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2020-


2020-06-30 b
What If They Declare a Pandemic and No One Cares?

US Interest In Coronavirus Waning

COVID-19 cases are reaching record levels yet again in the U.S., despite most developed countries around the world successfully flattening their curve and reopening without another major wave of infections. One of the big problems in the U.S., Statista's Willem Roper suggests based on recent data, may be a growing indifference amid a weariness of misinformation and a news cycle dominated by the virus.

In a new survey from the Pew Research Center, nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults in June say the outbreak has been exaggerated – an almost 10 percent increase since April. In terms of political party, respondents who identified as Republican or leaning Republican had the largest increase between April and June, going from 47 percent to 63 percent believing the outbreak has been exaggerated.

In March and April, Pew recorded that a majority of Americans were closely following updated news on COVID-19 and how it was spreading locally, nationally and globally. Since then, new surveys show Americans’ interest has quickly dissipated, going from 46 percent in May to just 39 percent of U.S. adults saying they’re closely following COVID-19 news in June.

Other data from this Pew survey show how misinformation is coursing through the country, with nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults saying they’re finding it hard to identify truth from fiction regarding COVID-19. A growing percentage of Americans are also paying more attention to the conspiracy that the coronavirus outbreak was planned by “powerful people.” (read more)

2020-06-30 a
The Cultural Revolution Intensifies

Think The "Cancel" Mobs Can't Get Any Worse? Think Again

America is in the midst of one of the great moral panics in our nation’s history. If we don’t stand up for our nation’s core values, the situation could get even worse – and soon. If you’ve spent any time on social media in the last three weeks, you’ve probably noticed the organized campaigns to get college and even high school students expelled or denied admission based on their political views. You’ve also seen gleeful mobs celebrating as Americans lose their jobs for running afoul of someone’s momentary political obsessions.

In every sector of American society, people are having their careers destroyed to the pitiless baying of the “woke” masses. It’s happening in business. CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman spent 20 years building the fitness brand into a multi-billion dollar company, only to be thrown out of the empire he built for declining to go along with the “racism is a public health crisis”  dogma.

It’s happening in journalism. New York Times editor James Bennet, a liberal, was fired for publishing an op-ed by a sitting Republican senator advocating for a military response to nationwide rioting -- a position the majority of Americans agreed with. The same fate befell Philadelphia Inquirer editor Stan Wischowski, who was terminated for approving an article that condemned looting and arson.

It’s happening in entertainment, in academia, and pretty much anywhere someone can be found who is not sufficiently supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement.

It’s even happening to people who didn’t do anything at all. An L.A. Galaxy soccer player was forced to resign because his wife tweeted that rioters should be shot. A lawyer in San Francisco was fired because his wife was rude to a man she thought was spray-painting BLM propaganda on a building that wasn’t his (it was). On Thursday, this Stasi-esque trend reached another level when a company called Equity Prime Mortgage fired the stepmother of the officer charged in the controversial shooting of drunk driver Rashad Brooks after he fought with and fired a taser at police. The stepmother was apparently fired for no reason other than family loyalty.

On Monday, the panic reached what one can only hope will be its peak when a San Diego Gas and Electric employee lost his job for “making a white supremacist hand gesture.” We’ve long since debunked the notion that the OK sign is somehow racist -- that was just a fiction perpetrated by internet trolls -- but in this case, this man lost his livelihood despite the fact he wasn’t even making an OK sign. He was apparently cracking his knuckles as he drove.

What America is going through right now is not merely another, more intense round of “cancel culture.” We’re now in the midst of a full-force, totalitarian remolding of our society, one that seeks to place the petty resentments of an outraged minority of leftist activists above everything else in American life. Because of their willingness to riot, loot, and assault anyone they perceive to be insufficiently sympathetic to their cause, leftists are able to bully ordinary people into submission. As a result, television shows such as “Cops” and “Live PD,” classic films such as “Gone With the Wind,” and iconic brands such as Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Buttersworth, and Uncle Ben’s rice are consigned to the “dustbin of history.”

I used to speak frequently to nervous conservatives who were convinced that if we only allowed the left to tear down Confederate war memorials, they would be satisfied. How quickly events have disproved that wishful thinking. From Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the western pioneers, activists are now coming after cartoon sports mascots and college fight songs. Everything -- from the core of our country’s history to the values and norms undergirding American culture -- must be uprooted to appease the mob.

They are tearing down dozens of statues and facing no consequences whatsoever for vandalizing our public spaces -- including memorials to our nation’s greatest heroes. When private citizens try to do the job the government won’t and protect our culture, our history, and our public property from destruction, local officials step in and remove the statues on behalf of the vandals, lest they injure themselves while imitating Iraqis celebrating the fall of Saddam Hussein.

These people are not seeking change at the margins. They are demanding a total cultural revolution, and cowardly public officials are giving it to them. If you look at this national outpouring of hatred and recrimination with horror verging on despair, I assure you that you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel exactly the same way. (read more)

2020-06-29 d
But Bibi Made Him Do It

Iran issues arrest warrant for Donald Trump over Qassem Suleimani killing
 
Leader of Quds force was killed by US in drone strike in Iraq on 3 January

Iran has issued an arrest warrant for Donald Trump and 35 others over the killing of top general Qassem Suleimani and has asked Interpol for help, a Tehran prosecutor, Ali Alqasimehr, has said.

The US killed Suleimani with a drone strike in Iraq on 3 January after it accused him of masterminding attacks by Iranian-aligned militias on American forces across the Middle East.

The move caused unease in Europe but the US claims that Suleimani’s death has weakened Iran’s grip on Iraq.

The US special envoy on Iran, Brian Hook, dismissed the warrant as a propaganda stunt that “nobody takes seriously”.

Interpol said it would not comply with the Iranian request, which was likely to be seen in the context of the growing tensions between Tehran and Washington over the future of the UN embargo on conventional arms sales to Iran. The embargo is due to expire in September unless the security council votes against. (read more)

2020-06-29 c
Airbnb Is Grounded

‘Travel will never, ever go back to the way it was,’ Airbnb CEO says

Brian Chesky predicts less flying, more road trips for years to come

“Travel will never, ever go back to the way it was pre-COVID.”

That’s the grim view of Airbnb Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Brian Chesky, in an interview published Sunday by Axios.

“I will go on the record to say that travel will never, ever go back to the way it was pre-COVID. It just won’t,” Chesky told Axios. “There are sometimes months when decades of transformation happen.”

Chesky predicted that vacationers will stay closer to home in the future, largely limiting their travel to places within driving distance, with national parks becoming even more popular destinations.

“I think you’re going to start to see travel becoming more intimate, more local, to smaller communities,” he said, citing Airbnb data that shows travel within countries is recovering to normal levels. But its international business is still being hit hard. “People are not getting on airplanes, they’re not crossing borders, they’re not meaningfully traveling to cities, they’re not traveling for business.”

