- An Age Of Decay
An Age Of Decay
Authored by Chris Buskirk via AmGreatness.com,
This essay is adapted from “America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay,” by Chris Buskirk (Encounter, 192 pages, $28.99)
The fact that American living standards have broadly stagnated, and for some segments of the population have declined, should be cause for real concern to the ruling class…
America ran out of frontier when we hit the Pacific Ocean. And that changed things. Alaska and Hawaii were too far away to figure in most people’s aspirations, so for decades, it was the West Coast states and especially California that represented dreams and possibilities in the national imagination. The American dream reached its apotheosis in California. After World War II, the state became our collective tomorrow. But today, it looks more like a future that the rest of the country should avoid—a place where a few coastal enclaves have grown fabulously wealthy while everyone else falls further and further behind.
After World War II, California led the way on every front. The population was growing quickly as people moved to the state in search of opportunity and young families had children. The economy was vibrant and diverse. Southern California benefited from the presence of defense contractors. San Diego was a Navy town, and demobilized GIs returning from the Pacific Front decided to stay and put down roots. Between 1950 and 1960, the population of the Los Angeles metropolitan area swelled from 4,046,000 to 6,530,000. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was inaugurated in the 1930s by researchers at the California Institute of Technology. One of the founders, Jack Parsons, became a prominent member of an occult sect in the late 1940s based in Pasadena that practiced “Thelemic Magick” in ceremonies called the “Babalon Working.” L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology (1950), was an associate of Parsons and rented rooms in his home. The counterculture, or rather, countercultures, had deep roots in the state.
Youth culture was born in California, arising out of a combination of rapid growth, the Baby Boom, the general absence of extended families, plentiful sunshine, the car culture, and the space afforded by newly built suburbs where teenagers could be relatively free from adult supervision. Tom Wolfe memorably described this era in his 1963 essay “The Kandy-Colored Tangerine Flake Streamline, Baby.” The student protest movement began in California too. In 1960, hundreds of protesters, many from the University of California at Berkeley, sought to disrupt a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the San Francisco City Hall. The police turned fire hoses on the crowd and arrested over thirty students. The Baby Boomers may have inherited the protest movement, but they didn’t create it. Its founders were part of the Silent Generation. Clark Kerr, the president of the UC system who earned a reputation for giving student protesters what they wanted, was from the Greatest Generation. Something in California, and in America, had already changed.
California was a sea of ferment during the 1960s—a turbulent brew of contrasting trends, as Tom O’Neill described it:
The state was the epicenter of the summer of love, but it had also seen the ascent of Reagan and Nixon. It had seen the Watts riots, the birth of the antiwar movement, and the Altamont concert disaster, the Free Speech movement and the Hells Angels. Here, defense contractors, Cold Warriors, and nascent tech companies lived just down the road from hippie communes, love-ins, and surf shops.
Hollywood was the entertainment capital of the world, producing a vision of peace and prosperity that it sold to interior America—and to the world as the beau ideal of the American experiment. It was a prosperous life centered around the nuclear family living in a single-family home in the burgeoning suburbs. Doris Day became America’s sweetheart through a series of romantic comedies, but the turbulence in her own life foreshadowed America’s turn from vitality to decay. She was married three times, and her first husband either embezzled or mismanaged her substantial fortune. Her son, Terry Melcher, was closely associated with Charles Manson and the Family, along with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys—avatars of the California lifestyle that epitomized the American dream.
The Manson Family spent the summer of 1968 living and partying with Wilson in his Malibu mansion. The Cielo Drive home in the Hollywood Hills where Sharon Tate and four others were murdered in August 1969 had been Melcher’s home and the site of parties that Manson attended. The connections between Doris Day’s son, the Beach Boys, and the Manson Family have a darkly prophetic valence in retrospect. They were young, good-looking, and carefree. But behind the clean-cut image of wholesome American youth was a desperate decadence fueled by titanic drug abuse, sexual outrages that were absurd even by the standards of Hollywood in the 60s, and self-destructiveness clothed in the language of pseudo-spirituality.
The California culture of the 1960s now looks like a fin-de-siècle blow-off top. The promise, fulfillment, and destruction of the American dream appears distilled in the Golden State, like an epic tragedy played out against a sunny landscape where the frontier ended. Around 1970, America entered into an age of decay, and California was in the vanguard.
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Up, Up, and Away
The expectation of constant progress is deeply ingrained in our understanding of the world, and of America in particular. Some metrics do generally keep rising: gross domestic product mostly goes up, and so does the stock market. According to those barometers, things must be headed mostly in the right direction. Sure there are temporary setbacks—the economy has recessions, the stock market has corrections—but the long-term trajectory is upward. Are those metrics telling us that the country is growing more prosperous? Are they signals, or noise?
There is much that GDP and the stock market don’t tell us about, such as public and private debt levels, wage trends, and wealth concentration. In fact, during a half-century in which reported GDP grew consistently and the stock market reached the stratosphere, real wages have crept up very slowly, and living standards have flatlined or even declined for the middle and working classes. Many Americans have a feeling that things aren’t going in the right direction or that the country has lost its societal health and vigor, but aren’t sure how to describe or measure the problem. We need broader metrics of national prosperity and vitality, including measures of noneconomic values like family stability or social trust.
There are many different criteria for national vitality. First, is the country guarded against foreign aggression and at peace with itself? Are people secure in their homes, free from government harassment, and safe from violent crime? Is prosperity broadly shared? Can the average person get a good job, buy a house, and support a family without doing anything extraordinary? Are families growing? Are people generally healthy, and is life span increasing or at least not decreasing? Is social trust high? Do people have a sense of unity in a common destiny and purpose? Is there a high capacity for collective action? Are people happy?
We can sort quantifiable metrics of vitality into three main categories: social, economic, and political. There is a spiritual element too, which for my purposes falls under the social category. The social factors that can readily be measured include things like age at first marriage (an indicator of optimism about the future), median adult stature (is it rising or declining?), life expectancy, and prevalence of disease. Economic measures include real wage trends, wealth concentration, and social mobility. Political metrics relate to polarization and acts of political violence.
Many of these tend to move together over long periods of time. It’s easy to look at an individual metric and miss the forest for the trees, not seeing how it’s one manifestation of a larger problem in a dynamic system. Solutions proposed to deal with one concern may cause unexpected new problems in another part of the system. It’s a society-wide game of whack-a-mole. What’s needed is a more comprehensive understanding of structural trends and what lies behind them. From the founding period in America until about 1830, those factors were generally improving. Life expectancy and median height were increasing, both indicating a society that was mostly at peace and had plentiful food. Real wages roughly tripled during this period as labor supply growth was slow. There was some political violence. But for decades after independence, the country was largely at peace and citizens were secure in their homes. There was an overarching sense of shared purpose in building a new nation.
Those indicators of vitality are no longer trending upward. Let’s start with life expectancy. There is a general impression that up until the last century, people died very young. There’s an element of truth to this: we are now less susceptible to death from infectious disease, especially in early childhood, than were our ancestors before the 20th century. Childhood mortality rates were appalling in the past, but burying a young child is now a rare tragedy. This is a very real form of progress, resulting from more reliable food supplies as a result of improvements in agriculture, better sanitation in cities, and medical advances, particularly the antibiotics and certain vaccines introduced in the first half of the 20th century. A period of rapid progress was then followed by a long period of slow, expensive improvement at the margins.
When you factor out childhood mortality, life spans have not grown by much in the past century or two. A study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine says that in mid-Victorian England, life expectancy at age five was 75 for men and 73 for women. In 2016, according to the Social Security Administration, the American male life expectancy at age five was 71.53 (which means living to age 76.53). Once you’ve made it to five years, your life expectancy is not much different from your great-grandfather’s. Moreover, Pliny tells us that Cicero’s wife, Terentia, lived to 103. Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of both France and England at different times in the 12th century, died a week shy of her 82nd birthday. A study of 298 famous men born before 100 B.C. who were not murdered, killed in battle, or died by suicide found that their average age at death was 71.
More striking is that people who live completely outside of modern civilization without Western medicine today have life expectancies roughly comparable to our own. Daniel Lieberman, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, notes that “foragers who survive the precarious first few years of infancy are most likely to live to be 68 to 78 years old.” In some ways, they are healthier in old age than the average American, with lower incidences of inflammatory diseases like diabetes and atherosclerosis. It should be no surprise that an active life spent outside in the sun, eating wild game and foraged plants, produces good health.
Recent research shows that not only are we not living longer, we are less healthy and less mobile during the last decades of our lives than our great-grandfathers were. This points to a decline in overall health. We have new drugs to treat Type I diabetes, but there is more Type I diabetes than in the past. We have new treatments for cancer, but there is more cancer. Something has gone very wrong. What’s more, between 2014 and 2017, median American life expectancy declined every year. In 2017 it was 78.6 years, then it decreased again between 2018 and 2020 to 76.87. The figure for 2020 includes COVID deaths, of course, but the trend was already heading downward for several years, mostly from deaths of despair: diseases associated with chronic alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide. The reasons for the increase in deaths of despair are complex, but a major contributing factor is economic: people without good prospects over an extended period of time are more prone to self-destructive behavior. This decline is in contrast to the experience of peer countries.
In addition to life expectancy, other upward trends have stalled or reversed in the past few decades. Family formation has slowed. The total fertility rate has dropped to well below replacement level. Real wages have stagnated. Debt levels have soared. Social mobility has stalled and income inequality has grown. Material conditions for most people have improved little except in narrow parts of life such as entertainment.
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Trends, Aggregate, and Individuals
The last several decades have been a story of losing ground for much of middle America, away from a handful of wealthy cities on the coasts. The optimistic story that’s been told is that both income and wealth have been rising. That’s true in the aggregate, but when those numbers are broken down the picture is one of a rising gap between a small group of winners and a larger group of losers. Real wages have remained essentially flat over the past 50 years, and the growth in national wealth has been heavily concentrated at the top. The chart below represents the share of national income that went to the top 10 percent of earners in the United States. In 1970 it was 33.3 percent; in 2019 the figure was 45.4 percent.
Disparities in wealth have become more closely tied to educational attainment. Between 1989 and 2019, household wealth grew the most for those with the highest level of education. For households with a graduate degree, the increase was 31 percent; with a college degree, it was 17 percent; with a high school degree, about 4 percent. Meanwhile, household wealth declined by a precipitous 60 percent for high school dropouts, including those with a GED. In 1989, households with a college degree had 2.74 times the wealth of those with only a high school diploma; in 2012 it was 3.08 times as much. In 1989, households with a graduate degree had 4.85 times the wealth of the high school group; in 2019, it was 6.12 times as much. The gap between the graduate degree group and the college group increased by 12 percent. The high school group’s wealth grew about 4 percent from 1989 to 2019, the college group’s wealth grew about 17 percent, and the wealth of the graduate degree group increased 31 percent. The gaps between the groups are growing in real dollars. It’s true that people have some control over the level of education they attain, but college has become costlier, and it’s fundamentally unnecessary for many jobs, so the growing wealth disparity by education is a worrying trend.
Wealth is relative: if your wealth grew by 4 percent while that of another group increased by 17 percent, then you are poorer. What’s more crucial, however, is purchasing power. If the costs of middle-class staples like healthcare, housing, and college tuition are climbing sharply while wages stagnate, then living standards will decline.
More problematic than growing wealth disparity in itself is diminishing economic mobility. A big part of the American story from the beginning has been that children tend to end up better off than their parents were. By most measures, that hasn’t been true for decades.
