cause is regaining momentum worldwide, defying the intentions of both Washington and Tel Aviv.

  Influence on western youth

  According to a recent poll published by the Daily Mail, only 40 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 have a negative view of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas. Despite Israel’s efforts to label Hamas as ISIS, more than half of young respondents do not share this view. The same poll indicates that 32 percent have a negative view of Israel instead, while only 24 percent have a positive outlook. Significantly, among young people, those with a negative view of Israel outnumber those with a positive view.

  An Axios poll in the US reveals that less than half of young respondents (48 percent) believe that the country should support Israel. In contrast, this percentage rises significantly among older respondents, reaching 83 percent among those born between 1946 and 1964. Another poll by Generation Lab shows that 48 percent of US college students surveyed do not blame Hamas for the events of 7 October.

  A Quinnipiac poll shows that 51 percent of voters under the age of 35 do not support sending weapons and military equipment to Israel in response to the Hamas operation, compared to 77 percent for those aged 50 or older.

  Additionally, Harvard University’s Center for American Political Studies conducted a survey on the war in Palestine among respondents aged 18 to 24, with the following key findings:

  • 47 percent believe that Hamas targeted the occupation army during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and not civilians.

  • 41 percent believe that Hamas fighters are military operatives and not terrorists.

  • 48 percent side with Hamas and not with Israel. (This rises to 91 percent for those aged 55-64)

  • Although 62 percent believe that Hamas’ actions are criminal, 52 percent believe that Hamas ‘ killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians can be justified because of the injustice inflicted on Palestinians.

  • 46 percent believe that law firms should not refuse to hire law students who supported Hamas and attacks on Israeli civilians.

  • 48 percent oppose the Biden administration’s policies toward Israel.

  • 54 percent believe that Iran has nothing to do with the Hamas attack on 7 October.

  • 59 percent believe that it was wrong for Israel to cut off electricity, water, and food to the Gaza Strip in order to retrieve its prisoners.

  • Only 30 percent believe that the US should support Israel in the war on Gaza.

  • 45 percent believe that Israel bombed the Baptist Hospital in the Gaza Strip.

  • Only 24 percent believe that the US media reports events in Gaza in a fair manner.

  • 60 percent believe that the US should not intervene militarily if Iran strikes Israel.

  Commenting on these figures, Mark Penn, CEO of Stagwell and president of the Harris-Ball Foundation, says that “the war between Israel and Hamas is not an issue divided along party lines, but on the basis of age.” 

  Rachel Janvaza, an expert on the political culture of the younger generation, suggests that “seniors are deeply traumatized by the generational divide, but this tension has been brewing on social media and in universities for a while – both of which play a very powerful role in how young people see the world.” Others disparage this development – Brad Polombo, in an article for Newsweek, opines: “Gen Z is not okay.” 

  Recent events highlight the resilience of Palestinian youth in preserving their identity and defending their rights. They have leveraged innovative ways to keep the Palestinian narrative relevant globally, with youth solidarity in West Asia bringing Palestinian grievances to a worldwide audience via various social media platforms, in all languages. 

  The impact of these events on the younger generation will likely continue to shape their views and influence future decisions, and today has the potential to affect international opinion and shift foreign policy. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 23:40

• Why Do People Immigrate To The US?
  Why Do People Immigrate To The US?

  The U.S. is a country created and built by immigrants from all over the world. As a result, it’s home to more immigrants than any other country.

  As of 2021, more than 45.3 million people living in the U.S. were foreign-born, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants. But while some come to reunite with family, others are seeking work or escaping dangerous situations.

  So why do people immigrate to the U.S.? The following graphic, by Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach and Joyce Ma, using U.S. Department of State data compiled by USAFacts, shows the different reasons cited by new arrivals to America in 2021.

  

  Why Immigrants Came to the U.S. in 2021

  New arrival data in a given year includes non-tourist visas, new arrival green cards, refugees, and asylees.

  Each arrival falls under a broad class of admission:

  • Work: Includes visas for specialty occupations or temporary agricultural work, as well as new arrival green cards issued for employment.

  • School: Includes student visas and families of student visa recipients.

  • Family: Includes immigrant visas and new arrival green cards issued for relatives of American citizens.

  • Safety: Includes refugees and asylees, as well as immigrant visas and new arrival green cards issued for fears of safety or persecution.

  • Diversity: Entry through the Diversity Visa Program—also known as the “green card lottery”—which accepts applicants from countries with low numbers of immigrants in the previous five years.

  In 2021, the United States saw 1.53 million new arrivals. Here’s how the arrivals break down by class and origin:

  

  New arrivals for work were the largest cohort of entries to America, totaling 638,551 people or 41.8% of new arrivals. The majority came from neighboring Mexico, which accounted for 55% of incoming workers and was the largest single country of origin.

  School and education saw 492,153 people 32.2% of new U.S. arrivals, with the majority coming from Asian countries. China had the most school-related entries into the U.S. out of individual countries, accounting for 19.0% of total school-related entries, followed by India at 17.4%.

  Family entries to the U.S. comprised just 23.2% or under a quarter of incoming new arrivals. In these instances, the largest cohorts came from India (17.6% of family entrants) and Mexico (15.2% of family entrants).

  Compared to the larger classifications above, safety (1.9% of total entrants) and diversity (0.9% of total entrants) accounted for significantly fewer U.S. arrivals. The countries with the most citizens seeking refuge or asylum were the Democratic Republic of the Congo (4,876 refugees) and Venezuela (1,596 asylees) respectively.

  Growth of U.S. Immigration

  Though 2021 saw less entrants than before 2020 as a prolonged result of the COVID-19 pandemic, it still tracks with increased immigration to the U.S. in the long term.

  In 1965, the U.S. updated its immigration laws, removing a national origins quota system with regional caps and preferences “emphasizing family reunification and skilled immigrants.”

  

  Since then, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has more than quadrupled. As of 2022, immigrants accounted for 13.9% of the U.S. population, or nearly 1 in 7 people.

  U.S. Immigration from Global Perspective

  The U.S population contains a high level of immigrants, though immigration is an even more pronounced factor in some other countries in the world. For example, Canada’s foreign-born population accounted for 23% of the country’s total population in 2021.

  Some countries actually have immigrants constitute the majority of their populations. In the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates saw 88% of its population in 2020 come from foreign countries, while Qatar saw 75%.

  Immigration levels have waxed and waned over time, but remains a vital part of the American story today.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 23:20

• Virulent Antisemitism And The Rot At Our Universities
  Virulent Antisemitism And The Rot At Our Universities

  Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics.com,

  It is time for blunt talk.

  Jewish students at universities are being harassed and threatened in unprecedented numbers, with disturbing vitriol. That’s more than a danger for those students. It is a profound danger for a liberal, tolerant democracy.

  It is time to call it out and oppose it. It’s time to end it.

  

  The attacks and violent demonstrations shine a particularly harsh light on the sorry state of higher education. The public has watched mass demonstrations against Israel on campus after campus. The demonstrators never mention the victims of the Hamas massacres, never condemn the terrorists, and often go beyond their support for innocent Palestinians to cheer Hamas.

  University leaders, who postured on every fashionable issue, have responded with bland, spineless statements. It’s no surprise that parents are rethinking which universities their children should attend, and major donors are doubting whether universities are worthy of their support.

  For Jewish students, these threats are real. They face harassment, intimidation, and bullying. The situation has been deteriorating for years, but the scale and ferocity of the harassment rose dramatically after Hamas launched its terror attack.

  When some brave students have spoken out in Israel’s defense, they have faced the jackboots of campus bullies. Instead of protecting those students, universities have abandoned their fundamental duty to ensure a safe environment and promote open discourse about serious issues. The situation is most toxic at elite universities and schools in major cities, where anti-Israeli students are reinforced by angry local activists.

  It is too mild to say, “This is the gravest, most antisemitic environment Jewish students have faced in recent years.” It’s worse than that. This is the most hostile environment Jewish students have ever faced in America.