“People will, one day, get back on planes,” Chesky told Axios. “But one of the things that I do think is a fairly permanent shift is ... a redistribution of where travelers go.”

Chesky said the changes hurt convention business for years to come. “I think a lot of people are going to realize they don’t need to get on an airplane to have a meeting,” he said. (read more)

2020-06-29 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

Fracking pioneer Chesapeake Energy files for bankruptcy

Company has fallen from heights in recent years, last straw was over-reaction to pandemic of lies driving drop in demand

Chesapeake Energy Corp. said Sunday that it had filed for bankruptcy protection as an oil- and gas-price rout stoked by the over-blown panic over the synthetic corona cold-virus pandemic of lies proved to be the final blow for a shale-drilling pioneer long hamstrung by debt and an unsustainable business model based on low energy return on investment.

Co-founded in 1989 by the late wildcatter Aubrey McClendon, Chesapeake was early to recognize that George Mitchell's horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing could unlock vast troves of natural gas, a trend that led to a rebirth of American fossil-fuel output and eventually made the U.S. the top oil producer in the world for a brief, shining moment.

By the end of 2008, the Oklahoma City-based company had drilling rights to nearly 15 million acres, according to a securities filing, an empire roughly the size of West Virginia. That vast footprint once helped Chesapeake earn the dubious title of second-largest U.S. gas producer.
 
But Chesapeake’s breakneck growth left it highly leveraged, and it was far slower than many of its peers to pivot to tapping deep shale formations for oil, which turned out to be somewhat more lucrative than gas. The result was a painful fall in recent years as Chesapeake shrank, selling assets to pare a mountain of debt before winding up in bankruptcy court.

Chesapeake is one of many debt-laden U.S. oil and gas producers now facing a reckoning as a planned over-reaction to the synthetic corona cold-virus induces an economic slowdown, sapping demand for fossil fuels.

2020-06-29 a

“Markets aren’t perfect, they’re not even very good, they’re just better than anything else.”
Peter Drucker

2020
-06-28 e
"From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!"

Beware the Jabberwocky Second Wave

What about the United States? The bedwetters’ line is that states that re-opened early have seen a “surge” in infections, although that’s not actually true since several states that re-opened early – such as Ohio – have not seen un uptick in infections and infections have continued to decline in those seven states that never shut down at all. Another difficulty with this hypothesis is that infections are rising in 22 states, not all of which re-opened early.
...
However, there’s no denying that in some southern and southwestern states, case counts have been climbing in a way that can’t be fully explained by increased testing. Last Friday, for instance, 25% of Arizona tests were positive, up from around eight percent on Memorial Day, when the rise began. Florida had a record single-day case count last Friday, and about a quarter of Alabama’s total cases have come in the last week. Scary stuff, right?

No, not really, because there’s been no corresponding rise in deaths. The daily death tolls are continuing to drop in Texas, Florida and Arizona, as they are for the whole of the United States, as this graph from the New York Times makes clear:
...
And before you say, “But what about the lag time between infection and death?” let me point out that cases started to rise in southern and southwestern states five weeks ago, so if the rise in cases was going to cause a proportionate rise in deaths we’d have seen that by now. Why haven’t we? Because most of the people getting infected since those states re-opened have been young people. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis says the median age for new cases in his state is 37, while in Texas Greg Abbott says a majority of new cases are from people under 30. And as we know, the infection fatality rate for people under 50 with no underlying health conditions is close to zero. A recent seroprevalence study in Sweden found that among 36,000 sero positive cases, only two deaths were detected, giving an IFR of 0.005%.

And in the extremely unlikely event of an infected young person requiring critical care, we’ve got a lot better at treating the disease – Dexamethasone really does work.

Another complicating factor is that Arizona’s rising death toll is partly due to deaths that occurred much earlier only just being reported. On Wednesday, for instance, it reported 79 “new” deaths, but they weren’t really new at all, according to azcentral.

The 79 deaths, while included in Wednesday’s report, did not all occur in the past day. According to the health department, 53 of those deaths were from “death certificate matching” for deaths that occurred previously and the department is just identifying as Covid-related. Arizona’s death total now is 1,463.

1,463, incidentally, is low. Worth remembering that over 17,000 people have died in New York.

Meanwhile, across America as a whole daily deaths are 90% lower than they were at their peak  (read more)

2020-06-28 d
A New Cultural Revolution

The Great Awokening and the Second American Revolution

Statues toppled, buildings renamed, curricula “decolonized,” staff fired. The protests following George Floyd’s killing have emboldened cultural revolutionaries in America and Europe. The iconoclasts are changing minds, and could be in a position to enact a root-and-branch reconstruction of America into something completely unrecognizable to its present-day inhabitants. Imagine a country whose collective memory has been upended, with a new constitution, anthem, and flag, its name changed from the sinful “America” to something less tainted. Far-fetched? Not according to data I have collected on what liberal white Americans actually believe. Only a renewed American cultural nationalism can resist it.

According to multiple surveys, the effect of the riots which occurred at around the same time as the BLM protests is quite different from what occurred with previous waves of rioting. First, many of the participants in the major riots were white. Second, there has been no clear call for Nixonian law and order following the riots, but rather greater public acceptance of the BLM movement’s unsupported claims that contemporary structural racism explains why police shoot unarmed black men or violent crime plagues inner-city neighbourhoods. While 57 percent of Americans disagree with the protestors’ radical slogan, “defund the police,” an astounding 29 percent support it. This is so despite the deaths of a number of black people during the riots and the fact the riots have coincided with a steep rise in the number of black homicide deaths in inner-city neighbourhoods due to a “Ferguson Effect” of police reducing their presence in these areas.

Meanwhile Trump is polling well down after the riots, having dropped 2.5 points to Biden since Floyd’s death on May 25th. Trump’s repeated mistruths, unstatesmanlike behaviour and nepotistic employment of family members may have eroded the truth-based environment to such an extent that evidence-free shifts in issue position become increasingly easy. His sinking popularity tarnishes issue positions associated with his presidency, even when they are backed by the weight of evidence—as with the idea that indiscriminate police brutality rather than racism accounts for violence against unarmed blacks. The power of corporate and celebrity endorsement, magnified by “trendy” social media herding, has resulted in unusually high approval among whites for the activities of the rioters. This is an important departure from what occurred during, for example, the late 60s race riots, 1992 Rodney King riots, or even the 2014 Ferguson riots.

Statues, memory, and the social construction of harm

Progressive scholars are fond of emphasizing the socially-constructed nature of perceived reality. This is overstated, of course. Human minds are not blank slates. Gender can’t be readily reconstructed to make males dominate the caring professions and females the majority of ditch-diggers. Similarly, Americans can’t easily be convinced they are actually Russians.

But you don’t need to follow social construction to its postmodernist extreme to acknowledge that social construction does play a role in how we perceive the world. To a partial extent, there really is a “social construction of reality,” as Berger and Luckmann put it. Psychological research, for example, shows that flagging certain issues repeatedly, or framing them in particular ways, affects attitudes and feelings.