The chart below compares the birth cohorts of 1940 and 1980 in terms of earning more than parents did. The horizontal axis indicates the relative income level of the parents. Among the older generation, over 90 percent earned more than their parents, except for those whose parents were at the very high end of the income scale. Among the younger generation, the percentages were much lower, and also more variable. For those whose parents had a median income, only about 40 percent would do better. In this analysis, low growth and high inequality both suppress mobility.
Over time, declining economic mobility becomes an intergenerational problem, as younger people fall behind the preceding generation in wealth accumulation. The graph below illustrates the proportion of the national wealth held by successive generations at the same stage of life, with the horizontal axis indicating the median age for the group. Baby Boomers (birth years 1946–1964) owned a much larger percentage of the national wealth than the two succeeding generations at every point.
At a median age of 45, for example, the Boomers owned approximately 40 percent of the national wealth. At the same median age, Generation X (1965–1980) owned about 15 percent. The Boomer generation was 15–18 percent larger than Gen X and it had 2.67 times as much of the national wealth. The Millennial generation (1981–1996) is bigger than Gen X though a little smaller than the Boomers, and it has owned about half of what Gen X did at the same median age.
Those are some measurable indicators of the nation’s vitality, and they tell us that something is going wrong. A key reason for stagnant wages, declining mobility, and growing disparities of wealth is that economic growth overall has been sluggish since around 1970. And the main reason for slower growth is that the long-term growth in productivity that created so much wealth for America and the world over the prior two centuries slowed down.
Wealth and the New Frontier
There are other ways to increase the overall national wealth. One is by acquiring new resources, which has been done in various ways: through territorial conquest, or the incorporation of unsettled frontier lands, or the discovery of valuable resources already in a nation’s territory, such as petroleum reserves in recent history. Getting an advantageous trade agreement can also be a way of increasing resources.
Through much of American history, the frontier was a great source of new wealth. The vast supply of mostly free land, along with the other resources it held, was not just an economic boon; it also shaped American culture and politics in ways that were distinct from the long-settled countries of Europe where the frontier had been closed for centuries and all the land was owned space.
But there can be a downside to becoming overly dependent on any one resource. Aside from gaining new resources, real economic growth comes from either population growth or productivity growth. Population growth can add to the national wealth, but it can also put strain on supplies of essential resources. What elevates living standards broadly is productivity growth, making more out of available resources. A farmer who tills his fields with a steel plough pulled by a horse can cultivate more land than a farmer doing it by hand. It allows him to produce more food that can be consumed by a bigger family, or the surplus can be sold or traded for other goods. A farmer driving a plough with an engine and reaping with a mechanical combine can produce even more.
But productivity growth is driven by innovation. In the example above, there is a progression from farming by hand with a simple tool, to the use of metal tools and animal power, to the use of complicated machinery, each of which greatly increases the amount of food produced per farmer. This illustrates the basic truth that technology is a means of reducing scarcity and generating surpluses of essential goods, so labor and resources can be put toward other purposes, and the whole population will be better off.
Total factor productivity (TFP) refers to economic output relative to the size of all primary inputs, namely labor and capital. Over time, a nation’s economic output tends to grow faster than its labor force and capital stock. This might owe to better labor skills or capital management, but it is primarily the result of new technology. In economics, productivity growth is used as a proxy for the application of innovation. If productivity is rising, it is understood to mean that applied science is working to reduce scarcity. The countries that lead in technological innovation naturally reap the benefits first and most broadly, and therefore have the highest living standards. Developing countries eventually get the technology too, and then enjoy the benefits in what is called catch-up growth. For example, China first began its national electrification program in the 1950s, when electricity was nearly ubiquitous in the United States. The project took a few decades to complete, and China saw rapid growth as wide access to electric power increased productivity.
The United States still leads the way in innovation—though now with more competition than at any time since World War II. But the development of productivity-enhancing new technologies has been slower over the past few decades than in any comparable span of time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early 18th century. The obvious advances in a few specific areas, particularly digital technology, are exceptions that prove the rule. The social technologies of recent years facilitate consumption rather than production.As a result, growth in total factor productivity has been slow for a long time. According to a report from Rabobank, “TFP growth deteriorated from an average annual growth of 1.1% over the period 1969–2010 to 0.4% in 2010 to 2018.”
In The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen suggested that the conventional productivity measures may be misleading. For example, he noted that productivity growth through 2000–2004 averaged 3.8 percent, a very high figure and an outlier relative to most of the last half-century. Surely some of that growth was real owing to the growth of the internet at the time, but it also coincided with robust growth in the financial sector, which ended very badly in 2008.
“What we measured as value creation actually may have been value destruction, namely too many homes and too much financial innovation of the wrong kind.” Then, productivity shot up by over 5 percent in 2009–2010, but Cohen found that it was mostly the result of firms firing the least productive people. That may have been good business, but it’s not the same as productivity rising because innovation is reducing scarcity and thus leading to better living standards. Over the long term, when productivity growth slows or stalls, overall economic growth is sluggish. Median real wage growth is slow. For most people, living standards don’t just stagnate but decline.
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You Owe Me Money
As productivity growth has slowed, the economy has become more financialized, which means that resources are increasingly channeled into means of extracting wealth from the productive economy instead of producing goods and services. Peter Thiel said that a simple way to understand financialization is that it represents the increasing influence of companies whose main business or source of value is producing little pieces of paper that essentially say, you owe me money. Wall Street and the companies that make up the financial sector have never been larger or more powerful. Since the early 1970s, financial firms’ share of all corporate earnings has roughly doubled to nearly 25 percent. As a share of real GDP, it grew from 13–15 percent in the early 1970s to nearly 22 percent in 2020.
The profits of financial firms have grown faster than their share of the economy over the past half-century. The examples are everywhere. Many companies that were built to produce real-world, nondigital goods and services have become stealth finance companies, too. General Electric, the manufacturing giant founded by Thomas Edison, transformed itself into a black box of finance businesses, dragging itself down as a result. The total market value of major airlines like American, United, and Delta is less than the value of their loyalty programs, in which people get miles by flying and by spending with airline-branded credit cards. In 2020, American Airlines’ loyalty program was valued at $18–$30 billion while the market capitalization of the entire company was $14 billion. This suggests that the actual airline business—flying people from one place to another—is valuable only insofar as it gets people to participate in a loyalty program.
The main result of financialization is best explained by the “Cantillon effect,” which means that money creation, over a long period of time, redistributes wealth upward to the already rich. This effect was first described in the 18th century by Richard Cantillon after he observed the results of introducing a paper money system. He noted that the first people to receive the new money saw their incomes rise, while the last to receive it saw a decline in their purchasing power because of consumer price inflation. The first to receive newly created money are banks and other financial institutions. They are called “Cantillon insiders,” a term coined by Nick Szabo, and they get the most benefit. But all owners of assets—including stocks, real estate, even a home—are enriched to some extent by the Cantillon effect. Those who own a lot of assets benefit the most, and financial assets tend to increase in value faster than other types, but all gain value. This is a version of the Matthew Principle, taken from Jesus’ Parable of the Sower: to those who have, more will be given. The more assets you own, the faster your wealth will increase.
Meanwhile, the people without assets fall behind as asset prices rise faster than incomes. Inflation hawks have long worried that America’s decades-long policy of running large government deficits combined with easy money from the Fed will lead to runaway inflation that beggars average Americans. This was seen clearly in 2022 after the massive increase in dollars created by the Fed in 2020 and 2021.
Even so, they’ve mostly been looking for inflation in the wrong place. It’s true that the prices of many raw materials, such as lumber and corn, have soared recently, followed by much more broad-based inflation in everything from food to rent, but inflation in the form of asset price bubbles has been with us for much longer. Those bubbles pop and prices drop, but the next bubble raises them even higher. Asset price inflation benefits asset owners, but not the people with few or no assets, like young people just starting out and finding themselves unable to afford to buy a home.
The Cantillon effect has been one of the main vectors of increased wealth concentration over the last 40 years. One way that the large banks use their insider status is by getting short-term loans from the Federal Reserve and lending the money back to the government by buying longer-term treasuries at a slightly higher interest rate and locking in a profit.
Their position in the economy essentially guarantees them profits, and their size and political influence protect them from losses. We’ve seen the pattern of private profits and public losses clearly in the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, and in the financial crisis of 2008. Banks and speculators made a lot of money in the years leading up to the crisis, and when the losses on their bad loans came due, they got bailouts.
Moral Hazard
The Cantillon economy creates moral hazard in that large companies, especially financial institutions, can privatize profits and socialize losses. Insiders, and shareholders more broadly, can reap massive gains when the bets they make with the company’s capital pay off. When the bets go bad, the company gets bailed out. Alan Krueger, the chief economist at theTreasury Department in the Obama Administration, explained years later why banks and not homeowners were rescued from the fallout of the mortgage crisis: “It would have been extremely unfair, and created problems down the road to bail out homeowners who were irresponsible and took on homes they couldn’t afford.” Krueger glossed over the fact that the banks had used predatory and deceptive practices to initiate risky loans, and when they lost hundreds of billions of dollars—or trillions by some estimates—they were bailed out while homeowners were kicked out. That callous indifference alienates and radicalizes the forgotten men and women who have been losing ground.
Most people know about the big bailouts in 2008, but the system that joins private profit with socialized losses regularly creates incentives for sloppiness and corruption. The greed sometimes takes ridiculous forms. But once that culture takes over, it poisons everything it touches. Starting in 2002, for example, Wells Fargo began a scam in which it paid employees to open more than 3.5 million unauthorized checking accounts, savings accounts, and credit cards for retail customers. By exaggerating growth in the number of active retail accounts, the bank could give investors a false picture of the health of its retail business. It also charged those customers monthly service fees, which contributed to the bottom line and bolstered the numbers in quarterly earnings reports to Wall Street. Bigger profits led to higher stock prices, enriching senior executives whose compensation packages included large options grants.
John Stumpf, the company’s CEO from 2007 to 2016, was forced to resign and disgorge around $40 million in repayments to Wells Fargo and fines to the federal government. Bloomberg estimates that he retained more than $100 million. Wells Fargo paid a $3 billion fine, which amounted to less than two months’ profit, as the bank’s annual profits averaged around $19.7 billion from 2017 to 2019. And this was for a scam that lasted nearly 15 years.
What is perhaps most absurd and despicable about this scheme is that Wells Fargo was conducting it during and even after the credit bubble, when the bank received billions of dollars in bailouts from the government. The alliance between the largest corporations and the state leads to corrupt and abusive practices. This is one of the second-order effects of the Cantillon economy.
Another effect is that managers respond to short-term financial incentives in a way that undermines the long-term vitality of their own company. An excessive focus on quarterly earnings is sometimes referred to as short-termism. Senior managers, especially at the C-suite level of public companies, are largely compensated with stock options, so they have a strong incentive to see the stock rise. In principle, a rising stock price should reflect a healthy, growing, profitable company. But managers figured out how to game the system: with the Fed keeping long-term rates low, corporations can borrow money at a much lower rate than the expected return in the stock market. Many companies have taken on long-term debt to finance stock repurchases, which helps inflate the stock price. This practice is one reason that corporate debt has soared since 1980.
The Cantillon effect distorts resource allocation, incentivizing rent-seeking in the financial industry and rewarding nonfinancial companies for becoming stealth financial firms. Profits are quicker and easier in finance than in other industries. As a result, many smart, ambitious people go to Wall Street instead of trying to invent useful products or seeking a new source of abundant power—endeavors that don’t have as much assurance of a payoff. How different might America be if the incentives were structured to reward the people who put their brain power and energy into those sorts of projects rather than into quantitative trading algorithms and financial derivatives of home mortgages.