  Never before have Jewish students been subjected to this kind of venom simply for their heritage. True, their admission was limited by quotas until the mid-1960s. True, they were denied membership in fraternities and sororities and routinely excluded from the faculty. But they were never subjected to this kind of raw hatred. As the dean of Berkeley’s law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, a man of the left, put it, “Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now.”

  This open hatred puts the lie to three oft-told “justifications” for violence and intimidation on campus.

  1. It is just aimed at Israel, not at Jews.

  2. It is just aimed at creating a Palestinian state, not eliminating the Jewish one.

  3. It is just aimed at Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks.

  None of those are true.

  First, although the anger is focused on Israeli students and faculty, the evidence is overwhelming that it is directed at all Jews.

  There are countless examples. More on them later.

  The second lie is that these anti-Israel protests merely seek to establish a Palestinian state so they can live in harmony, or at least cold peace, with Israel.

  There are two serious problems with that claim. One is that a Palestinian state with full sovereignty would almost certainly form alliances with Israel’s most lethal enemies, who would supply them with weapons, funds, intelligence, and training and perhaps establish military bases within a few miles of Israeli cities. That ominous prospect puts sharp limits on Israel’s willingness to cede full control to any Palestinian state.

  As for a “two-state solution,” that aspiration is true for some, including President Biden, but it is not true for militants or their fellow travelers on campus and beyond. Their actual, stated goal is the slogan repeated at all demonstrations, “Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea.” A nation stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean would completely eliminate Israel.

  That’s hardly a new goal. Arab and Muslim rejectionists have demanded it since the Jewish state was founded in 1948. Hamas proclaims it in its charter. So do all Islamist organizations and many Muslim countries. They refuse to use Israel’s name, calling it “the Zionist entity.” Hamas’ flag makes the same point visually. Its map of Palestine covers all of Israel. Yet students constantly chant this slogan out of malice or ignorance. What they are openly proposing is a “final solution” for the Jewish state.

  The third lie is that these protests are entirely concerned with Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks.

  Israel’s military response has certainly intensified the protests, which will grow as the fighting escalates. But the protests began before any Israeli response. They began while Hamas was still marauding through villages, killing innocents, raping women, and taking hostages. Although these early protests merely claimed to support Palestine, many also celebrated the terrorists and spewed the vilest hate at Israel and America.

  A credulous mainstream media perpetuated all three lies.

  Some journalists probably believed them. Others didn’t bother checking because the false “facts” confirmed their worldview and advanced their political goals.

  The most obvious, despicable, and consequential of these media lies was that “Israel’s military killed up to 500 innocent people in an attack on a Gaza hospital.” The main problems with that story are that some of it never happened, and the rest was a vast exaggeration.

  Why did major media sources say it did?

  Because Hamas said so, and they believed it. The headlines did more than repeat the lie. They screamed it. The journalists and their editors failed in their basic duty to check the facts.

  From the outset, Hamas knew the story was a wild exaggeration. After all, they spun it up and spread it, cynically, because it aided their cause. Israel’s communication officials should have responded quickly and effectively (they didn’t) since they knew almost immediately that the story was baseless. It was a misfire by local Islamic terrorists, backed by Iran. That conclusion was supported by audio of terrorists talking about the misfire. About 30% of their rockets fail and kill their own people.

  Israel responded too slowly to these deliberate lies because their communications specialists were trying to verify the information amid the fog of war. Their due diligence was not replicated by Western media, the Arab-Muslim street, regional political leaders, or pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses and the streets of Europe and North America. All of them embraced the Hamas lie because it confirmed their prejudices and advanced their cause.

  Left-wing groups avoided questioning the lie for one additional reason. They are now tightly aligned with the hate-Israel movement and want to sustain their coalition with militant Muslims. It gives both groups more clout. Its most visible representation is “the Squad” in Congress. It also dominates campus politics. Pro-Israel students encounter this belligerent coalition every day.

  The lies about the hospital bombing have the same DNA as the “blood libels” leveled against Jews since the Middle Ages – throwing babies down wells, making Passover matzos out of Christian blood, and on and on. They were tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury. The fury was directed at Jews. It still is. The latest libel ignited massive protests across the Middle East and Europe and led Arab leaders to cancel their scheduled meetings with President Biden. Its resurgence in the West is a terrible sign for our democracy.

  Harrowing stories from universities underscore the gravity and pervasiveness of this aggressive anti-Israel movement and its inexorable morphing into antisemitism. We have learned, for example, of Jewish students locking themselves in a library on a Manhattan campus, trying to protect themselves from anti-Israel protesters pounding on the doors.

  We have seen countless videos of pro-Palestinian students shouting down peaceful Jewish protests. We’ve read vile social media posts from faculty calling Jews “pigs” and “excrement,” beyond the usual false charges of “apartheid” and “settler colonialism.”

  At Cornell, horrific, antisemitic messages were posted on the campus message board. One, cited by the student newspaper, bragged it was “gonna shoot up 104 West,” the address of Cornell’s Center for Jewish Living. It added, “Allahu akbar! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! Glory to Hamas! Liberation by any means necessary” (posted October 29, 2023, by “kill jews”). We’ve learned of a Stanford instructor forcing all the Jewish students to sit in a corner, as a “Palestinian exercise.”

  We’ve seen the familiar call from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) that “Zionism must be dismantled” at all universities. That means expelling all Israeli students and faculty, abolishing study-abroad programs, ending faculty collaboration with Israeli scholars in medicine, science, and high technology, and eliminating all pro-Israel organizations on campus. That will never happen. But it’s the thought that counts.

  Some of these disturbing acts are isolated incidents. Many, though, are integral features of broader, antisemitic movements.

  Together, they have cumulated and taken a toll on Jewish students. They would have a different meaning if they prompted students of goodwill to unite in their condemnation and support of beleaguered Jewish students. That open support has been all too rare.

  What is on full display here is more than antisemitism, more even than the moral degradation of our universities. It is a rising, toxic tide of illiberalism, directed first at Israel, then at all Jews, and ultimately at what is most valuable in Western civilization.

  That movement germinated from neo-Marxist college faculty, beginning in the humanities, took hold with their students, spread to K-12 education, and won significant financial support from major foundations and leftist donors. That illiberal tide comes with strong support from militant Muslims. It has inundated Europe and is rising in America.

  Now is the time to turn it back. The stakes couldn’t be higher. They are the most profound, hard-won values of Western civilization, from free speech and free markets to democratic governance and religious freedom.

  Its enemies say they hate Israel. They do, but many of them hate all Jews. They say they love Palestine. They do, but they often go further: They cheer terrorist movements, harass Jewish students, burn flags of Israel and America, parade with maps promising the extinction of Israel, and chant slogans demanding it.

  They do all those things. And they won’t stop there. They never do.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 23:00

• Marine 'Mocked' For Low IQ, Outwits Most College Grads In Intelligence Test
  Marine ‘Mocked’ For Low IQ, Outwits Most College Grads In Intelligence Test

  In a fascinating episode from Jubilee Media’s “Ranking” series, a diverse mix of Gen-Z and millennial participants were tasked with assessing each other’s intelligence to establish a ranking within the group. Despite the varied backgrounds, the collective judgment of the group placed a young Marine at the lower end of the spectrum, whereas individuals with college degrees, including some from prestigious Ivy League institutions, were deemed the most intelligent. However, when it came time for the actual IQ test, the Marine outsmarted three college grads.  

  All participants “mocked and ridiculed the uneducated white Marine,” X user End Wokeness said. 

  Smug woman with a PhD gets put in her place by IQ test results pic.twitter.com/tVpQfje3qn

  — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 6, 2023

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

  Here’s the group’s perceived IQ ranking. Notice how everyone placed the Marine at number six?

  

  Now for the actual IQ test, the Marine is number three, beating three college grads. 

  

  What’s notable, and pay attention, Gen-Zers – you don’t have to go $100k in student debt for a degree that might not improve your intelligence.

  It seems like ‘woke’ gender studies at liberal universities are not making college grads smarter. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 22:40

• Research Flags "Concerning" Employment Losses At Nursing Homes Amid Biden Administration Staffing Push
  Research Flags “Concerning” Employment Losses At Nursing Homes Amid Biden Administration Staffing Push

  By Susanna Vogel of HealthcareDive

  Summary:

  • Healthcare employment growth fell across the board during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some sectors have had more difficulty rebounding than others, according to a new study — especially skilled nursing facilities, which face a controversial federal push for more staffing.