What society chooses to focus on and care about, the emotions it feels, the objects it sacralizes, the boundaries between groups, vary a lot across time and place. For instance, choosing not to shake someone’s hand is offensive in Western culture, but not in Japan, where a bow is the common greeting. Leaving food on one’s plate is treated as an insult in Japan, but not in the West. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning show that in Western elite culture in 1800, as in violent inner-city neighborhoods today, insults were treated as violence, which can only be avenged by physical violence. But for most of us, who haven’t been inculcated into a touchy honor culture, verbal slights don’t carry the same emotional punch. We either ignore them or respond with a counter-insult. As the sociology of emotions tells us, the way societies and individuals emotionally respond to words is, to an important degree, socially constructed.

Let’s apply this lens to the sacred values of left-modernist ideology. Is a white woman wearing a Chinese prom dress complimenting or insulting the Chinese? Most Chinese would probably take the former view, but a left-modernist ideological entrepreneur can spin this as cultural appropriation and white colonialism. In effect, the left-modernist socially constructs “harm” and “racism,” spinning something positive into a negative and seeking to sensitize Chinese people to the “fact” that they should feel insulted rather than proud. Those inducted into the religion of antiracism get the message and signal their virtue online, helping to propel people toward the new norm. If this were to catch on in China, the emotions Chinese feel when seeing the image of a white woman in a cheongsam would flip from pride to anger.

The same sensitizing dynamic works for history, literature, film, statues, and even words. Like Red Guards with a hair-trigger sensitivity for sniffing out the bourgeois, today’s left-modernist offense archaeologists outdo each other in trying to reframe the world as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and so on. Turning the principle of charity on its head, they insist on the most suspicious interpretation of a person’s motives when the subject matter is associated with their canonical totems of race, gender, sexuality. A Hispanic man flicking his fingers outside his truck window gets fired because this was photographed, tweeted, and spun as the “OK” white power sign. The result is an atmosphere where inter-personal trust is as low as humanly possible while discursive power flows to the accuser. The new cultural revolutionaries have constructed our emotional and conceptual reality.

Once “harm”, “racism” and other concepts become unmoored from reality, more of the world is remade. Statues which were long ignored become offensive. Complex historical figures like Jefferson or Churchill, who embodied the prejudices of their time, or elites like Columbus or Ulysses Grant, whose achievements had both positive and negative effects, are viewed through a totalizing Maoist lens which collapses shades of grey into black and white. If a historic personage transgressed left-modernist sacred values, their positives instantly evaporate and activists myopically focus on their transgressions. (read more)

2020
-06-28 c
The Russo-phobes Last Stand (We hope.)

All Players In The NYT 'Russian Bounties' In Afghanistan Story Have Slammed It As Fake News

Some are calling it a last ditch attempt to keep Russiagate alive ahead of November. The New York Times on Friday said Russian intelligence officers have been offering Taliban militants cash rewards to kill American and British soldiers.

In the past two days the claims by the usual anonymous US intelligence officials have crisscrossed the mainstream media, with more "confirmation" offered by... more anonymous intelligence officials.

Of course Russia promptly denied it, but more importantly the White House vehemently rejected the report as "fake news" with the president and his aides saying they've never seen such intelligence crossing the president's desk.

Certainly something of this level, which hearkens back to the original 1980's proxy war between Moscow and Washington centered in Afghanistan (where it should be noted roles were reversed: the CIA spent years funding and weaponizing the jihadists, many of which would go on to make up today's Taliban), would have been a top national security priority, something presumably impossible to keep from the commander-in-chief.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Saturday in response to the Times story that neither Trump nor Vice President Mike Pence was ever briefed on such a brazen Russian intelligence plan to hand out bounties.

"This does not speak to the merit of the alleged intelligence but to the inaccuracy of The New York Times story erroneously suggesting that President Trump was briefed on this matter," she said. (read more)

2020-06-28 b
La Dolce Vita

Corona-Depression: Southern Europe Will Never Recover

Bad news for southern Europe. It looks like coronavirus will further entrench the European Union’s long-standing disparities between north and south.

According to the European Commission’s estimates, the economies of Italy, Spain, and Greece will all shrink over 9%. By comparison, the EU average is 7.4%. France will shrink 8.2%, while most Nordic/Germanic countries will shrink less than 6.5% (that’s Germany, the Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Finland).

EU unemployment expected to rise from 6.7% to to 9% this year. Unemployment will rise to 9.7% in Portugal, 10.1% in France, 11.8% in Italy, 18.9% in Spain, and 19.9% in Greece. Germany will have 4%.

Deficits are going through the roof, from 0.6% of GDP in 2019 to 8.3% this year. Debt will rise to over102% of GDP, with huge disparities: over 115% for Spain and France, and almost 160% for Italy and 200% for Greece. By contrast, Germany’s debt will rise to 75% of GDP and Great Britain’s to 102%.

In terms of jobs and debt reduction, all of the hard-won gains of the past five years or so have been annihilated. (read more)

2020-06-28 a
Of course there is fraud with mail-in ballots.

1 In 5 Mail-In Ballots Rejected As 4 Charged With Fraud In New Jersey Election

Following accusations of widespread fraud, voter intimidation, and ballot theft in the May 12 municipal elections in Paterson, N.J., state Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal announced Thursday he is charging four men with voter fraud – including the vice president of the City Council and a candidate for that body.

“Today’s charges send a clear message: if you try to tamper with an election in New Jersey, we will find you and we will hold you accountable,” Grewal said in a statement.

“We will not allow a small number of criminals to undermine the public’s confidence in our democratic process.”

Paterson City Councilman Michael Jackson, 48, Councilman-Elect Alex Mendez, 45, Shelim Khalique, 51, and Abu Razyen, 21, were charged with crimes including fraud in casting mail-in votes, unauthorized possession of ballots, and tampering with public records.

Paterson’s City Council members aren’t officially affiliated with a political party. (read more)

2020
-06-27 d
Diversity Includes Diversity of Opinion

Pushing Back on Cancel Culture

Expanding civil rights protections to speech could limit the abuses of wokeness

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, the American Left has begun assaulting statues, parks, and public buildings. Protesters in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park pulled down statues of slaveowner Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star Spangled Banner,” and Saint Junipero Serra, the Spanish priest beatified by the Vatican for building the missions that spread Christianity in the New Spain territory of California. They attacked the monument to Ulysses S. Grant, the general responsible for winning the Civil War and the president who protected freed slaves under Reconstruction. Also vandalized in San Francisco, for obscure reasons, was a bust of the great Spanish novelist Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, who had himself been held as a slave: the protesters wrote “bastard” on it. Christopher Columbus statues in Boston, Virginia, and Minnesota have been damaged. In Wisconsin, protesters defaced a statue of Union Army Colonel Hans Christian Heg, an ardent abolitionist. New York City will remove a statue of Theodore Roosevelt from the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History Museum for its colonialist and martial imagery. Protesters are now promising to pull down a statue of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, from Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C., after almost succeeding in destroying the monument to Andrew Jackson directly across from the White House. The campaign has stretched beyond American shores: in Britain, memorials to Winston Churchill, Cecil Rhodes, and even Mahatma Gandhi have been threatened with destruction.