While the financial industry does well, the manufacturing sector lags. Because of COVID-19, Americans discovered that the United States has very limited capacity to make the personal protective equipment that was in such urgent demand in 2020. We do not manufacture any of the most widely prescribed antibiotics, or drugs for heart disease or diabetes, nor any of the chemical precursors required to make them. A close look at other vital industries reveals the same penury. The rare earth minerals necessary for batteries and electronic screens mostly come from China because we have intentionally shuttered domestic sources or failed to develop them. We’re dependent on Taiwan for the computer chips that go into everything from phones to cars to appliances, and broken supply chains in 2021 led to widespread shortages. The list of necessities we import because we have exported our manufacturing base goes on.
Financialization of the economy amplifies the resource curse that has come with dollar supremacy. Richard Cantillon described a similar effect when he observed what happened to Spain and Portugal when they acquired large amounts of silver and gold from the New World. The new wealth raised prices, but it went largely into purchasing imported goods, which ruined the manufactures of the state and led to general impoverishment. In America today, a fiat currency that serves as the world’s reserve is the resource curse that erodes the manufacturing base while the financial sector flourishes. Since the dollar’s value was formally dissociated from gold in 1976, it now rests on American economic prosperity, political stability, and military supremacy. If these advantages diminish relative to competitors, so will the value of the dollar.
Dollar supremacy has also encouraged a debt-based economy. Federal debt as a share of GDP has risen from around 38 percent in 1970 to nearly 140 percent in 2020. Corporate debt has had peaks and troughs over those decades, but each new peak is higher than the last. In the 1970s, total nonfinancial corporate debt in the United States ranged between 30 and 35 percent of GDP. It peaked at about 43 percent in 1990, then at 45 percent with the dot-com bubble in 2001, then at slightly higher with the housing bubble in 2008, and now it’s approximately 47 percent. As asset prices have climbed faster than wages, consumer debt has soared from 43.2 percent of GDP in 1970 to over 75 percent in 2020.
Student loan debt has soared even faster in recent years: in 2003, it totaled $240 billion—basically a rounding error—but by 2020, the sum had ballooned to six times as large, at $1.68 trillion, which amounts to around 8 percent of GDP. Increases in aggregate debt throughout society are a predictable result of the Cantillon effect in a financialized economy.
The Rise of the Two-Income Family
The Cantillon effect generates big gains for those closest to the money spigot, and especially those at the top of the financial industry, while the people furthest away fall behind. Average families find it more difficult to buy a home and maintain a middle-class life. In 90 percent of U.S. counties today, the median-priced single-family home is unaffordable on the median wage. One of the ways that families try to make ends meet is with the promiscuous use of credit. It’s one of the reasons that personal and household debt levels have risen across the board. People borrow money to cover the gap between expectations and reality, hoping that economic growth will soon pull them out of debt. But for many, it’s a trap they can never escape.
Another way that families have tried to keep up is by adding a second income. In 2018, over 60 percent of families were two-income households, up from about 30 percent in 1970. This change is not a result of a simple desire to do wage work outside the home or of “increased opportunities,” as we are often told. The reason is that it now takes two incomes to support the needs of a middle-class family, whereas 50 years ago, it required only one. As more people entered the labor market, the value of labor declined, setting up a vicious cycle in which a second income came to be more necessary. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 put more downward pressure on the value of labor.
When people laud the fact that we have so many more two-income families—generally meaning more women working outside the home—as evidence that there are so many great opportunities, what they’re really doing is retconning something usually done out of economic necessity. Needing twice as much labor to get the same result is the opposite of what happens when productivity growth is robust. It also means that the raising of children is increasingly outsourced. That’s not an improvement.
Another response to stagnant wages is to delay family formation and have fewer children. In 1960, the median age of a first marriage was about 20.5 years. In 2010, it was approximately 27, and in 2020 it was an all-time high of over 29.18 At the same time, the total fertility rate of American women was dropping: from 3.65 in 1960 down to 2.1, a little below replacement level, in the early 1970s. Currently, it hovers around 1.8. Some people may look on this approvingly, worried as they are about overpopulation and the impact of humans on the environment. But when people choose to have few or no children, it is usually not a political choice. That doesn’t mean it is simply a “revealed preference,” a lower desire for a family and children, rather than a reflection of personal challenges or how people view their prospects for the future. Surely it’s no coincidence that the shrinking of families has happened at the same time that real wages have stagnated or grown very slowly, while the costs of housing, health care, and higher education have soared.
The fact that American living standards have broadly stagnated, and for some segments of the population have declined, should be cause for real concern to the ruling class. Americans expect economic mobility and a chance for prosperity. Without it, many will believe that the government has failed to deliver on its promises. The Chinese Communist Party is regarded as legitimate by the Chinese people because it has presided over a large, broad, multigenerational rise in living standards. If stagnation or decline in the United States is not addressed effectively, it will threaten the legitimacy of the governing institutions.
But instead of meeting the challenge head-on, America’s political and business leaders have pursued policies and strategies that exacerbate the problem. Woke policies in academia, government, and big business have created a stultifying environment that is openly hostile to heterodox views. Witness the response to views on COVID that contradicted official opinion. And all this happens against a backdrop of destructive fiscal and monetary policies.
Low growth and low mobility tend to increase political instability when the legitimacy of the political order is predicated upon opportunity and egalitarianism. One source of national unity has been the understanding that every individual has an equal right to pursue happiness, that a dignified life is well within reach of the average person, and that the possibility of rising higher is open to all. When too many people feel they cannot rise, and when even the basics of a middle-class life are difficult to secure, disappointment can breed a sense of injustice that leads to social and political conflict. At first, that conflict acts as a drag on what American society can accomplish. Left unchecked, it will consume energy and resources that could otherwise be put into more productive activities. Thwarted personal aspirations are often channeled into politics and zero-sum factional conflict. The rise of identity politics represents a redirection of the frustrations born of broken dreams. But identity politics further divides us into hostile camps.
We’ve already seen increased social unrest lately, and more is likely to follow. High levels of social and political conflict are dangerous for a country that hopes to maintain a popular form of government. Not so long ago, we could find unity in civic rituals and were encouraged to be proud of our country. Now our history is denigrated in schools and by other sensemaking institutions, leading to cultural dysphoria, social atomization, and alienation. In exchange, you can choose your pronouns, which doesn’t seem like such a great trade. Just as important as regaining broad-based material prosperity and rising standards of living—perhaps more important—is unifying the nation around a common understanding of who we Americans are and why we’re here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 23:30 - 2022 Box Office Still 33% Shy Of Pre-Pandemic Levels
2022 Box Office Still 33% Shy Of Pre-Pandemic Levels
Despite a 65 percent jump in box office earnings last year, the movie industry still has a long way to go in its recovery from the Covid-19 shock.
At an estimated total of $7.5 billion, Statista’s Felix Richter notes that the North American box office had the third worst year since 2000, still trailing 2019 box office earnings by 33 percent.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Things are looking even worse when adjusting for ticket price inflation, which makes the 2022 results the third worst year in a long, long time. With roughly 814 million tickets sold in the United States and Canada, movie theaters attracted at least 400 million fewer visitors than in any year between 1995 and 2019, according to industry tracker The Numbers.
Movie theaters and the film industry were hit incredibly hard by the coronavirus pandemic, as screens went dark in most parts of the world in March 2020, when strict social distancing measures were implemented to contain the virus. Box office earnings vanished practically overnight, and film studios were forced to push back movie releases to later in the year, hoping that things would be back to normal by then. Unfortunately, things never went back to normal, as Covid came and went in waves and it took a long time for people to be comfortable enough to return to movie theaters, even after vaccinations had become widely available.
Desperate to generate new revenue streams, studios even did the previously unthinkable in 2021 and started releasing films on streaming services simultaneous to the theatrical release. While embracing streaming as an alternative means of distribution during these special times seemed like a shrewd move, it is proving difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. Consumers have a way of quickly getting used to new realities, and while many people have sorely missed the moviegoing experience, others have long called for the end of theatrical release windows.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 23:00 - In 2022, The World As We Know It Ended. Decades Of Conflict Lie Ahead…
In 2022, The World As We Know It Ended. Decades Of Conflict Lie Ahead…
Via The Burning Platform blog,
The ‘end of history’ has concluded and the world has returned to conflicts between ‘great powers’. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn nuclear…
By Ivan Timofeev, Valdai Club Programme Director & one of Russia’s leading foreign policy experts.
In 1989, the ‘short 20th century’ concluded with the ‘end of history’ – the victory of the Western capitalist world over the Soviet socialist project. At that time, there was not a single country, or community, left in the world which offered a realistic alternative to the US-led view of the organization of the economy, society, and the political system.
The Soviet bloc dissolved itself. A large part of it quickly integrated into NATO and the European Union. Other major world players had begun to integrate organically into the Western-centered world system long before the end of the Cold War. China retained a high level of sovereignty in terms of its domestic order, but quickly moved into a capitalist economy, actively trading with the US, EU, and the rest of the world.
Beijing, meanwhile, shied away from promoting the socialist project abroad. India had avoided claiming global projects of its own, although it has, to this day, also maintained a high level of identity in its political system and has so far shied away from joining blocs and alliances. Other major players also remained within the rules of the ‘liberal world order’ game, avoiding attempts to challenge it.
Individual rebels, such as Iran and North Korea, did not pose much of a threat, although they raised concerns with their stubborn resistance, persistent promotion of nuclear programs, successful adaptation to sanctions, and for the most part, any potential military attack was ruled out because of its high cost. For a brief period, it seemed that the global challenge might come from radical Islamism. But it could not shake the existing order either.
The initially spectacular military campaigns by the US and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan ended up doing little to democratize the Islamic world. But this did not bring about a global game-changer either. Moreover, the fight against radical Islamism has even strengthened the identity of the Western world as the guardian of the secular and rational, as opposed to the religious and fundamentalist.
Russia had, at first glance, found its niche in the new world order. The country had become a peripheral economy specialized in the supply of raw materials. Its market was eagerly exploited by global Western companies. Its large bourgeoisie became part of the global elite, becoming ‘global Russians’. Its industry either degraded or incorporated itself into global chains. Human capital was gradually shrinking. On the whole, Russia was perceived by Western partners as a withering, yet fairly predictable, power. Its occasional outbursts of indignation over the bombing of Yugoslavia, the war in Iraq, or the revolutions in the post-Soviet space were somehow smoothed over and were not considered a big problem.
It was possible to criticize Moscow for its ‘legacy of authoritarianism’ or its human rights record, to lecture it periodically – mixed with praise for its cultural affinity with the West, but at the same time making it clear that there would be no deeper integration. Timid attempts by Russian businesspeople to buy into the likes of Opel or Airbus or to acquire assets in other areas – in other words, to establish slightly more equal and interdependent economic relations – were unsuccessful. Moscow was also very explicitly told that its concerns about Western military involvement in the post-Soviet space had no legitimate basis and would be ignored.
Overall, in the late 2000s and even in the 2010s, it was possible to speak of a fairly high degree of sustainability of the order that had been established since the end of the Cold War. However, in 2022, it finally became clear that the ‘end of history’ was over. The world has now resumed its usual course of global upheaval, the struggle for survival, fierce competition, and rivalry.
In order to adequately assess this new phase, it is important to understand the meaning of the idea of the ‘end of history’. Its identification with Francis Fukuyama’s well-known concept provides only a superficial understanding; it has much deeper normative and political-philosophical roots. These can be found primarily in two modernist political theories – liberalism and socialism. Both are based on a belief in the limitless power and normative value of the mind. It is the mind that enables man to take control of the forces of nature as well as – the elemental forces, and darker sides of human nature and society.