  • Employment in hospitals increased 0.4% per quarter before the pandemic, but that growth rate shrunk to 0.03% during COVID-19, according to the study published in JAMA. By comparison, employment at skilled nursing facilities was already declining before COVID, dropping at a rate of 0.2% per quarter. During the pandemic, the rate of job losses accelerated to 1.1%.

  • The Biden administration is seeking to impose mandatory nursing staffing minimums at skilled nursing facilities, or SNFs. The nursing home industry largely opposes the rule, arguing there are not enough workers available to meet the staffing mandate.

  

  The downward employment trend in SNFs is “concerning,” according to the study’s authors, who said it could be due to a variety of factors, including worker worries of contracting infectious diseases, lower wages and high turnover among long-term care occupations.

  Regulators, healthcare industry leaders and workers unions disagree on how to make such roles more attractive to workers.

  In September, the Biden administration proposed a rule that would require nursing homes to provide three hours of nursing care per resident per day. The proposed rule also stipulates that at least one registered nurse be on duty at long-term care facilities at all times.

  Supporters of the rule, including top Biden administration officials, say that increasing staff is associated with higher-quality patient care and lower levels of provider burnout and turnover.

  Critics, including nursing homes and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, have asked the CMS to scrap the proposed rule, warning that requiring the industry to comply with staffing mandates would jeopardize patients’ access to care and cause facilities that can’t adequately staff to close. 

  Over 80% of nursing homes in the country currently fall short of proposed staffing guidance, according to a September analysis from health policy nonprofit KFF.

  Last month, Sens. Kevin Cramer, D-N.D., and Angus King Jr., I-Maine, sent a letter to CMS warning that the mandate would threaten veterans’ access to long-term care. A separate group of 28 senators also sent a letter pushing CMS to abandon the mandate.

  The Biden administration is also facing pressure from stakeholders who want the staffing rule to be more robust. A group of 100 House Democrats plans to submit comments to the CMS today asking them to make the staffing requirements stricter, including raising the direct care requirement to 4.2 hours per patient per day, according to the Washington Post.

  The comment period for the proposed rule ends today.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 22:20

• Labor Shortage Hits US Coast Guard, Forces Reduction In Active Fleet Of Cutters 
  Labor Shortage Hits US Coast Guard, Forces Reduction In Active Fleet Of Cutters 

  As the Irasel-Hamas war rages on and threatens to erupt into a regional conflict across the Middle East, the US military faces problems meeting recruitment goals. The shortfall is on full display within the US Coast Guard, which lacks 3,500 service members, approximately 10% of its enlisted workforce, according to Forbes. 

  Vice Commandant Adm. Steven Poulin wrote in a statement that the service must readjust operations and “prioritize lifesaving missions, national security and protection of the Marine Transportation System” due to widespread staffing issues. 

  

  “The Coast Guard cannot maintain the same level of operations with our current shortfall – we cannot do the same with less. Conducting our missions is often inherently dangerous, and doing so without enough crew puts our members and the American public at increased risk,” wrote Adm. Linda Fagan and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Coast Guard Heath Jones. 

  Forbes said the 3,500-person shortfall would result in ten cutters going out of service, five tugs being transferred to seasonal activation, and 29 boat stations closing. 

  Reducing the number of operating cutters comes at the worst time when demand for service remains high in the coastal waters off the US amid ongoing conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. 

  None of this should be a surprise. We’ve explained countless times the US military is having problems meeting recruitment goals (here are the three reasons why). 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 22:00

• Yuan De Facto Peg To The Dollar Looks Here To Stay
  Yuan De Facto Peg To The Dollar Looks Here To Stay

  By George Lei, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategist

  The US dollar suffered its worse selloff since mid-July last week, bringing some relief to China’s policymakers. With the world’s second-largest economy effectively pegging the yuan to the greenback, Beijing can ride the likely wave of dollar weakness that will also see the Chinese currency depreciate on a trade-weighted basis.

  Dollar-yuan has traded around 7.30 since mid-August in both onshore and offshore markets: fluctuations, either upward or downward, have been less than 1%. The steady hand of PBOC helped suppress one-month implied volatility on the onshore yuan below 3%, to the lowest since February 2022. In offshore trading, where PBOC has relatively less clout, one-month implied vol is now lower than 4%, at levels last seen in April 2022.

  PBOC’s favorite tool for stabilizing the dollar-yuan exchange rate is its daily fixing. The Chinese central bank has kept such a tight grip on the reference rate, sending its volatility to almost zero, something that last took place 13 years ago. From the onset of global financial crisis in 2008 to the middle of 2010, Chinese authorities essentially pegged their currency at 6.82 per dollar.

  

  Suppressing swings in the dollar-yuan exchange rate is the main route on the road to financial stability. But with it comes side effects that can create headwinds for an economy struggling to recover.

  Between mid-July and early-October, the Bloomberg dollar spot index rallied almost 7% from its 2023 low to high. While the yuan declined against the dollar over the same period, on a trade-weighted basis it advanced nearly 4%. That’s because the Chinese currency held up much better against the greenback than other currencies under the PBOC’s support.

  Now, should the weakening dollar trend persist, the yuan will likely follow suit on a trade-weighted basis, helping boost the country’s competitiveness.

  “It would be too early to declare victory in preserving RMB stability and PBOC will likely phase out its FX policy support gradually,” Ken Cheung, chief asian FX strategist at Mizuho Bank Ltd. said in a client email on Monday. While outflows from onshore equities have moderated recently, China’s property market is still not out of the woods yet and the growth outlook remains generally bearish, Cheung noted.

  

  While the PBOC has practically left yuan’s daily fixings flat, the currency has kept trading on the weaker side over the past couple months, sometimes pushing the boundaries set by policymakers (yuan is only permitted to deviate a maximum 2% away from the reference rate in onshore trading). If the PBOC were to loosen its grip, market equilibrium will probably imply a much weaker Chinese currency despite a falling US dollar.

  Bearish dollar moves are “likely to do much of the work” for the PBOC, which makes it less likely for policymakers to “give up on their defense of the currency,” according to a research report from JPMorgan on Friday. The US bank believes a large downside move in dollar-yuan is unlikely given the easing policy stance, and favors selling 3-month volatility for USD/CNH.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 21:40

• Victor Davis Hanson: The Mindset Of Our Anti-Semites
  Victor Davis Hanson: The Mindset Of Our Anti-Semites

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson, op-ed via American Greatness,

  Peruse campus literature.

  Watch clips from university protests.

  Scan interviews with pro-Hamas protestors.

  Read the chalk propaganda sketched on campus sidewalks.

  Talk to raging students in the free speech area.

  And the one common denominator – besides their arrogance – is their abject ignorance.

  

  Take their following tired talking points:

  “Refugees” 

  We are told that the Palestinians after more than 75 years of residence in the West Bank and Gaza are “refugees.” If that definition were currently true, then, are the 900,000 Jews who were forcibly exiled from Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia after the 1947, 1956, 1967 wars still “refugees?”

  Most fled to Israel. Do they now live in “refugee” camps administrated by the UN? Are they protesting to recover their confiscated homes and wealth in Damascus, Cairo, or Baghdad? Do Jews on Western television dangle their keys to lost homes in Damascus a half-century after they were expelled?

  How about the 150,000-200,000 Greek Cypriots who in 1974 were brutally driven out of their ancient homes in Northern Cyprus? Are they today living in “refugee” camps in southern Cyprus? Are Cypriot terrorists blowing themselves up in “occupied” Nicosia to recover what was stolen from them by Turkey?

  Turkish president Recep Erdogan lectures the world on Palestinian “refugees,” but does he mention Turkey’s role in the brutal expulsion of 40 percent of the residents of Cyprus?

  Are there campus groups organizing against Turkey on behalf of the displaced Cypriots? After being slaughtered and expelled, are the Cypriots a cause celebre in academia? Do the “refugee” cities of southern Cyprus resemble Jenin or Jericho?