These acts are more than just the deliberate erasure of history on a mass scale or gross vandalism. They are part of the “cancel culture” that first emerged on our nation’s campuses years ago but has metastasized in the last decade into the broader culture. Like all leftist revolutions, the movement has turned in on itself by seeking to purge colleges and universities of ideologically impure scholars and teachers. If successful, these efforts will spread rapidly, as they perhaps already have, to our workplaces and civic spaces.

This deteriorating environment may justify calling on Congress to protect explicitly every person’s right to hold his own beliefs, on a par with his right to be free from discrimination based on race, gender, or religion. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, holding that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects against employment discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender identity, may point the way to a further, and necessary, extension of the Act that would protect political speech and activity.

Cases of ideological discrimination on our nation’s campuses continue to emerge. Cornell faculty and alumni are waging a campaign to fire law professor William Jacobson, founder of the Legal Insurrection blog, because he questioned the motives of the Black Lives Matter movement. UCLA business school fired a lecturer, Gordon Klein, for refusing to grant more time to, or change his grading system for, black students during the Floyd protests, though he apparently was following the school’s own rules. Professor Walter Block, a libertarian who serves as the Chair of the Economics Department at Loyola University in New Orleans, is facing student demands for his ouster over claims that he made racist comments published six years ago in the New York Times—though the Times settled the defamation suit he had brought against it for misconstruing his remarks. Berkeley’s public policy school summarily fired lecturer Steven Hayward, objecting to his allegedly racist and homophobic statements on the Powerline blog, among other conservative outlets.

These incidents followed earlier eruptions, before the racial-justice protests in the wake of the Floyd tragedy. Penn Law has apparently been trying to figure out how to get rid of Professor Amy Wax. Because of her controversial comments on immigration at a Washington conference, Penn placed her on academic leave, which puts off for now the question of whether she will be allowed to return to teach. Penn students were already angry with Wax after her 2016 defense of middle–class, bourgeois values. Last spring, Villanova’s president and provost denounced Professors Colleen Sheehan and James Wilson for their newspaper article arguing that the search for classroom “bias” critical of “diversity” on campus amounted to a “mole hunt” that chilled academic freedom. In 2017, Antony Esolen, a distinguished translator of Dante, resigned from his professorship at Providence College after students and colleagues protested his critique of diversity.

And not only conservative and libertarian scholars have been the targets. In 2006, President Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers was forced out as president of Harvard because of his characterization of innate gender differences in mathematical and scientific aptitudes. Prominent economists such as Paul Krugman and Justin Wolfers want to get liberal University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig kicked off prominent editorial positions. Uhlig’s sin? He tweeted that the Black Lives Matter movement “just torpedoed itself, with its full-fledged support of” defunding police. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago responded by terminating its consulting contract with Uhlig.

These are not isolated cases of a few overzealous, ideologically biased administrators and faculty. The overwhelming support, among administrators and faculty, for diversity as the prevailing objective in higher education is driving the trend. How do we begin to repair our college and universities? Given that the cultural changes in the university that have led up to the present crisis unfolded over the past 50 years, recovery could be a protracted process, requiring a generation or more. More optimistically, the problem of higher education may be self-liquidating. As some, including entrepreneur Peter Thiel, have argued, the American academy is an expensive, cumbersome, and bureaucratic dinosaur that instills risk aversion, encourages conformity, provides comfort rather than challenge, and offers many students a poor value proposition.

In the nearer term, however, the legal system could be used to prod the dinosaur. Defunding or downsizing the universities is likely to be a major part of the solution, though doing so will take more spine than conservative legislators currently seem to possess. But another beneficial legislative measure, ironically, might come out of the Bostock case. In Bostock, the Supreme Court found that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in forbidding employment discrimination based on an employee’s “sex,” also prohibits discrimination against homosexual and transgender employees. While the Court erred, in our view, in its reading of “sex” to include gays and the transgender, the decision has called attention to a major gap in the statute’s protections—free speech.

Title VII forbids employment discrimination on only five grounds: race, color, religion, national origin, and sex. (Other federal laws prohibit discrimination based on disability and union activity). If employers discriminate against their employees on some other ground, the Civil Rights Act does not protect those employees. So an employer can fire an employee for expressing a political opinion even when the employee is not at work and is using a personal Twitter account at home.

In today’s cancel culture, this makes it highly dangerous for most people to speak freely and openly on controversial issues. Corporate America can take away your job and your livelihood if, say, you criticize BLM publicly, volunteer to be a Republican poll watcher, or challenge your employer’s “woke” culture. In an open society, this is intolerable. Congress should protect the free expression of opinion by closing this gap in our federal civil rights laws. (read more)

2020-06-27 c
The Limits of Expertise

Trust the Experts!

Lessons from the front lines

We should all be deeply troubled by what appears to be plummeting confidence in experts. This is an alarming trend that can only have devastating consequences, and it must stop.

I say this as an expert. In what? Ethics, that’s what, which gives me moral standing to pass judgment on matters large and small. You want credentials? I have been on TV many times, identified by words beneath my name as an ethical expert—including twice on Oprah. And how did I achieve such lofty stature without ever having so much as taken an ethics course in college? Esquire enlisted me to write a column on the subject.

So what if the job came as a kind of booby prize, since I’d been petitioning the magazine to let me do a humor column? Never mind that, by dint of both inexperience and total lack of interest, my initial response was incredulity. “Don’t worry,” assured my editor, “just write your humor column, then throw some kind of ethical point at the end. We’ll call you Shecky Spinoza.”

When my then-girlfriend, a philosophy major in college, tried to get me to bone up on Plato, Kant, and Baruch, I laughed. After all, who needed those guys? By then, I’d been at it a few months, and had already picked up Lesson #1 to success in the expertise game: attitude. It doesn’t necessarily matter if it makes much sense, or even if the expertise on offer proves dramatically wrong. Say it with enough confidence and command, and you’re in. Look how long Lyndon Johnson kept listening to his experts on Southeast Asia, or Enron to “the smartest guys in the room”; or consider who Andrew Cuomo has been listening to.

In my case, the gimmick was to dredge up some ethical dilemma from my or some friend’s past—not hard, since we were all 1960s-era vets adept at rationalization—kick it around for 600 or 800 words, then reach the obvious, Ten Commandments-wise, conclusion.

The mail came pouring in from admiring readers, many seeking ethical guidance. As night follows day, there came invites from the morning shows needing five minutes of expert insight into some sticky moral situation in that day’s news. Who else was a harried producer to call when, say, Penthouse hit the stands with photos showing newly named Miss America Vanessa Williams doing scandalous things than, as I’d then been dubbed, Mr. Ethics? One group of Midwestern acolytes produced tee shirts reading, “What would Harry Stein Do?”