Francis Fukuyama © Panayotis Tzamaros / NurPhoto via Getty Images
In the US, liberalism and realism have coexisted for decades. The former fulfils an ideological and doctrinal role. The latter is sort of behind a screen, compensating for ideological templates with pragmatism and common sense. Hence the often criticized American ‘double standard policy’.
In the USSR, under the concrete slabs of socialist belief, there was also its own version of realism. It was not reflexive to the extent that it could be in America, but it was implicitly developed among academic science, diplomacy, and intelligence. The existence of this stratum (its icon later became Evgeny Primakov) allowed Russia to rather quickly acquire a pragmatic base for its foreign policy after several years of idealism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the 2000s, Russian foreign policy was finally on a realistic track. Unlike the US, Moscow had no ideological outlook and did not want to have one, having satiated itself with such obsessions during the Soviet period. In the US and the West as a whole, the ideological component survived, further asserting its importance against the backdrop of the victory in the Cold War.
The dualism of ideology and pragmatism, however, has its own trap. It is that ideology can be not only a screen for pragmatic realists, but also an object of faith for a multitude of diplomats, academics, journalists, military, businessmen, and other representatives of the foreign policy elite. Ideology is capable of being the very self-sustaining value that can make social action value-rational rather than goal-rational. Approaching foreign policy in terms of democratization, or the degree of involvement in the global market economy, is an example of the influence of ideology on the perception of foreign policy and the formulation of foreign policy objectives. The attempt to democratize Afghanistan may be viewed with skepticism, but in the US, there were a considerable number of sincere supporters of the idea.
Both the dogmatism of US foreign policy and its realism proved critical to the shortness of ‘the end of history’. This mixture gave rise to unsustainable policies such as the aforementioned Afghanistan adventure on the one hand, and departures from the ‘canon’, expressed in double standards and the pushy promotion of interests under pious slogans, on the other. The first led to a waste of resources and an erosion of faith in the omnipotence of the hegemon (the Afghan resistance managed to get rid not only of the ‘ineffective USSR’, but also of the ‘effective US’ with all its allies in tow).
The second was the erosion of trust and growing skepticism on the part of other major players. Russia was the first, then China began to come to a similar understanding. In Russia, this started to emerge amid NATO’s eastward expansion in the post-Soviet space. In China, this happened later when then-US President Donald Trump launched an attack in the form of a trade and sanctions war without blinking an eye. However, Moscow and Beijing responded differently. Russia banged its fist on the table in 2014 and then turned over the table. China has started to prepare hard for a worst-case scenario, without yet openly challenging the US. But even short of such a challenge, it is perceived in Washington as a more dangerous long-term adversary than Russia.
Chinese President Xi Jinpin and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk to each other during their meeting in Beijing. © Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik / Kremlin pool via AP
In 2022, the remnants of the ‘end of history’ era finally became a thing of the past. However, there has not been a return to the Cold War either. Russian policy is mainly concerned about security interests. It is not derived from ideology, although it does include components of the identity of ‘the Russian world’, as well as historical motives for opposing Nazism. Russia does not offer a global ideological alternative comparable to liberalism – nor has China yet taken such initiatives.
The end of the ‘end of history’ is notable for several other details.
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Firstly, a major power has risked giving up the benefits of the ‘global world’ overnight. Historians will argue about whether Moscow anticipated such harsh sanctions and the departure of hundreds of foreign companies so quickly. However, it is clear that Russia is vigorously adapting to the new realities and is in no hurry to return to US-centric globalization.
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Secondly, Western countries have embarked on a very tough ‘purge’ of Russian assets abroad. Overnight, their jurisdictions ceased to be ‘safe havens’ where the ‘rule of law’ is followed. Now it is politics that calls the shots and Russia is the only harbor to which its citizens can return to relative peace. Stereotypes about the ‘stability and security’ of the West are breaking down. Of course, they are unlikely to begin a similar purge of other assets there. But looking at the Russians, outside investors are wondering whether they should hedge their risks.
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Thirdly, it turned out that in the West, they might face not only asset stripping, but outright discrimination on the grounds of nationality. Thousands of Russians ‘fleeing’ the ‘bloody regime’ have suddenly faced rejection and contempt. Others trying to prove that they are even bigger ‘Russophobes’ than their host partners are running ahead of the anti-Russian propaganda train. However, this does not guarantee that the stubborn dogmatists will embrace them.
The conflict between Russia and the West is likely to drag on for decades, regardless of how the conflict in Ukraine ends. In Europe, Russia will play the role of North Korea, while possessing much greater capabilities. Whether Ukraine has the strength, the will, and resources to become a European South Korea is a big question. Conflict between Russia and the West will lead to a strengthening of China’s role as an alternative financial center and source of modernization. A stronger China will only accelerate its rivalry with the US and its allies. The ‘end of history’ has ended with a return to its usual course.
One of these is the collapse of the world order as a result of large-scale conflicts between centers of power. It remains to be seen if the next cycle will not be the last for mankind, given the risks of an open military clash between the great powers with a subsequent escalation into full-scale nuclear conflict.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 22:30 -
- Tesla Owners Flood Chinese Showrooms To Protest Sharp Price Cuts
Tesla Owners Flood Chinese Showrooms To Protest Sharp Price Cuts
Tesla owners in China are apparently not pleased with the company’s new policy of cutting prices on what now seems like a weekly basis.
The swift pace of price cuts caused several of Tesla’s showrooms and distribution centers to swell with new Tesla owners, furious that they had missed out on the company’s price cuts by a matter of days.
Customers were demanding rebates and credits, claiming that they had overpaid for the same cars that weren’t marked down at the time they were purchased, a new report from Reuters says. Prices of Tesla vehicles in China are now between 13% and 24% lower than they were in September.
About 200 recent buyers of the Tesla Model Y and Model 3 made their way to a Tesla delivery center in Shanghai to protest, the report says. Recall, Tesla cut prices for the second time in just three months at the end of last week.
Some of the customers claimed that they didn’t think the prices would be cut so quickly. Many of the buyers were rushed into buying their vehicles before the end of 2022 to beat the deadline on a government subsidy for EVs.
Reuters reviewed video on social media that showed “crowds at Tesla stores and delivery centres in other Chinese cities from Chengdu to Shenzhen”, suggesting that the protests were carried out widely across the country.
One owner told Reuters: “It may be a normal business practice but this is not how a responsible enterprise should behave.” He told reporters that police had facilitated a meeting between the customers and Tesla staff. The customers handed over a list of demands, the report says, which included an apology, compensation and other credits. Tesla has said it would respond by early next week.
“About a dozen police officers” were on site at the protests in Shanghai. “Return the money, refund our cars,” a crowd in one protest video, posted to social media, chants out loud.
Tesla has cut prices to help spur demand as the company heads into the new year. In Q4 2022, Tesla reported a record number of vehicle deliveries, but still missed Wall Street’s estimates.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 22:00 - Will Universities Ever Admit They Were Wrong About COVID Policy?
Will Universities Ever Admit They Were Wrong About COVID Policy?
Authored by Matthew Andersson via AmericanThinker.com,
Former White House adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, wrote an excellent essay recently in the Wall Street Journal.
In it, he raises a vital question for all students, parents, faculty, and the broader public, as to how our nation’s university system became, along with major media, the most aggressive proponent and distributor of medical ideology and biosecurity policy. University behavior continues to be directed by the CDC and WHO, and it appears that university administration will continue its commitment to a consensus posture toward the COVID phenomenon, until another institution that it considers authoritative tells it otherwise. That is not likely to happen.
Academia will never account for its misguided COVID policies, and it will never back out of its commitment to consensus explanations or opportunities. Indeed, these people will help accelerate the entire COVID complex. COVID is a new social engineering program, and universities will make biosecurity, including molecular engineering and tracking technology, into a permanent research activity that is worth billions per year in funding and commercialization. The link connecting business, government, and higher education has never been stronger, while China-style social credit scoring, based in part on medical and ideological compliance, is considered by the current White House administration a necessary part of the political agenda.
For universities to admit that they were wrong would not only undermine their authority and risk their research funding, but also, most of all, put their senior administration in legal jeopardy. University directors, trustees, regents, and other governance bodies are keen to avoid liability, and university legal and communications departments are working overtime to shield their institutions from blowback, including vicarious liability.
Image: Oregon State University.
Plaintiff litigation, including class action, appears to be gaining momentum, as the evidence necessary to make durable causes of action against university administration is coalescing from widespread sources (serious health complications due to vaccines, for example). Legal theories are being formed to seek damages that could easily reach in the billions of dollars. Some universities could face bankruptcy.
COVID-related damages may be the next large-scale, long-term litigation project that rivals tobacco and asbestos.
The lawyers in the modern university system know that and have effectively put out a gag order to avoid university self-incrimination.
But the best legal strategy they possess is to push the same COVID explanations, while actually escalating their commitment to them.
They continue to expand the spectrum of biosecurity research that has penetrated nearly every department in the modern university system.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 21:30 - NYC Subway Crime Spikes 30% Despite Beefed Up Transit Patrols
NYC Subway Crime Spikes 30% Despite Beefed Up Transit Patrols
Send in the Ninja Turtles.
Subway crime in the New York City has jumped 30% in 2022 vs. one year ago, outpacing the 22% jump in major crimes across the city over the same period, Bloomberg reports, citing police data released this week.
The crime wave comes as an embarrassment to NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) who deployed thousands of additional police patrols in the transit system in order to to reduce crime and put riders at ease.
“Once we stabilized that, we’re going to right-size,” said Adams during a Thursday briefing, discussing the need to reduce the police force once crime is lower. “You’re going to see a normalizing of the number of people who are there.”
The New York City Police Department is spending an additional $20 million per month on overtime costs on top of regular levels, which pushed its overtime spending to $272 million through November. That’s more than 70% of the annual overtime budget for the fiscal year that ends June 30, according to New York City Comptroller Brad Lander’s office. -Bloomberg
The rise in spending on the police comes as Adams grapples with critics who say the city isn’t doing enough to tackle crime within the transit system. Ridership, meanwhile, has to 60% of 2019 levels.
Some City Council members, meanwhile, say the additional funding should be sent on other services such as schools and libraries.
Even though @NYCMayor says we need to defund libraries and senior centers to stay afloat, he wants to ADD officers to the largest police force in the US.
It’s a vicious cycle: cut social services, violence increases, respond with more police, cut social services to afford them. pic.twitter.com/FAi2Yop9D4
— Council Member Tiffany Cabán (D22) (@CabanD22) January 5, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsOn Thursday, NYPD Chief of Transit Michael Kemper said the additional subway patrols resulted in a 4.6% reduction in major crime in the transit system between Oct. 31 – Dec. 31, vs. the same period in 2021.
“This plan is paying dividends,” said Kemper, who was probably told the plan needed to pay dividends, or else. “We went from a very concerning increase in crime for the first 10 months of the year to a sharp turnaround during the last nine weeks of the year.”
In October, Adams and NY Governor Kathy Hochul pledged 1,200 overtime NYPD shifts in order to back the nearly 2,600 subway cops.
According to the Police Benevolent Association, which represents over 24,000 NYPD officers, said that the beefed up pace was unsustainable, and that the city was “underpaying and overworking cops.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 21:00 - Is The New World Order On The Precipice?
Is The New World Order On The Precipice?
Authored by ‘Madame DaFarge’ via The Burning Platform blog,
The New World Order nobility may be receiving more roadblocks for their plans than they had anticipated.
The entire scam is based on the ignorance and complacence of the great mass of people in the western based economies.
Control of the West is essential for world domination.
We are the source of wealth and innovation which makes it imperative.
The new platform has begun to get rickety with energy problems, war and civil strife bubbling to the surface.