  For that matter, how about the 12 million German civilians who between 1945-50 were expelled, and mostly walked back from, East Prussia and parts of Eastern Europe, some with Prussian roots going back a millennium and more. Perhaps 1 million died during the expulsions.

  Are any current survivors still “refugees?” If so, are they organizing for war to get back “occupied”  “Danzig” and “Königsberg” for Germany? So why does the world damn Israel and romanticize the Palestinians in a way it does not with any other “refugee” group?

  “Apartheid”

  Israel is said to practice “apartheid,” although since 2005-06 Gaza has been autonomous. Mahmoud Abbas runs in his fashion the West Bank. Like the Hamas clique, he held elections one time in 2005, and then after his election, of course, cancelled any free election in the fashion of the one election, one time Middle East. Who forced him to do that? Zionists? Americans?

  At any time, Gaza could have taken its vast wealth in annual foreign aid and become completely independent in fuel, food, and energy, without need of any such help form the “Zionist entity.”

  Gaza could have capitalized on its strategic location, the world’s eagerness to help, and the natural beauty of its Mediterranean beaches. Instead, it squandered its income on a labyrinth of terrorist tunnels and rockets. Today, it snidely snickers at any mention of following the Singapore model of prosperity–a former colonial city whose World War II death count vastly surpassed that of the various wars over Gaza.

  Are the Israeli Arabs—21 percent of the Israeli population—living under apartheid?

  If so, it is a funny sort of oppression when they vote, hold office, form parties, and enjoy more freedom and prosperity than almost anywhere else in the Middle East under Arab autocracies. Are those in sympathy with Hamas fleeing from Israel into Gaza or the West Bank or other Arab countries to live with kindred Muslims under an autocratic and theocratic dictatorship, or do they prefer to stay in the “Zionist entity” under “apartheid?”

  Where then is real apartheid?

  The Uyghurs in China, fellow Muslims to Middle Easterners, who are ignored by Israel’s Islamic enemies, but who reside in China’s segregated work camps to the silence of the usually loud UN, EU, and Muslim world?

  How about the Muslim Kurds? Are they second- or third-class citizens in Muslim Turkey? And how about the tens of thousands of foreign workers from India, Pakistan, and other Asian countries who labor under the kafala system in the Arab Muslim Gulf countries, and are subject to apartheid protocols that allow them no free will about how they live, travel, or the conditions of their labor?

  Are campuses erupting to champion the Uyghurs, the Kurds, or the subjugated workers of the Gulf?

  “Disproportionate”

  Israel is now damned as “disproportionally” bombing Gaza. The campus subtext is that because Gaza’s 7,000-8,000 rockets launched at Israeli civilians have not killed enough Jews, then Israel should not retaliate for October 7 by bombing Hamas targets–shielded by impressed civilians— because it is too effective.

  Would a “proportionate” response be counting up all the Israelis murdered, categorizing the horrific manner of their deaths, and then sending Israeli commandoes into Gaza during a “pause” in the fighting to murder an equal number of Gazans in the same satanic fashion?

  Does the U.S. lecture Ukraine not to use to the full extent its lethal U.S. imported weaponry since the result is often simply too deadly? After all, perhaps twice as many Russians have been killed, wounded, or are missing than Ukrainian casualties. Should Ukraine have been more “proportionate?” Has President Biden ordered President Zelensky to offer the Russian aggressors a “pause” in the fighting to end the “cycle of violence?”

  Or did U.S.-supplied artillery, anti-armor weapons, drones, and missiles “disproportionally” kill too many Russians? Or does the U.S. assume that since Russia attacked Ukraine at a time of peace, it deserves such a “disproportionate” response that alone will lose it the war?

  For that matter, the U.S. certainly disproportionately paid back Japan for Pearl Harbor, and the Japanese brutal take-over of the Pacific, much of Asia, and China—and the barbarous way the Japanese military slaughtered millions of civilians, executed prisoners, and mass raped women. Should the U.S. have simply done a one-off retaliatory attack on the imperial fleet at Yokohama, declared a “cease-fire,” and thus ended the “cycle of violence?”

  Civilian casualties

  Campus activists scream that Israel has slaughtered “civilians” and is careless about “collateral damage.” They equate retaliating against mass murderers who use civilians to shield them from injury, while warning any Gazans in the region of the targeted response to leave, as the moral equivalent of deliberately butchering civilians in a surprise attack.

  So did protestors mass in the second term of Barrack Obama when he focused on Predator drone missions inside Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen to go after Islamic terrorists who deliberately target civilians?

  At the time, the hard-left New York Times found the ensuing “collateral damage” in civilian deaths merely “troubling.” No matter—Obama persisted, insisting as he put it, “Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us.” Note Obama did not expressly say the terrorists in Pakistan or Yemen were killing Americans, but “trying” to kill Americans. For him, that was, quite properly, enough reason “to kill” the potential assassins of Americans.

  What would the Harvard President today say of Benjamin Netanyahu saying just that about Hamas?

  We have no idea how many women, children, and elderly were in the general vicinity of a targeted terrorist in Pakistan or Yemen when an American drone missile struck. Then CIA Director John Brennan later admitted that he had lied under oath (with zero repercussions), when he testified to Congress that there was no collateral damage in drone targeted assassinations.

  Obama was proud of his preemptive assassination program. Indeed, in lighthearted fashion he joked at the White House Correspondence Dinner about his preference for lethal drone missions, when he “warned” celebrities not to date his daughters: “But boys, don’t get any ideas. I have two words for you, ‘predator drones.’ You will never see it coming. You think I’m joking.”

  Did the campuses erupt and scream “Not in my name” when their president laughed about his assassination program? After all, Obama had also admitted, “There is no doubt that civilians were killed who shouldn’t have been.” Did he then stop the targeted killings due to collateral damage—as critics now demand a cease fire from Israel?

  “Genocide”

  Genocide is now the most popular charge in the general damnation of Israel, a false smear aimed at calling off the Israeli response to Hamas, burrowed beneath civilians in Gaza City.

  But how strange a charge! Pro-Hamas demonstrators the world over chant “From the River to the Sea,” unambiguously calling for the utter destruction of Israel and its 9 million population. Are the Hamas supporters then “genocidal?”

  Is genocide the aim of Hamas that launched over 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities without warning? What is the purpose of the purportedly 120,000 rockets in the hands of Hezbollah if not to target Israeli noncombatants? Is all that a genocidal impulse?

  Do Hamas and Hezbollah drop leaflets to civilians, as does Israel, to flee the area of a planned missile attack—or is that against their respective charters?

  Hamas leaders in Qatar and Beirut continue to give interviews bragging about their October 7 surprise mass murdering of civilians. They even promise more such missions that likewise will be aimed at beheading, torturing, executing, incinerating, and desecrating the bodies of hundreds of Jewish civilians, perhaps again in the early morning during a holiday and a time of peace.

  Is that planned continuation of mass killing genocidal? Does the amoral UN recall any other mass murdering spree when the killers beheaded infants, cooked them in ovens, and raped the dead?

  Perhaps students at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Stanford will protest the real genocide in Darfur where some half-million black African Sudanese have been slaughtered by mostly Muslim Arab Sudanese. Did the Cornell professor who claimed he was “exhilarated” on news of beheaded Jewish babies protest the slaughter of the Sudanese? Did the current campus protestors ever assemble to scream about the Islamists who slaughtered the indigenous Africans of Sudan?

  Are professors at Stanford organizing to refuse all grants and donations that originate from communist China? Remember, the Chinese communist Party has never apologized for the party’s genocidal murder of some 60-80 millions of its own during the Maoist Cultural Revolution, much less its systematic efforts to eliminate the Uyghur Muslim population?

  These examples could easily be expanded. But they suffice to remind us that the Middle-East and Western leftist attacks on Israel for responding to the October 7 mass murdering are neither based on any consistent moral logic nor similarly extended to other nations who really do practice apartheid, genocide, and kill without much worry about collateral damage.

  So why does the world apply a special standard to Israel?