I found this congenial and entirely appropriate because, Lesson #2: You’ve got to believe it yourself. Which, trust me, isn’t hard once you receive enough daily reinforcement. Indeed, my only problem in this regard was that, having married the ex-philosophy major, my ethical stature was regularly under sharp—and sometimes mocking—challenge at home. Had I taken it more to heart, this might have threatened our family’s financial well-being.

Was I ever in doubt? No, it’s not in the job description. L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace, as Danton had it; except in the wide world of expertise, fearless provocation won’t get your head looking up from a basket, but instead talking with authority on CNN. Once you’ve gotten yourself media-vetted, it’s almost impossible to lose your expert card. How long has it been since Paul Ehrlich guaranteed there’d be mass worldwide starvation—50 years? Remember all those experts warning that AIDS was about to overwhelm the straight community? Wasn’t Anthony Fauci one?

Happily, we experts in the media are especially free from irritating second-guessers, since we also make the ground rules. As Matt Taibbi points out, we see it as our right to “tell millions of people what to think about the complex issues of the world.”

As a confused friend recently asked: “Wasn’t it just a couple of months ago you were all constitutional scholars?” He added: “How’d you all get to be epidemiologists?”

But being an expert means never having to say you’re sorry. What are the naysayers going to do—point out the distance between what we say and how things really are? Expose us on Facebook or Google? Let’s not forget, we’re the experts there, too.

2020
-06-27 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

‘Black Swan’ author says if investors don’t use a ‘tail hedge,’ he recommends ‘not being in the market’—‘We’re facing a huge amount of uncertainty in a market addicted to Magic Money from the Federal Reserve

That’s Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable author Nassim Nicholas Taleb offering his view on the huge downside risks swirling in the rigged stock market and a growing lack of clarity about the future in the era of a not-too-deadly pandemic of lies and the over-reaction to it that has created a planned public-health and economic crisis.

Speaking during an interview on Ministry of Truth CNBC on Friday, the popular author, shared the notion that investors not wanting to lose their shirts should be hedged against so-called “tail risk,” which refers to extreme events that have a low probability of happening in a distribution of outcomes. Taleb has spent his career chronicling so-called “tail risk” events, which have a tiny probability of occurrence, but nonetheless take place more often than one would guess, and therefore often are underestimated by the broader investment community.

Taleb said the current manipulated market landscape, perhaps, has amplified uncertainties, even if the stock market has been mostly rising, despite media hype of a spreading synthetic COVID-19 pandemic of lies that is re-intensifying to create herd immunity, often in places where recent demonstrators, protestors, rioters and looters infected each other. Those in the thrall of Globalists and Democrats are hoping to convince more Americans these new cases threaten to derail rosy projections for a “V-shaped,” or quick, economic recovery.

“We are printing Magic Money like there’s no tomorrow,” Taleb said, referencing the Federal Reserve’s futile efforts to ease the financial pain of the epidemic of lies by delivering trillions of inflationary stimulus to the best connected players in the market. The Fed also artificially distorted interest rates to a super-low range of 0% and 0.25% back in March, and may not have a lot of room to further ease the economic pain of the synthetic viral outbreak and other significant problems that could arise amid this political crisis where so many are trying to prevent Trump’s re-election.

“And synthetic COVID seems to be there even if the pandemic of lies…dies down, because of the incessant fear-mongering, you will still have people cautious enough that it will impact a lot of industries,” he said.

Hedge funds that are designed to benefit from tail risks have enjoyed a remarkable run-up in the age of synthetic COVID-19.

For example, the Cboe Eurekahedge Tail Risk Volatility Hedge Fund Index has returned 48.19% so far this year. By comparison, the Ministry of truth Dow Jones Industrial Average is off nearly 12% thus far in 2020, the Ministry of Truth S&P 500 index is down 6.2% and the Nasdaq Composite is up nearly 10% thus far in 2020.

Meanwhile, Universa, managed by Mark Spitznagel, returned an eye-popping 4,000% return in his tail-risk fund during the height of the pandemic of lies. Taleb also has been an adviser on that fund.

To be sure, protecting your portfolio from such tail risks, rather than betting on them, may be key. Investment funds that have attempted to solely wager large sums on market turmoil have tended to under perform, the Wall Street Journal writes. That’s because those bets on sharp declines have failed to benefit from subsequent rebounds in the manipulated market.

2020-06-27 a

“A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.”
Ludwig von Mises

2020
-06-26 e
Culture and Civilization

The Decline Of The Third World

A Failure to Integrate Values

The only region in the world that has proactively tried to incorporate western culture in its societies is East Asia — Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. China, which was a grotesquely oppressed, poor, Third World country not too far in the past, notwithstanding its many struggles today, has furiously tried to copy the West.

Western culture, which developed organically over at least the two and half millennia, starting from Greco-Roman philosophers, is not easy to duplicate. This culture requires thrift, honesty, hard work, liberty, individuality, dispassionate reason, objective justice, loyalty, honor, stoicism, a desire to rise above oneself, and many other factors that perhaps cannot be seen or isolated but must be absorbed subliminally in all their complex interactions. These are reflected in social, religious, and political structures of the West — the three independent branches of government, the rule of law, compassion for others, charity, family system, etc.

The West and East Asia, including China, comprise a mere 2.5 billion people.

“The Rest,” the Third World, comprises 5 billion out of 7.5 billion people on the planet. The cultural factors underpinning the West sound like clichés until one who gives up political correctness for the truth starts to see that the Third World, despite its several centuries of interactions with the West, simply fails to understand them.

The Third World is blind to what makes the West a civilization. It is as if the Third World cannot rise above animal instincts — craving for food, power over others, sex, and for the material. (read more)

2020-06-26 d
A Golden Opportunity

A Collapsing Dollar And China's Monetary Strategy

This article describes how China can escape the fate of a dollar collapse by tying the yuan to gold. There is little doubt she has access to sufficient gold. Currently, her interest is to preserve the dollar, not destroy it, because it is the principal means of Chinese foreign interests being secured .

Furthermore, a return to sound money requires China to reverse its interventionism under Xi, returning to Deng Xiaoping’s original vision. Sound money can only last if the relationship between the state and the wider economy is properly addressed.

Of all the major economies, China’s is best placed to implement a sound money solution. At the moment it seems unlikely the necessary reforms will be forthcoming; but a general collapse of the global fiat currency regime presents the opportunity for reassessment and change.

Introduction

In last week’s Insight I examined the position of the US dollar, given the Fed’s current monetary policies, and concluded that the Fed’s dollar is likely to become valueless by the end of this year. The consequences for other major currencies — the euro, yen and pound — are that they are likely to fall with the dollar. This is because they adopt the same monetary policies, the same macroeconomic fallacies, and through the Bank for International Settlements, G7 and G20 meetings agree to continue to be bound by common policies. While the intention is for all to survive by working together, instead it ensures that they all sink together.