China is believed to be a huge source of economic and political power but actually without the West being a customer, China is a backwater without technology, markets, energy and foodstuffs. The government is unstable as shown in the past few weeks with the new attempted lockdowns. Their food shortages of the past two years are not mentioned by the simpletons of the media but contribute to general instability. The Chinese are a huge unknown to our “intellectual elite” whether they realize it or not. Control of the sluggish population of Chinese is an easy task compared to Europe and North American farmers but all are now stirring.
This does not even consider India and Russia. By adding these cards to the deck the game plan of the WEF attempted coup appears poorly designed with a small chance of successful domination. That leaves two options regarding their plans, either they are rather sophomoric or there is a plan simmering as yet unknown. I vote for sophomoric. All international schemes have revolved around the US for 100 years because of our ability to fund any type of debauchery. The current unknown is how do they expect the US consumer to drive the economies that they expect to dominate if we are poor, hungry and cold. Europe has been used as test bed for the new system as they are used to being dominated by a system of their betters.
The clock is ticking as we speak for a major crash that will test the controls set up by the Reich in Europe. The citizens are getting chilly and unappreciative in the support for the new order. The power bills have skyrocketed while farmers’ land is being confiscated. France has been using a colonial type franc to fund its ex-territories in Africa while sucking them dry causing huge migration. Italy and France have begun a war of words about illegal immigrants. Hungary has said it will veto additional sanctions on Russia. The Reich has used the Euro to tap money from the Mediterranean countries so they are running on empty. Britain is in their own mess financially as well. Where will the funding for this extension of socialism originate?
Theoretically the last option would be expanding the Belt and Road system financed by China. Unfortunately China is experiencing tougher times than expected at home and it is a road to nowhere. Bluffing about Taiwan is amusing, not dangerous. Even their border with India has become volatile.
The Reich is left again bumping into the Russian Bear that is blocking its’ expansionist dreams. WEF intellectualism is revealed again to be suspect at best. Russia is only interested in its’ own empire and historically defends against the Reich. Certainly the sanctions invoked by the EU for the war are a thorn for Russia but an obvious disaster for Europe.
The traditional answer to world financial trauma is to have the USA make the payoffs through gold or more recently inflation. Today there is little room for maneuver in our finances. In 1907 we spent 7% of our GDP on government. Today it is about 46%. There is nothing left for the banks to steal. That leaves one option for world stability. That is of course our military.
Europe has none since the US has paid for its’ unruly teenager for 90 years. In WW2, 1 of 11 men were in the army. Today it is about 1 in 200 and there is a 25% deficit in recruiting. Our young men are not being fooled into supporting a corporate empire building system again.
US hegemony is past but there is no one to take our place as the relatively benign thief in charge.
This is a new horizon in history which places a great deal of pressure on the “intellectual” class to react to unknown situations.
Their record in the last century for functional innovative thought is 0 wins vs 100 losses.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 20:30 - Media Blackout Over Terror Incident At Vegas Power Plant
Media Blackout Over Terror Incident At Vegas Power Plant
The US power grid is under attack as extremists shoot, sabotage, and vandalize electrical equipment at power stations. One of the highest-profile attacks was when two men used guns to paralyze a substation in Washington state on Christmas Day, leaving thousands without electricity. The incident made national news, but strangely enough, another attack last week on the Las Vegas power grid went unnoticed by the national press.
Mohammad Mesmarian, 34, rammed his car through the gate of a solar power generation plant outside Las Vegas on Wednesday and set his car on fire, intending to damage a massive transformer, 8 News Now reported.
“Employees at the plant said they found a car smoldering in a generator pit,” 8 News Now said, adding the Mega Solar Array facility provides power to 13 properties on the Las Vegas Strip, all belonging to MGM Resorts.
Investigators believe Mesmarian “siphoned gasoline from his car to put on wires at the transformer,” 8 News Now said, citing documents from investigators.
“Mesmarian clarified he burned the Toyota Camry,” police said. “Mesmarian said he burned the vehicle at a Tesla solar plant and did it ‘for the future.'”
Here’s security camera footage of Mesmarian lighting his car on fire next to a giant transformer.
8 News Now said Mesmarian caused “major damage,” estimating it could take two years to receive parts and fix the transformer. Luckily, the damaged unit wasn’t online at the time of the incident..
“Following an incident at the Mega Solar Array facility, on-site personnel immediately notified authorities and shut down the plant’s operations as a precaution in accordance with industry-standard safety protocols,” an Invenergy spokesperson said.
Mesmarian was arrested at a campground Thursday. He’s being charged with committing an act of terrorism, first-degree arson, third-degree arson, destroying or injuring real or personal property of another, and escape by a felony prisoner.
Why is the national press absent in reporting this terror incident on the power grid?
Perhaps the person involved doesn’t fit the extremist profile routinely touted by progressive and state media.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 20:00 - Fear Of COVID Is The Opiate Of The People
Fear Of COVID Is The Opiate Of The People
Authored by Mark Oshinskie via The Brownstone Institute,
After all of the criticism I’ve directed toward Coronamaniacs and the Vaxxmongers over the past three years – in-person and online – I know that many of them have wished that I’d get very sick and die “from Covid.” If I had, they would have gleefully jeered me, as many did when lockdown critic Herman Cain died. Bear in mind that Mr. Cain was 74 and had Stage IV cancer.
But I haven’t died “from Covid.” Like the super-vast majority of people, I was never at any risk of doing so.
While I’d prefer to never get sick, I always knew it was possible that I might “get Covid,” just as I had gotten some other, prior, unnamed coronavirus-driven colds or flus. It’s how life is, has been and will always be. Many people seem to be sick lately. It doesn’t help immune function to be in the low light/low Vitamin D state of winter. And during the past three years of disrupted social life, our immune systems haven’t been properly tested.
Many have said that, by Spring, 2022, everyone had been exposed to Covid-causing coronaviruses. Maybe it’s true, though it sounds like hyperbole; I’m not sure how this could be known. Regardless, except for one February, 2020 day of malaise, and then a week-long dry cough with no apparent cause—perhaps a quick, nearly asymptomatic, pre-Lockdown brush with Covid, or perhaps nothing at all—I’ve felt fine for the past three years.
Last week, on the day after Christmas, that changed.
My muscles started to ache. These aches spread and lasted for three days, accompanied by a tight chest and a banging headache. On Day 2, I also got a high fever. I let the fever crest until I took some Tylenol to moderate my temperature. Serial doses over the next two days quelled the headaches. My wife got sick the day after I did and exhibited the same symptoms.
By our respective Day 4s, we each felt much better.
Aside from the fever, we didn’t have the publicized, original Covid symptoms: shortness of breath, dry cough and fatigue. Plus, for what it’s worth, we each tested negative on home antigen tests that my wife had gotten in the mail. Thus, we mutually guessed that we probably had some form of flu. I didn’t care whether or not I had “had Covid.” That diagnosis never scared me. I only cared that we felt sick for three days.
A day later, by coincidence—or perhaps because my computer was, in our surveillance society, eavesdropping on my wife and my conversations about how we were feeling, physically—this clickbait headline appeared on my screen: “The New Symptoms of Covid.”
I took the bait. The article set forth a revised list of symptoms closely resembling those that my wife and I had just endured.
Hmm. Maybe we did “have Covid.” The new kind. Because heaven forbid that anyone might think that they just got some unspecified sort of cold or flu, as they might have thought three-plus years ago.
To the extent I might believe the article, it said that the virus had mutated into yet another variant, this one with the parodic name, “XBB-1.5.” I’ve known for decades that viruses mutate. This adaptability was another reason that I declined to begin to take an endless series of shots said to protect against viruses that would continually go out of fashion, only to be replaced by others.
Throughout, my understanding has been that viruses typically weaken—not strengthen—following such mutations. Thus, I might expect that a coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, which was unscary to begin with, would cause the same symptoms—only weaker—as it evolved into some different variant under the “Covid” umbrella.
But as a virus weakens, I didn’t assume—as the clickbait article suggested—that the types of symptoms would change. I’ve wondered why an illness caused by an ever-evolving virus, that is supposedly genetically distinct from its viral predecessors and said to cause different symptoms than other viruses or variants have caused, is still widely presented to the public as “Covid.”
Like other marketing campaigns—only more so—countless money and boundless effort went into building the “Covid” brand. In order to incite fear, Government/Media/Pharma had to set “Covid” apart from centuries of respiratory illnesses experienced by those infected by other coronaviruses. Given the name recognition that Government/Media have developed for “Covid” since March, 2020, they’re motivated to stick with this well-known brand name to describe a viral disease that wasn’t much different from centuries of pre-March, 2020 Coronavirus infections; which, in turn, won’t be much different from infections that follow it, ad infinitum.
Christian Scientists say that to name a disease is to empower it. But while the Chistian Scientists think it’s bad to empower an illness, Government/Media/Pharma have taken the opposite approach: for three years, they’ve relentlessly strived to empower, and thus, exploit “Covid.”
Politically and economically, it’s been extremely useful to perpetuate the Covid franchise. Keeping some people scared of Covid helps to sustain the perpetual State of Emergency—oxymoron intended—and all of the Covid-linked government oppression and subsidy schemes that depend upon the myth of crisis. If, instead of referring to “Covid,” Government/Media used all of the various variant names, the public might eventually figure out what they should have known in March, 2020: we’ve always lived among evolving respiratory viruses that briefly sicken many people but don’t seriously threaten anyone who’s healthy.
Though to those with the attention span to accommodate all of the shifting variant names, these names might have a certain spooky sci-fi cachet of their own: so many viruses keep emerging that some people feel they’re under siege.
But overall, from a fear-marketing standpoint, it’s best to stick with the simpler, original brand name:
“Covid.”
“Covid.”
“Covid.”
Did I mention “Covid?”
Government/Media/Pharma have seared “Covid” into the American consciousness and terrorized people by grossly exaggerating Covid’s lethality. They aggressively suppressed criticisms of the attendant scam. By repeatedly saying “Covid” and “Pandemic,” they weaponized these words in order to pacify and control the masses, to effect the biggest wealth transfer in history to the already rich—including but not limited to, Pharma—to further impoverish the working class that they now disdain, and to strategically change election laws.
Aside from sustaining the perception of a public health Crisis, and to justify imposing a wide array of deprivation restrictions on basic liberties, sustaining Covid brand loyalty also provides at least three other important, continuing benefits.
Firstly, by keeping at least some segment of the population afraid of the Covid bogeyman, politicians can use it as an excuse to print ever more “Covid Emergency” relief and research money, ostensibly, but not actually, to control what Biden strategically labeled “this God-awful disease;” even though everyone I know who has had it experienced it as a cold or flu. This massive, annually supplemented slush fund will be used for a vast array of chicanery, including widespread political patronage, with tentacles reaching through politically-aligned state and municipal governments, political donors, the Medical Industrial Complex and the Defense/Biosecurity apparatus. Covid is worth far more alive than it is dead.
Secondly, sustaining Covidism protects politicians and public health bureaucrats. By continuing to invoke “Covid” to spook a gullible public, the scaremongers can use this word to defuse public anger regarding the overreaction of the past three years and all of the lasting damage which people are belatedly seeing. People who are constantly reminded of the Covid Scare of the past three years or who remain naively scared of the Covid Monster will continue to think that all measures to crush it were worth the suffering that the Government/Media/Pharma opportunistically caused with their orchestrated overreaction. Thus, most people won’t demand accountability for the scam of the past three years. They’ll allow the Government/Media/Pharma to continue to hide behind the foundational lie that “We did all of that to save you from death!”
Fear of Covid is the opiate of the people.