  To the leftist and Islamist, Israel is guilty of being:

  1) Jewish;

  2) Too prosperous, secure, and free;

  3) Sufficiently Western to meet the boilerplate smears of colonialist, imperialist, and blah, blah, blah.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 21:00

• You Get Nothing: Google Abandons Building 15,000 Homes In San Francisco
  You Get Nothing: Google Abandons Building 15,000 Homes In San Francisco

  The complete and total destruction of San Francisco and the surrounding area, consisting of streets overrun by drug addicts and corporations and retail establishments simply giving up on the city, is almost finished. Thanks, liberals!

  The latest chapter in the once great city’s demise came this week when Google pulled out of a $15 billion investment in Santa Clara County that would have built 15,000 homes, according to Gizmodo. 

  The report notes that Google and Lendlease have jointly terminated their $15 billion deal, originally struck in 2019, to develop housing and commercial spaces in Sunnyvale, San Jose, and Mountain View, the latter being the home base for the tech giant.

  The ‘Downtown West’ project in San Jose was set to feature 4,000 affordable housing units, sufficient office space for 20,000 workers, a 300-room hotel, and 10 parks. Instead, San Francisco now “gets nothing”.

  

  Gizmodo wrote that in 2021 the San Jose City Council gave the green light for the Downtown West construction plans by Google and Lendlease, a project which, according to an active post on Google’s site, was shaped through close collaboration with the city and community members to support community building.

  The project’s progress was halted in April during the demolition stage, leaving its future uncertain and potentially becoming a blight on the San Jose landscape at a time when economic injections are sorely needed.

  Compounding the issue, the San Jose Spotlight has highlighted that opioid overdoses in San Jose have seen a threefold increase since 2018.

  In a press release issued Friday, Lendlease said: “The decision to end these agreements followed a comprehensive review by Google of its real estate investments, and a determination by both organizations that the existing agreements are no longer mutually beneficial given current market conditions.”

  Alexa Arena, Google’s Senior Director of Development, commented to Gizmodo: “We’ve been optimizing our real estate investments in the Bay Area, and part of that work is looking at a variety of options to move our development projects forward and deliver on our housing commitment.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 20:40

• Medicaid Disenrollments Pass 10 Million As States Continue Eligibility Checks
  Medicaid Disenrollments Pass 10 Million As States Continue Eligibility Checks

  By Rebecca Pifer of HealthcareDive

  Summary

  • More than 10 million low-income Americans have lost Medicaid coverage as states continue checking eligibility for the safety-net program following the pandemic.

  • The U.S. passed that marker as of Nov. 1, according to a tracker by health policy nonprofit KFF, which started collecting data on Medicaid enrollment in April when states could begin redeterminations.

  • To date, 35% of the 28 million people with a completed renewal were disenrolled, while 65% had their coverage renewed. Disenrollments vary widely by state — Texas has the highest disenrollment rate at 65%, while Illinois has the lowest at 10%, KFF found.

  

  Disenrollment rates have been rising steadily since this summer, as more states start rechecking their Medicaid members’ eligibility for the program.

  The Biden administration enticed states to put those checks on hold during the COVID-19 public health emergency in exchange for more generous federal funding. That continuous enrollment period caused Medicaid’s rolls to swell to some 94 million people earlier this year, making the program the largest source of insurance coverage in the U.S. during the pandemic.

  Millions of people were expected to lose coverage at the end of Medicaid unwinding, though the actual number is currently very much in flux. Patient advocates, Democrat lawmakers and health policy researchers have raised concerns about redeterminations, as high numbers of people have lost coverage for administrative errors, not actual ineligibility. In addition, states’ different strategies are complicating efforts to get a clear national picture of how redeterminations are playing out.

  Disenrollment figures are almost certainly an undercount, due to data lags, KFF noted.

  But across states with available data, 71% of all people disenrolled lost coverage for procedural reasons like not filling out paperwork by the deadline, or the state being unable to contact them. That’s a small dip from earlier this year, when the KFF found 74% of terminations were procedural.

  The Biden administration has taken a number of steps in an effort to curb procedural disenrollments, including offering states more flexibility in how they pursue redeterminations. To date, all states have taken the CMS up on the additional assistance, except Florida.

  Regulators have also threatened state agencies with sanctions over an administrative glitch that improperly removed children from Medicaid coverage, and forced states with high levels of procedural terminations to pause redeterminations.

  Those actions are resulting in more Medicaid members rejoining the program after being kicked off, according to health insurance executives.

  In recent third-quarter earnings calls, Centene, Molina and Elevance — all of which contract with states to manage the care of their Medicaid beneficiaries — said they’re seeing the rate of reconnects accelerate as compared to earlier this year.

  In addition, states are revising rates to reflect changing acuity as payer’s membership rolls change, which should insulate insurers from extreme unexpected medical costs.

  Despite that, however, redeterminations continue to stress payers’ financial outlooks. Earlier this year, Centene lowered its 2024 earnings guidance due to expectations that Medicaid redeterminations will increase spending and lower premium revenue next year. And Molina in October lowered its member retention expectations after redeterminations are completed, from 50% to 40%.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 20:20

• Home Depot Founder Calls Biden A "Dunce," Says President Is A "Puppet"
  Home Depot Founder Calls Biden A “Dunce,” Says President Is A “Puppet”

  Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who has railed against “socialism,” corporate “wokeness,” and the Biden administration, recently spoke with FOX Business Charles Gasparino about why he is in a “particularly pissed-off mood” these days. 

  “I’ve said this to all of my friends, anybody who would listen: if this election goes the way the last one went, this country will be a Third World country,” the 94-year-old billionaire told Gasparino. 

  Marcus blames the social and economic mess consuming the country on President Biden, calling the president a “dunce” and saying he’s the “most divisive president we’ve ever seen.” Labeling half the country as a ‘MAGA Republican’ was never a way to promote ‘unity,’ he continued. 

  

  The billionaire then talks about Biden’s deteriorating mental state, saying, “Somebody is feeding him like a puppet.” He warned against the massive spending increase and numerous policy errors that triggered high inflation and an explosion in debt. 

  Marcus acknowledges some positives during the Trump administration, such as increased wages, higher employment among minorities, and low inflation. However, he expresses concerns about Trump’s personality, particularly his inability to “keep his mouth shut . . . I’m afraid if he’s elected, the first thing he does is go after his enemies, starting with the Republicans.” 

  Marcus said, “I think [Trump] has the policies if he would just follow the script and do what he has to do.”

  Gasparino asks the billionaire if he could build another Home Depot in today’s environment. The short answer is ‘no’: “Regulations and all this woke crap” have made starting a public company near impossible, he said. 

  He added: “I ran a business for 60 years… I would never get involved with a social issue outside of business. That was not my business.”

  Marcus said there was some hope for the future of the company as Americans were quickly turning on radical leftists. The example he gave was the Bud Light boycott:

  “They were No. 1 . . . and they turned stupid overnight,” he said. “The American people remember; their sales are going to stay down.”

  He concludes by saying the American people are worth saving from what he believes is a progressive apocalypse… 

  In a separate interview earlier this year, Marcus told Americans to “wake up” to the reality that the economy is in “tough times” following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. 

  Months before that, in December 2022, he railed against “socialism” for why nobody wants to work and warned capitalism is in dire straits. 

  Marcus’ warning is similar to co-founder and retired CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, who recently warned that “socialists are taking over” and ‘capitalism cannot be replaced with disastrous socialism.’ 

  The positive takeaway is that the Bud Light boycott serves as a barometer of American sentiment, indicating widespread discontent with progressive policies across the corporate world to local, state, and federal governments.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 20:00

• Woke Teachers Trying To Ban Classic Novel From Schools To "Protect Students"
  Woke Teachers Trying To Ban Classic Novel From Schools To “Protect Students”

  Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

  The Washington Post reports that “progressive” teachers in in Washington state are attempting to get To Kill a Mockingbird, authored by Harper Lee, banned in schools in order to “protect students.”

  

  The report notes that The Mukilteo School District teachers are adamant that the classic novel, published in 1960, is “outdated and harmful.”