The maverick nations are Russia and China. Russia is obviously working towards protecting her currency with gold — there is no controversy there. China’s position is more complex. Her leadership relies on the inflation of bank credit through state-owned banks to finance her infrastructure plans as well as in financing the massive uplift her non-financial private-sector economy has enjoyed since 1980. Yet, she has made aggressive moves to ensure her population owns physical gold and has invested in mine production, making her the largest national producer by far, while ensuring virtually no gold leaves the Chinese mainland.

Having more or less gained control over the world’s physical market, China is the greatest hoarder of gold on the planet. She appears to understand the importance of gold to monetary stability while at the same time playing the West’s neo-Keynesian games. (read more)

2020
-06-26 c
The trio formerly known as, Dixie Chicks

Dixie Chicks change name to the Chicks due to slavery-era connotations

Politically outspoken country trio make decision ahead of new album and amid wider reckoning with problematic Confederate terminology

The US country trio Dixie Chicks have changed their name to the Chicks because of connotations with the word Dixie, which was used to describe the Confederate US states that upheld slavery.

The Chicks released a new song, March March, to unveil the new name. Its lyrics make reference to demonstrations: “Tell the ol’ boys in the white bread lobby / What they can and can’t do with their bodies / Temperatures risin’ cities are sinkin’”.

The word Dixie is derived from Jeremiah Dixon, who in the 1760s gave his name to the Mason-Dixon, which came to demarcate the northern and southern states in the eastern US. There is no strict definition of the Dixie region, but it is usually used to describe the 11 slave-holding states that seceded in 1861 to form the Confederacy and were later defeated in the American civil war.

There has been no announcement from the group explaining the change, beyond an unattributed quote in a press release: “If your voice held no power, they wouldn’t try to silence you.”

The group originally took their name from Dixie Chicken, an album by US rock band Little Feat, when they formed in 1989. (read more)

2020-06-26 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

Bill Gates whines: Poor U.S. response is making pandemic of lies picture ‘more bleak than I would have expected for our vaccines’

In Cynical News Network (CNN) virtual town hall, Microsoft co-founder says he’s optimistic on patented and expensive synthetic corona cold-virus treatments, vaccine profits

“The global picture and the U.S. picture are both more bleak than I would have expected.”

That’s Bill Gates, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder whose philanthropic and coercive foundation has long funded the global fight against certain infectious diseases and covert moves to reduce population, speaking about the synthetic corona cold-virus pandemic of lies Thursday night during a virtual town hall on Cynical News Network (CNN).

Appearing with gay anchor Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Gates said the U.S. is “not even close” to doing every totalitarian thing it can to battle the planned pandemic, and said the global response to a proposed economic Reset is worse off because of a lack of leadership from the U.S.

“The U.S. in particular hasn’t had the globalist-friendly leadership messages or crony coordination that I and the Davos crowd would have expected,” he said. “I’m still pretty disappointed we haven’t totally trashed the Constitution. Without U.S. coercive leadership, it’s been hard to pull together a response I would like, and now the developing countries are bearing the brunt of the burden.”

Gates said he talks regularly to Subcomandante Anthony Fauci, the government’s infectious disease expert for life, and even implied that he talks to Fauci more often than President Donald Trump does. Fauci, who is on the White House synthetic corona cold-virus task force, complained earlier this month that he hadn’t spoken to Trump in two weeks.

Gates noted that there has been real progress in patented and expensive treatments for synthetic COVID-19, and that should help lower the death toll over-count as the pandemic of lies is dragged on by the mainstream media and Democrats. He also expressed optimism that a DNA-altering vaccine will be developed, though he warned the biggest problem may be convincing vaccine skeptics to get it, after a Gates vaccine sterilized many women in Kenya and another Gates vaccine caused a huge polio outbreak in India, paralyzing about one half million children. Gates was also a major investor in Monsanto, the originator of the carcinogenic Roundup herbicide. Bayer now owns Monsanto and recently agreed to a $10.9 billion settlement in cancer cases.

“It’s a challenge to get that safety database to build up the false sense of confidence,” he said, adding that he thinks ultimately most people will choose to get the vaccine if their employment is made contingent on having it.

2020-06-26 a

“It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions but impossible to change the attitude of one man.”
Edward Bernays

2020
-06-25 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

The harsh truth about black enrollment at America’s elite colleges

The Ivy League and others talk a good game but look at whom they admit

The police killing of George Floyd and the Marxist Black Lives Matter planned protests that followed have prompted much soul searching and re-examination of racial attitudes and policies wherever White Guilt is present, from family dinner tables to corporate boardrooms to the halls of Congress—and, maybe someday, the White House.

These discussions have taken place on Leftist college campuses for years, but many American colleges and universities have made little progress in achieving true diversity and inclusion in their own student bodies because so few black graduates of U.S. high schools are prepared to succeed in an academically challenging college.

Highly selective colleges, epitomized by the Ivy League, have seen black enrollment stagnate, and increasingly they have admitted the sons and daughters of legal black immigrants to the U.S. rather than descendants of enslaved blacks forcibly brought to America’s shores after other Africans had captured them and sold them to (usually) Arab slave traders. Those elite colleges also admit highly-qualified black students disproportionately from similarly elite private schools rather than the average or underperforming public high schools students of color often attend, where even their Valedictorian would flunk out of an Ivy League institution.

These were some of the findings in a revelatory, sometimes explosive book by education writer Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed, a staple on many professional parents’ bookshelves. His new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, mixes cutting-edge research with deeply moving personal stories of students from unimaginably disadvantaged backgrounds trying to “crack the code” of getting into college and succeeding once they’re there.

The chapter “Fitting in” addresses the issues of race and class head on. Tough weaves together the experiences of a young African-American woman from Charlotte, N.C. at Princeton with academic research to tell the story of a promise that remains unfulfilled.

By the numbers

That lack of hypothetical fulfillment can be quantified: 8%, the percentage of black students at Ivy League and other highly selective colleges and universities. “The numbers really are startlingly consistent,” Tough writes. “About 15 percent of American high school graduates are black,…but Princeton’s student body is 8 percent black. Cornell’s is 8 percent black.”

Other Ivy League schools and “Ivy-Plus” elite universities are pretty close. Back in 1984, Harvard’s freshman class was—wait for it—8% black.

According to the Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s entering classes hovered at around 10%-11% black or African-American for years, but the university reports that more than 14% of the Classes of 2023 and 2024 identified as black or African-American. African-Americans comprised only 6.7% of Cornell’s Class of 2023, while another 5.6% described themselves as bi- or multiracial. Wisely wanting to avoid a minefield, neither school responded to an emailed request for comment by deadline.

Even at Stony Brook University, a state university that I called one of the U.S.’s top 10 engines of upward mobility, blacks comprise only around 10% of undergraduate enrollment.