Lest we forget how essential it was—not—to wreck American society and economy over a virus that threatened almost no one under 75, politicians will order and fund the construction of public monuments where people can go and wring their hands over, and speak in hushed tones about, the deaths of unhealthy septugenarians, octogenarians and nonagenarians “from Covid.”
Thirdly, preserving the Covid Scare also enables Government/Media/Pharma to unilaterally, arbitrarily declare victory over Covid whenever it wants. If Covid ever becomes a political liability, it can be decreed to have been conquered. The self-proclaimed Covid-slaying politicians can portray themselves, and the public health bureaucrats, as saviors of humanity. The Media can hail, and gullible people will venerate, those who may claim to have liberated our nation from the long-lasting grip of, as Trump so inaptly called it, “The Plague.”
Fundamentally, whether my wife or I had some weird, sore-throat-free cold, some nausea-less flu or just the latest style of “Covid,” neither of us enjoyed our three-day viral experience. Like any old school respiratory virus, this one made us feel lousy, albeit with a different constellation of symptoms. We handled it the same way as other viral illnesses: we drank extra water, took some home remedies, and tried to get some extra sleep. A few years ago, no one made a big deal about, or needed to categorize, being sick like this. People rode it out. No one cared what you had. Or didn’t have.
During the three days that my wife and I felt the effects of some sort of virus, I never regretfully thought that I would’ve been fine if I had only worn a mask. Nor, while reclining on the sofa sipping hot tea, did I think to blame anyone for passing a virus to me; I understood that an occasional respiratory infection is an unavoidable cost of social life.
And I definitely didn’t think that any coronavirus justified shutting down a society or mass-injecting some experimental substance.
These measures have failed miserably and caused tremendous, lasting and expanding harm.
* * *
Republished from the author’s Substack
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 19:30 - Mysterious Antennas Found In Utah's Hills; Some Speculate 'Decentralized' Blockchain Network
Mysterious Antennas Found In Utah’s Hills; Some Speculate ‘Decentralized’ Blockchain Network
Salt Lake City officials are finding mysterious antennas across the foothills of the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. The first ones were discovered nearly a year ago, but more have been popping up in recent months. These devices appear to be relaying data across a wide area.
As first reported by KSLTV 5 in Utah, the mysterious devices consist of a battery box, a solar panel, and an antenna.
“These towers have been bolted into different peaks and summits and ridges around the foothills,” Tyler Fonarow, the city’s recreational trails manager, explained, “and it started with one or two, and now it might be as much as a dozen.”
Salt Lake City public lands officials hiked up the snowy Twin Peaks trail today to remove a mysterious device (solar panel, antenna & locked battery box). They’re finding more in the foothills, with no explanation as to who’s putting them there — or why. Story on @KSL5TV at 6 pic.twitter.com/llfFXMOyLq
— Michael Locklear (@MichaelLocklear) January 5, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Fonarow said whoever is installing these small fiberglass antennas doesn’t have a permit for authorization on public land. His department has been seizing the devices. They found one last week and plan to remove another later this month.
More antennas have been found on property managed by the Forest Service and the University of Utah.
A university spokesperson just released a statement about the mysterious antennas:
“Since Salt Lake City leaders alerted the University of Utah to the unauthorized solar panel towers in the foothills northeast of the Avenues neighborhood, University of Utah representatives have been actively coordinating with City Public Lands officials to determine whether any member of our campus community is connected to the towers. As far as we know, the tower located on university property is not owned or operated by the university. We appreciate Salt Lake City’s collaboration and dedicated efforts to identify the owners.”
Fonarow speculated the devices could be part of a decentralized wireless connectivity platform:
“It might be related to cryptocurrency and relaying networks and being able to make money off that,” he said, “so that’s another reason we want to stop it now before it becomes a dumping ground for dozens and dozens of more antennas.”
Last week, a Salt Lake City Public Lands Facebook posted pictures of “unauthorized solar panel towers” found in the Foothills.
Some people who replied to the Facebook post speculated the devices could be part of the Helium network.
“Probably helium network like several have posted. Or some kind of mesh network repeaters? I don’t understand why they are being torn down and huge effort to take them off public lands, when if it is a mesh network repeater, can be used by the public, and is very important in emergency/communication failure situations,” one person said.
“Those are very clearly off-grid Helium miners,” another person said.
Someone asked: “Ham radio repeater?”
If the speculation is correct, these mysterious antennas could be hotspots connecting to a wireless blockchain-based network for Helium. This entirely new incentive model allows people to set up hotspots that act as Helium miners and serve data to devices. People can earn money by simply buying a hotspot and plugging it in.
Here’s what the Helium coverage looks like around Salt Lake City.
There are nearly a million hotspots nationwide.
“Mining HNT is done by installing a simple device on your home or office window,” Helium wrote on their website, adding these “hotspots provide miles of wireless network coverage for millions of devices around you using Helium LongFi, and you are rewarded in HNT for doing this. And because of an innovative proof-of-work model (we call it “Proof-of-Coverage”), your Hotspot only uses 5W of energy.”
There’s no confirmation Helium hotspots are the devices being found by officials, but speculation indeed points to that.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 19:00 - Ron DeSantis Activates National Guard Amid Surge of Illegal Aliens Entering Florida Keys
Ron DeSantis Activates National Guard Amid Surge of Illegal Aliens Entering Florida Keys
Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed an executive order to activate the National Guard in the state amid a major surge of illegal aliens arriving in the Florida Keys from places such as Cuba and other Caribbean countries.
“As the negative impacts of [President Joe] Biden’s lawless immigration policies continue unabated, the burden of the Biden administration’s failure falls on local law enforcement who lack the resources to deal with the crisis,” the Republican governor said in a statement.
“That is why I am activating the National Guard and directing state resources to help alleviate the strain on local resources. When Biden continues to ignore his legal responsibilities, we will step in to support our communities.”
The executive order (pdf) also directs state law enforcement agencies and other state agencies to “provide resources in support of local governments” responding to the influx of illegal immigrants in the Florida Keys, as well as “additional support toward efforts to prevent further migrant landings on Florida’s shores.”
A boat that was left along the shoreline after it was used recently to transport Cuban migrants from the communist island nation to America in Key West, Fla., on Jan. 6, 2023. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Florida’s state government is also set to deploy aircraft from the Florida National Guard, as well as support marine patrol from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, to “support water interdictions and ensure the safety of migrants attempting to reach Florida through the Florida Straits.”
DeSantis’s office called the influx of illegal immigrants “alarming.”
It noted that about 300 illegal aliens on Jan. 1 unlawfully entered Dry Tortugas National Park, which is about 70 miles west of Key West. On the same day, another 45 illegal aliens entered Key West—an island that’s part of the Florida Keys archipelago.
8,000 Illegal Aliens Encountered in Waters Off Florida
“This massive influx of illegal immigrants caused the park to close to ensure the safety of visitors and staff and to provide the space necessary to attend to the illegal immigrants,” stated the governor’s office.
“Since August 2022, federal, state and local law enforcement have encountered more than 8,000 migrants in waters off the coast of Florida.”
Illegal aliens from Cuba line up to board a bus to be driven to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection station as they are processed in Marathon, Fla., on Jan. 5, 2023. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“Florida has a long history of helping refugees, including Cubans and others fleeing communist regimes, find support after they arrive in the United States, however, this has always involved support from the Federal Government and a large, coordinated effort amongst state, federal and local governments,” DeSantis’s office said.
But it is “particularly burdensome” for Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, which has 194 deputies, to manage hundreds of illegal immigrants while also trying to ensure public safety, his office noted. It called the Biden administration’s overall response to the influx of illegal aliens into the United States “inept,” adding that the federal government has failed to “provide the resources necessary to respond to the current mass migration event.”
“Instead, the burden falls on local law enforcement, which puts Floridians at risk.”
Meanwhile, the arrivals have been continuing.
Walter N. Slosar, the chief patrol agent of the Miami Sector headquarters, wrote on Twitter late Jan. 6: “During the past 24 hours, Border Patrol agents & [law enforcement] partners responded to 5 migrant landings & encountered 90 Cuban migrants in the Florida Keys. The migrants arrived on rustic vessels & residents notified local authorities.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 18:30 - Saudi Arabia's PIF That Owns LIV Golf "Emerging" As "Possible Bidder" For WWE In Entertainment Expansion
Saudi Arabia’s PIF That Owns LIV Golf “Emerging” As “Possible Bidder” For WWE In Entertainment Expansion
World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (or WWE) shares jumped on Friday after the entertainment company announced founder Vince McMahon, who retired last year amid allegations of sexual misconduct, would return to the board as a possible sale is being explored. Then after markets closed on Friday evening, a report surfaced that the Saudi-backed sovereign fund behind the pro golf league LIV Golf could be a possible bidder for WWE if it decides to sell.
Michael McCarthy and A.J. Perez of “Front Office Sports” wrote, “Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is emerging as a possible bidder for WWE if the promotion puts itself up for sale. “
PIF, who owns LIV Golf — appears to have expanding interests in sports and entertainment. LightShed Partners analyst Brandon Ross told Front Office Sports:
“In the same way they did LIV, there’s an unlimited faucet of dollars there.
“The Saudis are already a decent part of the profitability of the company just on those two [Saudi-based WWE] events alone. They’re trying to be relevant in the entertainment world.”
Last month, WSJ reported McMahon “told people that he intends to make a comeback at WWE,” and on Friday, it appears he has done just that, with the return to the board and finding a buyer for the company.
Back to WWE and Saudi Arabia, Front Office Sports said the two have a “deep history” of holding events in the Middle Eastern country. WWE recently signed a deal to hold two events annually in the Kingdom through this decade.
WWE shares closed up 17% to $84.27 on Friday after the news of McMahon returning to the board.
We pointed out that WWE’s equity float as a percentage of short interest is about 20% — as the news of McMahon, possible sale, and rumor of interested PIF bidder sparked a squeeze.
If Front Office Sports is correct, it appears the Saudis are preparing to expand their reach over several forms of entertainment, from golf to wrestling — and the big question: What’s next?.. XFL?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 18:00 - "We Don't Do This": Adam Schiff & The Underbelly Of American Censorship
“We Don’t Do This”: Adam Schiff & The Underbelly Of American Censorship
Below is my column in the Hill on the recent disclosure of efforts by Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.) to pressure Twitter to censor critics, including a columnist. This effort occurred shortly after Schiff’s office objected to one of my columns accusing him of pressuring social media companies to censor those with opposing views. While publicly denying that he supports censorship, Schiff was secretly pressuring Twitter to censor an array of critics.
Here is the column:
“We don’t do this.”
That response from Twitter to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is a singular indictment, coming at the height of Twitter’s censorship operations. Apparently, there were some things that even Twitter’s censors refused to do.
One of those things was silencing critics of Schiff and his House committee.
In the latest tranche of “Twitter Files,” journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter balked at Schiff’s demand that Twitter suspend an array of posters or label their content as “misinformation” and “reduce the visibility” of them. Among those who Schiff secretly tried to censor was New York Post columnist Paul Sperry.
Sperry drew Schiff’s ire by writing about a conversation allegedly overheard by one of his sources. Sperry’s article, which appeared in RealClearInvestigations, cited two sources as overhearing two White House staffers discussing how to remove newly-elected President Trump from office. The article raised the possibility of bias on the part of an alleged key player in launching the first Trump impeachment, CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella. The sources reportedly said that Ciaramella was in a conversation with Sean Misko, a holdover from the Obama administration who later joined Schiff’s staff. The conversation — in Sperry’s words — showed that “just days after [Trump] was sworn in they were already trying to get rid of him.”
Rather than simply refute the allegation, Schiff wanted Sperry and other critics silenced. His office reportedly laid out steps to cleanse Twitter of their criticism, including an instruction to “remove any and all content about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff from its service — to include quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content.”