  Set in the deep South during the Great Depression, the book deals with themes of racial injustice, gender roles, and rape to name a few. While it was awarded the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was voted the best book of the past 125 years by New York Times readers in 2021, it has long been criticised for use of racial slurs by characters, with critics also suggesting the novel relies too heavily on stereotypes.

  The report notes that “Students shared their discomfort with the way the 1960 novel about racial injustice portrays Black people,” adding “One Black teen said the book misrepresented him and other African Americans… Another complained the novel did not move her, because it wasn’t written about her — or for her.”

  A student didn’t want to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” because it wasn’t “written about her — or for her.” That describes pretty much every book I ever read and loved. Isn’t part of the fun of reading losing yourself in an unfamiliar world? https://t.co/bVJLvzyaXY

  — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 3, 2023

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

  The Post adds that another student “spoke about how a White teen said the n-word aloud while reading from “Mockingbird,” disobeying the teacher’s instructions to skip the slur.”

  The teachers filed a motion challenging the place of the novel on the list of approved books, and successfully got it removed from ninth-grade classes.

  “To Kill A Mockingbird centers on whiteness,” the teachers wrote, further claiming that “it presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature and should be removed.”

  Commentators note that while the novel might contain ‘difficult’ themes, it has a place in history, adding that it’s not explicit sexual material or gay porn, which has been found and challenged in many schools, prompting leftists to accuse conservatives of pushing ‘book bans’.

  Interesting that the teachers “wanted to protect students” from TKAM, but pornographic material about child sexuality is just fine. No protection needed there for young, innocent minds.

  — Ann Flan Kirwin 🇺🇸 (@annflanVA) November 4, 2023

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

  Liberals are banning “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Conservatives are restricting pornography. We are not the same. https://t.co/z9uv6YbCyq

  — Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) November 3, 2023

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

  Getting rid of gay porn is “banning books” but actually banning a classic novel like To Kill a Mockingbird is “protecting students.” https://t.co/vvVs17Oiib

  — Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 3, 2023

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  Related:

  WATCH: 1776 Project PAC founder @RyanGirdusky joined @IngrahamAngle to discuss the important school board elections happening on Tuesday.

  We are trying to un-elect a school board in Kansas that banned To Kill a Mockingbird, fight back against CRT in Pennsylvania, and capitalize… pic.twitter.com/rL2YMyfe8S

  — 1776 Project PAC (@1776ProjectPac) November 4, 2023

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

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  In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Summit Vitamins – super charge your health and well being.

  Also, we urgently need your financial support here.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 19:40

• "Tough Place": Implosion Of Downtown San Francisco Forces McDonald's To Close After 30 Years
  “Tough Place”: Implosion Of Downtown San Francisco Forces McDonald’s To Close After 30 Years

  The unraveling of San Francisco’s office sector has been stunning so far. The once-thriving urban center is now grappling with a record-high 30% vacancy rate in office buildings, attributed mainly to the shift towards remote and hybrid work in a post-Covid era, as well as a mass exodus of companies who no longer felt their office workers were safe because ‘defund the police’ policies backfired and sparked a citywide violent crime tsunami. Now, the ripple effects of a plunge in office workers, no longer walking the streets and spending money at brick-and-mortar shops, have darkened the city’s recovery.

  On Friday, McDonald’s restaurant at 235 Front St. in the Financial District served its last Big Mac after a three-decade run, according to San Francisco Business Times. 

  

  Scott Rodrick, the McDonald’s franchise owner, said the “post-pandemic realities of operating the downtown restaurant simply became unbearable for the franchisee and McDonald’s Corp.” 

  “The economics of running a franchised restaurant in San Francisco continue to be a challenge, particularly in a downtown that is impacted by high office building vacancy rates and visitor trends that have not recovered since the pandemic,” Rodrick wrote in an email to the local media outlet. 

  Rodrick said San Francisco “continues to be a very tough place to own and operate a restaurant business, irrespective of price point.” He said traffic at the restaurant had dropped off a cliff. 

  “Office building vacancies, the environmental atmosphere of downtown sidewalks and a tepid return by tourists and conventioneers all drove the decision” to close the restaurant, Rodrick wrote.

  This is a troubling development for the commercial real estate industry because the crisis is spreading. And given that retail businesses rely heavily on office workers – this spells disaster for any recovery in the local economy in the short term. 

  For retail shops to thrive, foot traffic generated by office workers and tourists is needed. 

  In recent weeks, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, San Fran’s largest employer and anchor tenant in the city’s tallest skyscraper, urged radical Democrats in City Hall to reverse course on defunding the police. This call from Benioff, alongside other top business leaders, suggests a growing separation from previously ‘woke’ policies pushed by City Hall. However, these calls to reverse disastrous progressive policies could be too late. 

  We noted earlier this year that pressure on Democrat Mayor London Breed was increasing as she embarrassingly reversed course on her defunding the police initiatives. 

  Perhaps in the next local election, law-abiding taxpayers in San Francisco may consider demanding accountability from Democratic leaders for the city’s collapse, which has led to some areas in the metro area being comparable to the hellholes of Detroit and Baltimore City. 

   

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 19:20

• Ron Paul: Don't Worry, It's Not Foreign Aid…It's Corporate Welfare!
  Ron Paul: Don’t Worry, It’s Not Foreign Aid…It’s Corporate Welfare!

  Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute,

  Faced with growing American frustration over more than $100 billion spent on a failed proxy war in Ukraine, President Biden’s handlers have hit on a gimmick to convince us that this foreign aid is actually an investment in our own economy!

  In his recent television address, Biden explained that as we transfer more weapons to Ukraine we then will build new weapons at home to replace them.

  That, explained Biden, means more American jobs and a stronger American economy.

  

  So “Project Ukraine” is not really about foreign welfare, but rather domestic corporate welfare for the military-industrial complex. Should that make us feel any better?

  There is no denying that this nearly two-year Ukraine/Russia war has been a boon for the US weapons industry. Profits at the military-industrial complex are back to record highs after a brief slump during the Covid scare. And the money that goes to the weapons manufactures also saturates Washington, DC: a little of it goes to the think-tanks promoting war, another little bit goes to the political campaigns of candidates who promote war, and so on.

  As Connor O’Keeffe reminds us in a recent article at the Mises Institute, the arguments that more war spending is good for the economy ignore the “broken window fallacy” as first explained by French economist Frédéric Bastiat in his essay, “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen.” In the tale, a shopkeeper has a window broken and must pay to have it replaced. The locals view the mishap favorably, as they see the $50 for a new window to be a benefit to the glazier which he will then spend, thus improving the economy as a whole. What is not seen, however, is what the shopkeeper might have done with that same $50 had he not been forced to replace a broken window. Perhaps he would have invested it in a way that created far more wealth and more jobs.

  Unfortunately, Biden is not alone in coming up with new gimmicks to enable Washington to operate in a “business as usual” manner.

  New House Speaker Mike Johnson has also been busy trying to convince us that sending money overseas is actually good for our own economy. Over the weekend he appeared on Fox News to tell us that sending another $14 billion to the wealthy nation of Israel is Republicans “trying to be good stewards of the taxpayer’s resources.” How is that? Well he came up with the gimmick that they would cut $14 billion from the IRS and send it to Israel.

  Said Johnson, “Instead of printing new dollars or borrowing it from another nation to send over to fulfill our obligations and help our ally, we want to pay for it, what a concept, we are trying to change how Washington works.”

  See the trick here? They are not “paying for it” by sending the money overseas, and they are not “changing how Washington works” by doing the exact same thing they always do: stealing from the poor at home to send to the rich in foreign countries.

  Instead of trying to trick Americans into thinking that foreign aid and corporate welfare are good for our economy, why not just stop breaking all of our windows? Just end all foreign aid and corporate welfare!

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 19:00

• Zelensky Invites Trump To Ukraine, Saying He Can't Negotiate Peace
  Zelensky Invites Trump To Ukraine, Saying He Can’t Negotiate Peace

  Has Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just initiated his next publicity stunt? After all, just days ago he publicly complained that war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas is “taking away the focus” from the Ukraine conflict.