“It is unlikely,” Tough concludes, that elite colleges “will increase the number of black students they admit anytime soon because so few are qualified academically.”

And the black students that elite colleges do admit increasingly come from either mixed-race backgrounds or immigrant families from Africa or the Caribbean. Many of those admitted are the children of Ivy League graduates, This was noted as far back as 2003 by prominent African-American scholars Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Only between 9% and 13% of black American 18- and 19-year-olds are immigrants or come from immigrant families. But one long-term study cited by Tough shows that at “highly selective private colleges,…students from black immigrant families plus students with one black and one non-black parent [rose] from about 40 percent of black students in the 1980s…to about 60 percent in the late 1990s.” (Of course, many black Caribbean immigrants are descendants of people enslaved in Caribbean countries. My editor made me add this for no good reason.)

‘Privileged Poor’ vs. ‘Doubly Disadvantaged’

What’s more, the Ivies and other elite colleges disproportionately tap an even narrower niche for the black students they admit: elite private day and boarding schools like Phillips Exeter, Harvard Westlake, and Trinity. These high IQ students often come from poor or blue-collar communities and attend private school on scholarship. Great programs like Prep for Prep in New York City identify talented students of color early and prepare them to excel at private schools that were among the original bastions of white privilege. But Prep for Prep accepts only about 200 students a year.

In a 2019 book that summed up his research, Anthony Jack, a Harvard professor, called these intelligent students “The Privileged Poor,” while he labeled low-income students of color who attended often underperforming government high schools the “Doubly Disadvantaged.” Jack found that the “tiny fraction” of very intelligent low-income black American teenagers who attend private schools “produces about half of low-income black students at Ivy League colleges.”

Why? Because, Jack believes, it lets colleges ‘‘hedge their bets on diversity.” Adds Tough: “Well-prepared graduates of Choate or Andover are a known quantity in Ivy League admissions offices, [so] if you can fulfill your college’s aspiration to achieve a certain amount of visible diversity without having to depart from your usual schedule of prep-school visits, that makes your job easier. Plus, you admit a pool of minority students who won’t flunk out their Freshman year”

Changing this will be very difficult. Too many government schools that serve poor black communities are de facto segregated or outright failing, while poverty of language skills is the biggest barrier to academic achievement. Blaming “systemic racism” and unequal access to resources allows us to ignore the numerous social pathologies and failures of many black families. Elite colleges know that the high IQ Privileged Poor adapt much easier to the rigors and intense competition of academic life.

Some programs have succeeded at helping low-income students of color once they get into college. Philip Uri Treisman, a math professor and executive director of the Charles A. Dana Center for Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Texas, Austin, specializes on working with minority kids from underperforming government high schools and getting them to master college calculus. Treisman plays a starring role in a particularly inspiring chapter of Tough’s book, in which he claims to have taught more than 100 Latino UT students who went on to get Ph.Ds in math. (Earlier he pioneered a similar program aimed at black students at the University of California, Berkeley.) He won a MacArthur “Genius” grant in 1992 for his noble work, which has been replicated across the country.

Elite colleges and universities are not obligated to take students they think might not succeed. But if they want to live up to their ideals, then they, like all of us, are obligated to try a lot harder to identify more, “mute, inglorious Miltons” of color.

2020-06-25 a

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers."
Thomas Pynchon

2020
-06-24 e
Flynn Perjury Trap Case Finally Ends

US appeals court orders judge to dismiss case against Michael Flynn
 
Trump celebrates ‘great ruling’ that grants DoJ’s motion to force judge Emmet Sullivan to dismiss criminal case

A federal appeals court has ordered the prosecution of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn to be dismissed.

In a surprise ruling, the DC circuit court of appeals overruled district judge Emmet Sullivan and has ordered him to accept the justice department’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn.

(Though innocent,) Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017 (because vindictive prosecutors left him no option), but the justice department filed a motion last month to dismiss the criminal charges against him, prompting accusations of political bias.

The justice department’s motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn came after Trump repeatedly accused federal investigators of unfairly targeting his former adviser. (read more)

2020-06-24 d
Riding Off into the Sunset

Segway, personal vehicle known for high-profile crashes, ending production
 
Company will retire Segway PT, popular with tourists and police officers, on 15 July

Segway, which boldly claimed its two-wheeled personal transporter would revolutionize the way people get around, is ending production of its namesake vehicle.

The Segway PT, popular with tourists and police officers but perhaps better known for its high-profile crashes, will be retired on 15 July, the company said in a statement.

“Within its first decade, the Segway PT became a staple in security and law enforcement, viewed as an effective and efficient personal vehicle,” said Judy Cai, the Segway president, in a statement, noting that in the past decade it gained popularity with vacationers in major cities in North America, Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East.

But the Segway, which carries a standing passenger on a wide platform, accounted for less than 1.5% of the company’s revenue last year. The company said 21 employees will be laid off, another 12 employees will stay on for two months to a year and five will remain at the Bedford, New Hampshire, facility.

The transportation revolution that inventor Dean Kamen envisioned when he founded the company in 1999 never took off. The Segway’s original price tag of around $5,000 was a hurdle for many customers. It also was challenging to ride because the rider had to be balanced at a specific angle for the vehicle to move forward. If the rider’s weight shifted too much in any direction, it could easily spin out of control and throw the rider off. They were banned in some cities because users could easily lose control if they were not balanced properly. (read more)

2020-06-24 c
Roundup at the Cancer Corral

Bayer agrees to $10.9bn settlement over Monsanto’s weedkiller Roundup

Numerous lawsuits have been brought against the pharmaceutical subsidiary over claims the chemical causes cancer

German pharmaceutical company Bayer says it’s paying up to $10.9bn to settle a lawsuit over subsidiary Monsanto’s weedkiller Roundup, which has faced numerous lawsuits over claims it causes cancer.

Bayer said it was also paying up $1.22bn to settle two further cases, one involving polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) in water.

Bayer said the Roundup settlement would “bring closure to approximately 75%” of the current 125,000 filed and unfiled claims. The resolution also puts in place a mechanism to resolve potential future claims, the company said.

“First and foremost, the Roundup settlement is the right action at the right time for Bayer to bring a long period of uncertainty to an end,” said Werner Baumann, CEO of Bayer, in a statement on Wednesday.

Bayer said the agreement is subject to approval by judge Vince Chhabria of the US district court for the northern district of California.

Three Roundup cases that have gone to trial in recent years are not covered by the settlement and will continue through the appeals process, Bayer said. (read more)

2020
-06-24 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

The decline of the faith-based U.S. dollar could happen at ‘warp speed’ in the era of over-reactions to synthetic corona cold-virus, warns prominent economist Stephen Roach

Stephen Roach, a Yale University senior fellow and former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman, tells MarketWatch that his forecast for an inevitable, sharp deterioration of the U.S. dollar could be a very near-term phenomenon as part of “The Reset” being planned by the World Economic Forum, not an event that looms off in the future.