The date of Schiff’s non-public letter in November 2020 is notable: Earlier that year, I wrote a column for The Hill criticizing Schiff for pushing for censorship of misinformation in a letter that he sent to social media companies. His office promptly objected to the very suggestion that Schiff supported censorship.
We now know Schiff was actively seeking to censor specific critics on social media. These likely were viewed as more than “requests” since Schiff was sending public letters threatening possible legislative action against these same companies. He wanted his critics silenced on social media. After all, criticizing his investigations or staff must, by definition, be misinformation — right?
His office seems to have indicated they knew Twitter was using shadow-banning or other techniques to suppress certain disfavored writers. In the letter, his staff asked Twitter to “label and reduce the visibility of any content.”
Twitter, however, drew the line with Schiff; one of its employees simply wrote, “no, this isn’t feasible/we don’t do this.”
The “this” referred to in this case was raw political censorship. And even a company that maintained one of the largest censorship programs in history could not bring itself to do what Schiff was demanding — but the demand itself is telling.
Not only does it show how dishonest some politicians have been in denying censorship while secretly demanding it, it also shows the insatiable appetite created by censorship. The article in question, written by Sperry, is a good example. Sperry has denied ever supporting QAnon conspiracy theories, as Schiff’s office charged. Yet even if Sperry’s account about Schiff’s staffer was wildly untrue, that should make it easier to rebut publicly.
The move by Schiff to ban Sperry and others on Twitter — and to remove content — is highly ironic. Schiff has been criticized repeatedly for promoting “misinformation” and for relying on unidentified “sources” for his claims of Trump’s criminality. For example, Schiff pushed the false claim that the infamous Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation; he also was criticized for pushing false narratives of Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election.
Nevertheless, I would equally oppose any effort to ban Schiff from social media, although that is hardly likely given the demonstrated political bias of past censorship efforts.
As for Sperry, he was later permanently suspended by Twitter, which I also criticized.
Schiff is unlikely to be deterred by the release of these communications. He recently sent a letter to Facebook, warning it not to relax its censorship efforts. His letter, written with Reps. André Carson (D-Ind.), Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), reminded Facebook that some lawmakers are watching the company “as part of our ongoing oversight efforts” — and suggested they may be forced to exercise that oversight into any move by Facebook to “alter or rollback certain misinformation policies.”
Schiff’s actions embody the slippery slope of censorship. By labeling his critics as QAnon supporters or purveyors of “misinformation,” he sought to have allies in social media “disappear” critics like Sperry — yet he found that even those allies could not stomach his demands. Given Twitter’s censorship of even satirical sites, it was akin to being turned down by a Kanye West podcast as being too extreme.
With the disclosure of apparent FBI involvement in Twitter’s censorship program, the release of the Schiff files is another rare insight into how government officials attempted to enlist social media companies for censorship by surrogate or proxy. That is precisely why many in the media, political and business establishments have mobilized against Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter who has released these compromising files.
In a recent tweet, Schiff chastised Musk and demanded more answers from the Twitter CEO. While insisting that “I don’t support censorship,” Schiff asked Musk if he would “commit to providing the public with actual answers and data, not just tweets?” Well, Musk just did precisely that.
The “actual answer” is that Schiff has long sought to silence his critics, and Musk has exposed the underbelly of censorship — which is where we found Adam Schiff.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 17:30 - Billionaire Jack Ma Cedes Control Of Fintech Giant Ant Group
Billionaire Jack Ma Cedes Control Of Fintech Giant Ant Group
A little over two years after China launched its billionaire “re-education” campaign by unexpectedly suspending the IPO of one of China’s most influential fintech companies, Ant Financial, in November 2020, a move aimed at humbling (if not crushing) China’s then-richest man Jack Ma, the campaign has come full circle on Saturday when Ant announced Jack Ma was giving up controlling rights of the fintech giant as the billionaire further retreats from his online empire following China’s unprecedented tech crackdown.
Ant Group said in an announcement on Saturday that Ma would no longer be the “control person” who holds 34 percent of the company’s shares. Instead, he would be one of 10 major shareholders. The move would “further enhance the stability of our corporate structure and sustainability of our long-term development,” according to the statement.
The announcement, which described the move as part of a “corporate governance optimization” plan, gave no details about when the changes would be finalized, and noted that they would not affect the company’s day-to-day operations. Under Ant Group’s current governance structure, Ma does not have a management role.
The company is offering 10 individuals, including the founder, management and staff, voting rights independently, effectively removing Ma’s control of Ant, according to an announcement on Saturday. The adjustment, however, will not change economic interests of any shareholders and Ma will still hold voting rights and economic interests in the company following the change. In a filing in July, affiliate Alibaba Group Holding reiterated that Ma “intends to reduce and thereafter limit his direct and indirect economic interest in Ant Group over time” to a percentage that doesn’t exceed 8.8%. Ma will have about 6.2% of the voting rights after the adjustment, Bloomberg calculated.
Ma’s retreat from the company he founded comes after the Chinese Communist Party waged an unprecedented crackdown on Big Tech and some of China’s richest oligarchs. Beijing had made Ma’s Ant Group and its sister company, e-commerce giant Alibaba, early targets in the campaign to curb the power of internet giants. After Beijing forced Ant Group to call off what would have been a blockbuster initial public offering in 2020 and later fined Alibaba a hefty $2.8 billion for abusing its dominance, Jack Ma effectively disappeared from public view and was last seen living in Japan. Last year, Ant Group said it would undertake a major government-ordered overhaul of its business to address regulators’ concerns about unfair competition and the amount of data it collects on users.
Meanwhile, on Friday the Jay Fai restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand posted a picture of Ma on Instagram, where he appears to have just visited the restaurant. “Incredibly humble, we are honored to welcome you and your family to Jay Fai’s,” the caption on the post reads. According to Reuters, Ma was at the restaurant with Soopakij Chearavanont, the chair of the Charoen Pokphand Group
According to Bloomberg, the change of control could mean that Ant will have to wait longer for a much anticipated resumption of its initial public offering. Companies can’t list domestically on the country’s so-called A-share market if they have had a controller change in the past three years — or in the past two years, if listing on Shanghai’s STAR market. For Hong Kong’s stock exchange, this waiting period is one year.
Ant’s consumer lending affiliate recently received regulatory approval for a capital injection of 10.5 billion yuan ($1.5 billion), signaling progress in its restructuring and removing a hurdle as it seeks to obtain a financial holding license. The company could issue about 400 billion yuan to 500 billion yuan of loans after the changes, based on Bloomberg calculations.
While Ma was once hailed in China as a model of success, but he faced increasing trouble with the Chinese government, especially after he criticized the nation’s banking regulators in late 2019. As the NYT notes, under Xi Jinping, Beijing had sought to exert greater state control over the economy in recent years, including by reining in the influence of tycoons who amassed enormous wealth but were seen to overstep their bounds.
The Chinese government’s multi-year crackdown has reined in breakneck growth for the entire internet sector, and left global investors feeling the shockwaves. It’s changed the playbook for the nation’s tech champions who once prioritized growth at all costs, introducing a new paradigm for the country’s private sector.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 17:00 - 'A Wonderful Christmas Present': Zelensky Hails Single Biggest US Arms Package At One Time
‘A Wonderful Christmas Present’: Zelensky Hails Single Biggest US Arms Package At One Time
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
The US is going to send Ukraine Bradley Fighting Vehicles for the first time in a new weapons package worth nearly $3 billion, US officials told The Associated Press late this week.
The $2.85 billion aid package was formally announced on Friday, and marks the single largest arms package for Ukraine the US has pledged at one time. The package will include 50 Bradleys, which are designed to transport infantry troops with armored protection that are equipped with a 25 mm gun.
Bradley Fighting Vehicle, US Army The White House confirmed the US will be providing Ukraine with Bradleys in a statement on a phone call between President Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The statement said that Berlin will be supplying Kyiv with a similar piece of equipment, the German-made Marder Infantry Fighting Vehicles.
The announcement came the day after France said it would be giving Ukraine AMX-10 RC armored combat vehicles, which are similar to the Bradleys but have a bigger gun and are considered “light tanks.” A French official said it was the “first time that Western-made armored vehicles are being delivered in support of the Ukrainian army.”
While providing Ukraine with Western-made armored vehicles is a significant escalation in aid, it falls short of the heavier tanks Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been seeking, such as US-made Abrams and German-made Leopards.
Zelensky was denied Abrams when he visited Washington DC, and a US official told The Washington Post the Biden administration is still ruling it out.
Zelensky described the new package as a “Christmas Present” in a Friday tweet…
The US officials speaking to AP said the $2.85 billion weapons package will also include HUMVEES, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, and a large number of missiles and other ammunition. The weapons will be paid for by funds already authorized by Congress to spend on the war, which at this point totals about $112 billion.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 16:30 - Ontario Governing Body For Psychologists Demands Re-Education For Jordan Peterson
Ontario Governing Body For Psychologists Demands Re-Education For Jordan Peterson
Outspoken psychologist and former tenured professor Jordan Peterson has come under relentless attack ever since he criticized the ‘Act To Amend The Canadian Human Rights Act And The Criminal Code’ back in 2016. The act is a framework which makes scrutiny of gender identity ideology or transsexualism into potential discrimination under Canadian law. Peterson posted a series of videos which outline why critique of gender identity groups is rooted in science and should be protected as free speech.
After several years of harassment from leftist activists and politically motivated bureaucrats, Peterson is once again being threatened. This time, with the loss of his license to practice psychology unless he submits to a series of ‘re-education’ programs mandated by the College of Pyschologists of Ontario.
The CPO is a quasi-governmental body (a mostly unaccountable bureaucracy) acting in accordance with the Psychology Act, 1991 the Health Professions Procedural Code, the Regulated Health Professions Act, 1991 and the regulations and by-laws of the college. The CPO’s sudden aggressive effort to silence Jordan Peterson appears to have been triggered by his reinstatement on Twitter in November.
He was originally banned from the site for referring to actress Elliot Page by her original name (Ellen Page) and using the word “her” as a descriptive, which is a scientific fact, but also a violation of the leftist site’s TOS before Elon Musk’s takeover.
The psychologist is also known for his criticisms of Canada’s draconian covid lockdowns and mandates.
With Peterson once again having access to a wider audience on social media, the CPO has ordered him to complete a mandatory “Specified Continuing Education or Remedial Program” to “review, reflect on and ameliorate [his] professionalism in public statements,” according to a lengthy list of requirements from the college that Peterson shared on Twitter. He must meet with a psychologist for coaching classes, which he must pay for, until a final report is issued by the coach that shows their concerns have been “properly ameliorated.”
The CPO argues that Peterson’s social media interactions constitute a violation of the organization’s standards for professional interactions with the public. In other words, the CPO essentially believes it has the right to control the speech of member psychologists and force them to adhere to a predetermined narrative they find acceptable when engaging with the public.
It should be noted that there are no publicized instances of psychologists being threatened with a loss of their license for espousing leftist viewpoints on social media. The measures appear to be strictly designed to punish more conservative leaning professionals.
Peterson says he will not comply with the CPO programs because his comments have nothing to do with his role as a psychologist. “Every single accusation is not only independent of my clinical practice, but explicitly political — and not only that: unidirectionally explicitly political,” Peterson writes.
Canada’s spiral into authoritarianism is widely publicized and the nation’s waning respect for free speech accelerated during the pandemic lockdowns. While the US is not far behind, Americans at least have free speech rights codified in a constitution that is designed to regulate what the government can and cannot do. In Canada, such a thing does not exist. Canadian rights are treated more like privileges that the government is allowed to legally erase at a moment’s notice.