  Now, he’s lashed out at former President Trump while inviting him to come and see the war in Ukraine for himself. Zelensky said the provocative words in a new NBC “Meet the Press” interview. He sarcastically batted down Trump’s prior claims that he could negotiate peace within 24 hours.

  Zelensky responds to Trump saying he could end the Ukraine war in 24hrs:

  “I invite President Trump. If he can come here, I will need 24 minutes … to explain to President Trump that he can’t manage this war. He can’t bring peace, because of Putin.” pic.twitter.com/WqGFsCDKoC

  — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 5, 2023

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  “Former President Trump said that about 24 hours, that he can manage it and finish the war,” Zelensky said in response. “For me, what can I say? So he’s very welcome as well.”

  “President Biden was here, and I think he understood some details which you can understand only being here,” Zelensky added. “So I invite President Trump. If he can come here, I will need 24 minutes,” he said in a swipe and direct challenge to Trump. 

  Zelensky then emphasized that achieving peace or a ceasefire deal is not an option so long as President Vladimir Putin is in power. He’s maintained this staunch position since nearly the start of the war.

  “He can’t bring peace because of Putin,” the Ukrainian leader told NBC further. “If he’s not trying and if he’s not ready to give our territory to this terrible man, to Putin, if you are not ready to give it, if you are not ready to give our independence, he can’t manage it.”

  Many outside observers have emphasized that the only way to lasting ceasefire is to get Kiev to agree to territorial concessions in the east – but this is the very thing that Zelensky says in a non-starter. The Zelensky government has also held on to the dream of ‘liberating’ Crimea, which has been under clear Russian control for well over half a decade. 

  Trump over the weekend reiterated that he’s the only candidate who can prevent World War Three, telling the Florida Republican Party’s “Freedom Summit” in Kissimmee that “we are closer than anyone understands” to “obliteration.”

  U.S. presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump told Republicans at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that he was the only candidate who could prevent ‘World War Three’ pic.twitter.com/N8BNQ5Dg3w

  — Reuters (@Reuters) March 5, 2023

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  Trump also told the crowd that “When you think of it, how important elections are, you’d have millions of people alive right now if the 2020 election was not rigged. They would be alive. Ukraine, Israel. The attack would have never been made. All of these people would be alive, the cities would be thriving.”

  This type of rhetoric has not only angered the Ukrainian government, which sees in Trump a manifestation of GOP resistance to a ‘black check’ approach to funding Kiev, but also ardent Ukraine supporters and hawks, including the neocons. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 18:40

• Jack Smith Could Be On Shaky Ground In Trump Charge: Analysts
  Jack Smith Could Be On Shaky Ground In Trump Charge: Analysts

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

  Two analysts have noted that special counsel Jack Smith might be on shaky legal ground in his federal election-related case against former President Donald Trump.

  

  Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, said that the Trump charge of corruptly obstructing an official proceeding hasn’t been “extensively litigated” over the past several decades, adding that a ruling could come on whether it is appropriate in the former president’s case.

  Multiple defendants who were charged in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach have “argued that Congress certifying the electoral votes was not an ‘official proceeding’ and courts have universally rejected that argument,” she told Newsweek last week.

  “This bigger question is, what satisfies the ‘corruptly’ requirement? Is it any criminal conduct, such as trespassing in the Capitol building or submitting fake electors? Or does the corrupt conduct have to relate to the other subsections of 1512, which prohibit destroying or concealing evidence?” she asked.

  She continued: “If the corruption requires consciousness of guilt, then Trump can argue that he genuinely believed the election was stolen. Either way, this issue will likely end up before the United States Supreme Court because it is a novel issue that affects hundreds of criminal defendants, including the former president.”

  Lawfare’s Roger Parloff wrote in a recent article that the Department of Justice (DOJ) recently won two “fragile” victories in two cases involving Jan. 6 defendants, and Mr. Smith has “relied on [a] statute” that was used by other prosecutors to charge at least 317 individuals in the Jan. 6 case.

  “Smith has relied on that statute and its conspiracy equivalent, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k), for two of the four counts in his indictment against former President Donald Trump for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election,” Mr. Parloff wrote. “Those counts, whose legal sufficiency Trump challenged in a motion to dismiss this week, are the most serious leveled against Trump in that case, carrying a maximum 20-year term of imprisonment.”

  Three appellants in a Jan. 6 case are now petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to review a recent appeals court ruling that favored the DOJ, he noted, but he said that the D.C. appeals court judges “can’t agree about its holdings, and its holdings determine the viability of a 20-year felony that an ex-president and major presidential candidate now stands charged with violating.”

  “Moreover, at the appeals court level, judges’ acceptance of the Justice Department’s interpretations of that law have been 100 percent correlated with the political party of the judge’s appointer,” he wrote.

  “If that trend continues, and if either case climbs one more rung up the appellate ladder, the department (and Mr. Smith) faces bleak prospects indeed.”

  The comments come as constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley warned that the gag order targeting President Donald Trump is “unconstitutional” and said that an appeals court ruling to rescind the order last week was a “quite significant” development.

  Several weeks ago, District of Columbia Judge Tanya Chutkan placed a gag order on the former president in the Jan. 6-related case, saying President Trump cannot speak about potential witnesses, court staff, or prosecutors. An appeals court in the district froze Judge Chutkan’s order late last week, with oral arguments being set for Nov. 20.

  “They could have left it to continue, to continue while they reviewed it, but they decided perhaps in an abundance of caution to order this stoppage until they can give it a full review,” Mr. Turley, a professor for George Washington University, said on Fox News on Nov. 3. “The reason I think this could be quite significant is because I think the order is unconstitutional.”

  He added that it is “very odd” to issue the order because the same court “insisted on having this trial before the election, sort of shoehorned it in before Super Tuesday,” referring to the key GOP presidential nominating date.

  “And everyone in this election is going to be talking about these cases,” the law professor said, “except one person under this gag order and that is Donald Trump.”

  With the order, the former president “can’t criticize the prosecutors, he can’t criticize witnesses, and special counsel Jack Smith just asked for this order to be expanded in an equally unconstitutional way, and that has drawn the criticism even of the ACLU, which is a staunch critic of Donald Trump, but the ACLU has said look, this is flagrantly unconstitutional,” Mr. Turley said, referring to the American Civil Liberties Union.

  On Nov. 3, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote they were pausing Judge Chutkan’s order to provide them more time to consider the former president’s request while his appeal continues. The three judges on the appeals court panel were all appointed by Democratic presidents, while Judge Chutkan was appointed by former President Barack Obama.

  Judge Chutkan had ruled against President Trump’s attorneys and argued that the gag order was not illegal because the former president is a criminal defendant. The gag order was issued at the request of special counsel Jack Smith’s team of prosecutors, who claimed that the former president’s criticism of witnesses, the judge, prosecutors, and Washington itself threatened the integrity of their case.

  The Trump legal team had argued that the order denied him the right to free speech, especially while he is the leading GOP candidate for president.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 18:20

• Speaker Mike Johnson Faces Looming Battles Over Biden Impeachment, Shutdown
  Speaker Mike Johnson Faces Looming Battles Over Biden Impeachment, Shutdown

  In 12 days, Mike Johnson (R-LA) will need to whip out a compromise between House conservatives and Senate Democrats along with RINO republicans in order to keep the government from default, yet again.

  

  Johnson is also going to need to appease the renewed vigor for a Biden impeachment among House Republicans – which we wouldn’t be surprised to see linked to shutdown negotiations.

  According to Punchbowl News, Johnson has been keeping his cards close to his vest and hasn’t shared much of his thinking with his leadership team.

  The GOP whip operation is not currently in action at all. Remember, when GOP speakers move government funding bills, the majority leader and whip operation typically hold listening sessions and begin to work the vote days — if not weeks — in advance. That hasn’t happened yet.

  The House Republican Conference is slated to meet on Tuesday behind closed doors and sources in the speaker, majority leader and majority whip’s office told us that they don’t expect much of an answer on the path forward until after that gathering.

  Here are Johnson’s options, per Punchbowl:

  1) A ‘clean’ bill would allow federal funding agencies to operate until the middle of January, Johnson’s preference in terms of duration of this latest band-aid. This would be the ‘path of least resistance’ for Johnson.