CPO actions not only indicate hostility towards free speech, but also hint at an underlying fear – Members of the professional class are often the most indoctrinated of all people, and for one of them to break from the paradigm and speak against the establishment is considered the utmost betrayal.
Peterson is being targeted with a special brand of bureaucratic attention because the establishment uses the professional class to convince and control the general public. The claim that the “experts have spoken” is the ultimate tool for manipulating a majority of the population, and when some of those experts contradict the narrative, the powers-that-be take particular notice.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 16:00 - The CDC Puts Itself In Charge Of Language Too
The CDC Puts Itself In Charge Of Language Too
Authored by Robert Malone via The Brownstone Institute,
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has come out with a guide for how we are all to speak and write. This can be found on the website titled, “Preferred Terms for Select Population Groups & Communities.” It is clear that this list is being read and distributed broadly – from medical institutions, hospitals, scientific communications, doctor’s offices, schools and universities, as well as other US Government agencies and institutes.
The CDC is the arm of the US Government tasked with disease control and prevention. It is not tasked with correcting wrong-speak.
Now, how exactly this guide fits in with the CDC mission is beyond me. Here is what the CDC lists as their mission on their website:
Do you read anything in the above that suggests that political correctness or correcting wrong-speak is part of the CDC mission? When did the CDC decide that they should take on the progressive left’s cause to reshape American language (oh, I used that “forbidden” word -”America”, which according to Stanford University- that is now verbotten).
I dunno – Maybe there should be some sort of jail penalty for those of us who just can’t get it right. Or maybe, the government should just revoke social media “privileges” or stop people from being allowed to make payments via internet banking services, such as PayPal has done on occasion.
According to the website, the CDC has put together this very extensive “list” to protect people from “stigmatizing language.”
The problem is that the CDC evidently believes that there should be no social stigmas. That if one commits a crime, is in prison, is an addict, or is involved in behaviors that most find offensive or are illegal, it is not ok to use a term to directly describe that activity because societal judgment might hurt someone’s feelings.
So, the CDC is apparently afraid that we might hurt people’s feelings by using unapproved terms, and that this would lead to a threat to public health. This comes down to a new, popular opinion among mental health care professionals that “Harmful language ultimately increases stigma on the individual, which reduces one’s belief in the ability to change as well as their motivation to ask for help.” I went to Pubmed and tried to find data to support this hypothesis.
A quick review of Pubmed shows that it has over 1,300 publications with the keywords “stigmatizing language.” What I found was a lot of first-person stories and case studies about how healthcare professionals have either witnessed or been harmed by hurtful words. But what I didn’t find was clear evidence that calling someone an addict, prisoner, smoker, handicapped, underserved, rural and a vast myriad group of words that are now labelled as being inappropriate by the CDC actually do harm. Now, there must be studies out there? But I couldn’t actually find any, so I couldn’t evaluate the quality of the research. My basic search does imply that whatever evidence is out there isn’t very strong or it would be cited by a multitude of studies.
The article “Words Matter: Addiction and Stigmatizing Language: When it comes to addiction, stigmatizing language shouldn’t be the norm.” is a fairly typical example of the articles and studies I found. This article is in a large, mainstream magazine (Psychology Today) and is all about the feelings and beliefs of health care professionals about the harms of stigmatizing language. Yet, not a single study is cited in the article.
So, let’s take a closer look at this list of words from the CDC website and compare them to real-life examples at the CDC. The question being: does the CDC use the forbidden words on their own list? The answer is an unequivocal ”yes,” they do and they use them a lot. Another case of “good for thee but not for me.” An internet search shows that their website and spokespeople have no issues using these words themselves. Seems to me what is good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Some examples.
According to the CDC, we are no longer to use the word “smoker,” as it might offend those who smoke.
Yet, here are images from the CDC website – using the word “smoker.” In fact, they even have a registered trademark for the phase:
So, please folks – don’t do like the CDC. The proper term is “people who smoke.” We wouldn’t want to offend smokers…
The CDC’s attempt to be non-judgmental for people who are addicted is also interesting. As they now categorize addiction as a disease, this means any reference to people who are addicted being called “addicted” is wrong-speak. For instance, instead of “relapse,” we should say “people who return to use.” Because relapse implies that the behavior is stigmatizing and we shouldn’t stigmatize disease.
But the CDC conflates the fact that addiction and addicts hurts society, families and individuals. Being an addict is not healthy and is harmful.
The CDC has even developed a special abbreviation for injectable drug addicts (I mean people who inject drugs):
As a society, as individuals, we have every right to judge those who hurt families, children, communities and themselves. Addicts hurt themselves and others. Let’s not sugarcoat it. Yes, there are addicts who are mentally ill, but it is often a self-inflicted wound.
Many treatment programs and practitioners do insist that the addict confront themselves and the damages done by their addiction. This is not a malicious or bad thing. Not “sugarcoating” addiction is often part of the treatment and healing process.
“Person who relapsed” versus “person who returned to use.” Why? Because we wouldn’t want to put any judgement on addiction? Where does their idiocy end?
Then of course, there are all those tried and true public health phrases that aren’t supposed to be used anymore.
Except the CDC uses these terms also. From the CDC website:
Another group of words what are now wrong-speak is how people who are incarcerated are to be discussed:
From the CDC Website:
The CDC believes that people who are incarcerated will be offended, and they might have their mental health status endangered by using terms such as inmate, prisoner, convict, ex-convict, criminal, parolee or detainee.
Because we wouldn’t want someone detained or convicted of a murder to have their feelings hurt, would we?
So, calling Bryan Kohberger a “detainee” for the murder of four innocent college students would be considered a wrong-speak crime. Good to know.
There are many words that are truly offensive. We all know of them. None of those words made it to the CDC list.
Please, go to the CDC website and read for yourself. Their list of unapproved versus approved words and phrases is quite remarkable.
Where does this end?
* * *
Reposted from the author’s Substack
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 15:30 - Russia To Mobilize An Extra 500,000 Conscripts This Month, Ukraine Says
Russia To Mobilize An Extra 500,000 Conscripts This Month, Ukraine Says
Ukrainian officials are in the past days growing more specific regarding their assertions that the Russian government is planning a major new mobilization order, complete with martial law and a closure of the borders for all men of fighting age.
Kiev is claiming that Moscow is preparing to call up an additional 500,000 conscripts in January, following the ‘partial mobilization’ which included 300,000 extra troops in October, which proved hugely controversial inside Russia as tens of thousands reportedly fled military service.
Getty Images Vadym Skibitsky, Ukraine’s deputy military intelligence chief, was cited in The Guardian as saying Ukraine expects the new mobilization to pour additional Russian manpower into Ukraine for a coming post-winter offensive, to ramp up in the spring or summer months.
The renewed fighting and troop influx is expected to be concentrated in the east and south, the Ukrainian official said.
Moscow meanwhile has responded to the reports by flatly denying it to be the case, with President Vladimir Putin having addressed the rumors last month, dismissing a new call-up as “pointless”. He cited that a mere half of those that were activated as part of the October mobilization are actually fighting in Ukraine.
This suggests Russia has been significantly holding back, or also could be slow-playing its operations for the duration of the winter, in preparation for a big offensive.
Ukraine is already using its own claims of the coming mass mobilization to push for more arms deliveries from the West, claiming Putin’s forces “will collapse” if the next major offensive is beaten back.
Ukraine’s military intel claim Russia will mobilise 500k men this Jan.
“If Russia loses this time around, then Putin will collapse,” describing the next 6 to 8 months as the last push
The 1st wave of 300k proved unpopular in Russia. W comments @RALee85https://t.co/2R1zWwjVOa
— Isobel Koshiw (@IKoshiw) January 6, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
So far the only sign that could lend credence to the Ukrainian predictions of “something big” coming are military activities in Belarus. The past week has seen more and more heavy Russian equipment pour into Belarus by train, amid ongoing joint Russian-Belarusian drills, and President Alexander Lukashenko making bolder symbolic moves in support of Putin’s operation in Ukraine.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 15:00 - A Potent Reminder Of The Need For American Space Independence
A Potent Reminder Of The Need For American Space Independence
Authored by Grant Anderson via RealClear Wire,
The International Space Station (ISS) has proven to be a great example of human technological achievement and has existed as a platform for global connection, diplomacy, peace and cooperation. It has played a valuable and noble role in supporting the peaceful scientific endeavors of multiple nations and communities for over two decades. But, as it continues into its final decade of life – NASA announced in January of 2022 that it plans to “de-orbit” the ISS in 2031 – it is definitely starting to show its limitations. All good things must come to an end, and in this regard, the ISS is no different than any other good thing.
More broadly, these limitations, and the looming expiration of the ISS generally, reinforce the need for continuing the important pursuit of American independence in space. Certainly, the ISS has supported numerous international missions over the past twenty years, where astronauts from all backgrounds have worked together to advance human activity in space.
That said, American access to the ISS has faced several complications over the years, a lesson that we should strive to heed moving forward. A few examples make the point. When the U.S. space shuttle program ended, America had to depend on the Russian Soyuz to travel to and return from the station – a situation that may have worked when relations between the U.S. and Russian Federation were amiable, but now problematic in the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine. In fact, early in the war on Ukraine, Russian authorities threateningly hinted that they could leave an American stranded on the ISS.
And as contemptible as Russia’s pressures have been, other incidents remind of the need to keep pressing toward the goal of independence in space. Most recently in December, a major coolant leak occurred on the Soyuz spacecraft docked at the ISS, a challenge that, while not immediately life-threatening to personnel onboard, poses new problems for return flights to Earth. The Soyuz spacecraft is on station standing by as a “lifeboat” in the event of an emergency where ISS inhabitants need to evacuate.
The cause of the leak remains unknown and investigations have yet to determine the origin of the malfunction. Thankfully, news reports on the leak and subsequent actions have indicated that both U.S. and Russia have been coordinating closely throughout the ordeal. However, the entire leak episode is another problematic example of American astronauts operating at the mercy of a foreign power’s capability, reliability and technology. It is all the more reason for why America can’t pull its foot off the gas in re-building our human spaceflight program, enhancing our space access platforms and capabilities, and ensuring that our own backup systems and assets are ready for any number of plausible contingency operations or needs.
It is a testament to the shared values, mission focus and professionalism of the world’s astronaut corps that even in the most trying of political times, those in the universe above can work together and not let events on Earth get in the way of work on the ISS. Unfortunately, what happens in orbit is often determined by events on the global surface, and with that sobering thought in mind, anyone on the ISS could be impacted by events far outside of their control. With the war in Ukraine continuing to grind away, and relations between Russia and the West strained by the day, these types of incidents should serve as both a blinking warning light and a motivating incentive for us to keep our eye on the ball with our own civil space program. The last thing we would ever want is Americans left stranded.
In times of strife, confusion, economic uncertainty and seemingly endless competing national priorities, the temptation to scale back our efforts in space can be alluring. We’ve seen the space program slashed before, most recently during the “great recession” of 2009-2011, when competing needs crowded out the argument to maintain a robust presence above the atmosphere. But the imperative for a committed and appropriately capitalized American space program now is strong and we need to stick to our goals. The world has changed, the competition is fierce, the technology is rapidly advancing, and our adversaries are working feverishly to establish their own space programs – often for purposes that run counter to the peaceful space ambitions of the past.
As we begin the New Year, our policies and budgets should continue to support the programs, capabilities and technological development that will allow us to keep moving toward our goals beyond Earth. At the same time, this recent leak aboard the Soyuz and wider related concerns about the reliability and dependability of Russia should only reinforce the need to swiftly establish and secure American independence in space.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/07/2023 – 14:30
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