  2) Pairing an extension with H.R. 2, the GOP immigration bill which would strengthen the US-Mexico border. That said, H.R. 2 is broad, and has provisions that most senators will reject. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, say they’re working on a separate border plan which they insist won’t amount to a conservative wish list, and which they’ll seek to attach to the national-security supplemental funding bill. House Republicans could also cherry pick aspects of H.R. 2.

  That said, if Johnson and crew attempt to slash federal spending in relation to a two-month stopgap, they’re gonna have a bad time.

  3) A ‘laddered approach’ – pushed by Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), which would extend government funding for each agency for different periods of time. This has exactly zero support in the Senate.

  Impeachment?

  While Democrats impeached Trump for simply asking Ukraine about obvious (and increasingly evidenced) Biden corruption, and then impeached him again over Jan. 6 (using a MSM producer to choreograph the ‘show’), Republicans are spinning their wheels over Biden, because they suck at this.

  Johnson has cautioned over rushing an investigation, calling impeachment the “heaviest power that we have.”

  That said, as a prominent member of the House Judiciary Committee, Johnson insisted that bribery is “what happened here.”

  The White House has vigorously denied any wrongdoing by Biden and noted that even as Republicans have pored over the business dealings of his brother and son, they’ve failed to connect the president to their work overseas.

  But as Johnson takes the helm from a former Speaker who at times seemed reluctant to pursue the matter, he said last week the House would soon have to determine how to move forward with an investigation shared across three committees. –The Hill

  “I do believe that very soon we are coming to a point of decision on it,” Johnson said on Thursday.

  “I have been very consistent, intellectually consistent in this, and persistent that we have to follow due process, and we have to follow the law,” he continued. “That means following our obligation on the Constitution and doing appropriate investigations in the right way at the right pace, so that the evidence comes in, and we follow the evidence where it leads. You follow the truth where it leads.“

  Chairmen Comer, Jordan, and Smith have my full faith and backing as they continue their investigations into the Biden family.

  We will follow the truth where it leads and deliver for the American people. pic.twitter.com/NRTrjV0VC3

  — Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) October 29, 2023

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  “We’ve not predetermined the outcome of this. We’ve not prejudged it,” Johnson said. “But I think everyone can see how it is unfolding.”

  The underlying allegation stems from when Biden was Vice President and threatened Ukraine’s former president with a quid-pro-quo to withhold US foreign aid unless they fired the prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden’s employer.

  “The president bribed or pressured a foreign leader to fire that country’s top prosecutor because the prosecutor was investigating his son, and he used $1 billion of U.S. taxpayer money to have that bidding done, and then he bragged about it on video,” Johnson said on Fox News in August.

  According to Rep. James Comer, it’s up to Johnson.

  Comer tells Maria Bartiromo he thinks Biden should be impeached but is leaving it up to Mike Johnson pic.twitter.com/g2MI0PNiwh

  — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 5, 2023

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 18:00

• Elon Musk's Free Speech Stance Is "Dangerous", Columbia Journalism Fellow Warns
  Elon Musk’s Free Speech Stance Is “Dangerous”, Columbia Journalism Fellow Warns

  Authored by Matt Lamb via TheCollegeFix.com,

  A Columbia University journalism fellow said Elon Musk’s support for free speech on X, formerly known as Twitter, is both “immoral” and “dangerous.”

  Anika Navaroli used to work on Twitter’s “Trust and Safety Team,” the unit within the company that censored information, oftentimes true. Musk eliminated the team. She now is a senior fellow at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

  “What has now become clear is that Musk’s vision of speech on X is one of the greatest dangers to democracy, especially leading into the 2024 elections,” Navaroli (pictured) wrote on Thursday in The Hill.

  

  She praised workers like herself for “thanklessly” working behind the scenes to defend “institutions.”

  Navoli and her co-workers, in her telling, “were one of the last defenses to American democracy leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 mob attack on Congress” which “led ultimately to our deplatforming former President Donald Trump.”

  She wrote:

  Much like poll workers, social media trust and safety workers toil thanklessly and behind the scenes for years to protect the safety and integrity of our most vital democratic institutions. Rather than invest in that crucial work, Musk took a page out of Trump’s playbook, repeatedly and publicly attacking trust and safety workers. He unleashed the Twitter Files, which revealed the names, images, and contact information of former Twitter trust and safety employees.

  The journalism fellow said speech is “evolving,” “complicated,” and “sticky.”

  “It requires tradeoffs, flexibility, and tough decisions. It shouldn’t be dictated by an autocratic CEO with absolutist ideologies,” Navoli wrote, repeating prior statements she has made on the subject.

  “Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom,” she previously said during a Congressional hearing.

  “So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”

  She is correct in that our conceptions of speech are complicated – I do not think there is some broad First Amendment right for the authors of pornographic books targeting kids to have their works in libraries.

  Nor are men cross-dressing and scandalizing kids equal to the concerned parent speaking out at a school board meeting about sexualized curriculum  in terms of the First Amendment. (Neither does the Biden administration, which favors the former but not the latter).

  But I don’t think it is “complicated” that there was true and verified information about Hunter Biden’s laptop that the Twitter team censored.

  Navoli’s fears are just the latest that began more than a year ago, prior to Musk’s completion of his purchase of the platform in October 2022.

  For example, a Vanderbilt law professor said the purchase was “deeply troubling.”

  University of California Berkeley Professor Robert Reich also believes Musk’s support for open debate on social media is a threat to “democracy,” calling it “the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth.”

  “In Musk’s vision of Twitter and the internet, he’d be the wizard behind the curtain – projecting on the world’s screen a fake image of a brave new world empowering everyone,” President Bill Clinton’s former Labor Secretary wrote.

  X is still plagued with throttling problems, as The College Fix has seen. But overall the platform has improved and truthful speech (i.e. on gender) is better respected.

  That is a good thing and not complicated at all.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 17:40

• Woke Wikipedia Editors Fight Over Matt Taibbi (Et. Al) $100,000 National Journalism Award
  Woke Wikipedia Editors Fight Over Matt Taibbi (Et. Al) $100,000 National Journalism Award

  After journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger won a $100,000 award from the National Journalism Center / DAO for excellence in investigative journalism regarding the Twitter Files, WikiPedia editors threw a fit – with one, who goes by “Specifico”, removing all mention of the award until other editors were in ‘consensus for inclusion.’

  

  Bari, Michael and I are very grateful for this significant award, which we hope will provide encouragement to future independent journalists to take on unpopular subjects and confront powerful institutions.

  — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 2, 2023

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  First, from Taibbi’s acceptance speech:

  More than two dozen reporters worked on the Twitter Files at different times, including Lee Fang, Paul Thacker, David Zweig, Aaron Maté, Matt Farwell, and many others, across the political spectrum. Journalists from left-leaning publications and reporters with conservative backgrounds both worked on this story, which was unique enough to employ pseudonymous citizen journalists like “Techno Fog” and Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Schmidt. Susan is here tonight, and has a new Twitter Files piece coming out on Twitter and Racket in the coming days.

  This was apparently too much for Wikipedia – which has been the de-facto leftist ministry of bullshit for years.

  An editor who goes by “SPECIFICO” took it upon themselves to nuke the DAO award from Taibbi’s profile, writing “I reverted the addition of this item. PPlease see the reason im my edit summary. It should not be re-added prior to consensus for inclusion.”

  2/2 This is what happened first. Report is they have relented: pic.twitter.com/vgXMtb7toJ

  — Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) November 6, 2023

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  Another editor replied: “I am curious. How does one determine that an award is not “credible”?”

  Specifico, as it were, is a total weirdo. Shocker, we know.

  If you’d like to experience more of Wikipedia’s legendary professionalism and integrity, I highly recommend clicking on SPECIFICO’s username to view their personal page.

  Behold, the “Master Editor” (which means they have 42,000+ edits!) who removed the Dao Prize mention: pic.twitter.com/pdB0uqSGQ4

  — Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) November 6, 2023

  Fortunately, less-woke minds prevailed, and the award is now visible on Taibbi’s page.

  

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/06/2023 – 17:20

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