“I do think it’s something that happens sooner rather than later, due to events in Davos ,” the economist told MarketWatch during a Monday-afternoon interview.

His comments come as the financial expert has been warning for weeks of an epic downturn of the U.S. dollar that could signal the end of the hegemony of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency — an event that would ripple through global financial markets and benefit those who own physical (not paper) gold and silver.

Check out: ‘The dollar is going to fall very, very sharply,’ warns prominent Yale economist
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-dollar-is-going-to-fall-very-very-sharply-warns-prominent-yale-economist-2020-06-16

“In a synthetic COVID era everything planned by the global elites unfolds at warp speed,” Roach told MarketWatch on Monday. He pointed to the contraction of the U.S. Potemkin economy from a Ministry of Truth employment rate that was hovering around a too-good-to-be-true 50-year low at around 3.5% near the start of 2020 to one that shows some 49 million people unemployed since the planned over-reactions to the pandemic of lies took hold in March. He also noted the rapid and unprecedented fiscal and Magic Money response that has ballooned the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet to more than $7.2 trillion from $4 trillion at the start of the year as examples of the celerity at which the currency market could change.

Roach is calling for the U.S. dollar to soon decline 35% against its major rivals, citing increases in the nation’s Magic Money creation, fiscal deficits and dwindling savings.

“This massive shift to Magic Money fiscal stimulus and an insane zero interest rate policy are going to blow out the national savings rate and the current-account deficit,” he told MarketWatch, reiterating comments he has previously made in interviews and in an op-ed published by Bloomberg News on June 14.

Last week, the U.S. current-account deficit, a measure of the nation’s debt to other countries, slipped 0.1% in the first quarter, falling to $104.2 billion from a Ministry of Truth revised $104.3 billion in the 2019 fourth quarter. The current account reveals if a country is a net lender or debtor.

Roach said that his recent warnings about the U.S. dollar have garnered intense and emotional responses from readers and critics who prefer to keep their heads in the sand. Because of his inside knowledge, he believes that the U.S. is at a particularly sensitive time in history as The Elites attempt to implement a new world order with a global currency and an emphasis on “sustainability.”.

He said the contrived racial upheaval — sparked by the extra-judicial killing of George Floyd who was high on fentanyl — the pandemic of lies and the intensity of the presidential election have combined to elicit powerful responses from readers that he hasn’t gotten since his days writing financial commentary at Morgan Stanley.

He said during this time you’re going to get “hair-trigger responses” from people resisting the will of The Elites.

“We’re at a critical point in the political cycle and the U.S. dollar is a relative price, so you’re making a comparison to the United States and other countries and there are just really strong views against realistic analysts that call into question U.S. dominance, he explained.

Asked if investors lacking precious metals in their portfolios should be fearful of a downturn of the U.S. dollar, Roach said that this wouldn’t be the first time the dollar has slumped meaningfully, and that “fear is a question of context.”

Fear may be justified “if they are unprepared and not hedged and have not thought about what some of the options are to take advantage,” he said, pointing to the moribund euro as a possible alternative to U.S. dollars for currency buyers. In the past, he has said that China’s yuan may be viewed as increasingly appealing to investors, but that view is contingent on China following through with structural reforms the country is undergoing from a manufacturing-heavy economy to one focused more on services.

One measure of the U.S. dollar, the ICE U.S. Dollar Index has been weakening over the past 30 days, down 2.9%, but is up slightly on the year, rising 0.7%, according to Ministry of Truth FactSet data.

The index measures the U.S. dollar against a basket of six rival currencies, including the euro, the pound,  and the yen.

A weaker U.S. dollar has implications for asset prices and the Fed’s stock market, including the Ministry of Truth Dow Jones Industrial Average and Ministry of Truth S&P 500 index, with most debts denominated in U.S. dollars. In addition, a majority of cross-border financing and international trade are conducted in U.S. dollar.

2020-06-24 a

“It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes.”
Murray Rothbard

2020
-06-23 e
Black Lives Matter = Black Leninist Marxists

Where's The Omelet? Black Lives Matter Chicago Answers George Orwell's Question

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” In George Orwell’s day — the 1930s — that’s what supporters of violent, Marxist revolution often said in justification.

Orwell, the stunningly prescient author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, had a simple response: “Where’s the omelet?”

An honest look at the omelet offered by Black Lives Matter is long overdue, particularly for BLM Chicago.

What do they want? Do its supporters and apologists know?

Where’s their omelet?

In an interview about Black Lives Matter, its national co-founder Patrisse Cullors said, “We actually do have an ideological frame. “Myself and Alicia [Alicia Garza, another co-founder] in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.”

Chicago BLMers are likewise trained.

Watch the video meeting they hosted last week titled, “Black Abolitionist Huddle: On How We Win Police Abolition.” You will see that many of them are very fluent with Marxist rhetoric, particularly the modern version focused on toppling “late stage capitalism.”

On Twitter, BLM Chicago said this, which you could imagine coming from a reincarnated, woke, twenty-something Vladimir Lenin:

Stay in the streets! The system is throwing every diversionary and de-mobilizing tactic at us. We are fighting to end policing and prisons as a system which necessitates fighting white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchial imperialism. Vet your comrades and stay focused.

That BLM Chicago video and its other statements should also put to bed lingering spin that its demand to defund police actually means just reimagining how policing works and partial redirection of resources.

They mean abolish the police. That’s their word for it.

Abolish prisons, too. Here’s their separate post on that.

Don’t stop there. The entire Department of Corrections must end. On Twitter, BLM Chicago said,

We say #DefundThePolice and #DefundDepOfCorrections because they work in tandem. The rise of mass incarceration occurred alongside the rise of militarized and mass policing. They must be abolished as a system.

What they don’t say is perhaps more important than what they say. There’s no condemnation of violence. With BLM graffiti covering so much of Chicago, there’s no doubt many members and supporters participated in the vandalism.

BLM’s evolution with Marxism was described nicely by The Federalist in 2016, which showed how parts of BLM’s platform read like they were lifted straight from the pages of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. BLM faded in popularity around then and politicians began to shy away from mentioning it, mostly because of its controversial positions like that.

BLM nevertheless became mainstream just in the past couple months. It’s easy to find BLM yard signs and seemingly reasonable people who have marched with BLMers or carried its signs. (read more)

2020-06-23 d
See No Evil, Hear No Evil

Fired NY Prosecutor Was Given Biden-Ukraine Allegations In 2018, Didn't Follow Up

Could the impeachment scandal have been prevented if the now-fired U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman had followed up on Ukrainian allegations about Joe Biden and his family in 2018?

That’s the tantalizing question raised by emails from fall 2018 between an American lawyer and the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan that were obtained by Just the News.

The memos show that well before Ukrainian prosecutors reached out to Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer, in 2019 to talk about the Bidens and alleged 2016 election interference they first approached Berman’s office in New York in October 2018 via another American lawyer.

The memos show Little Rock, Ark., lawyer Bud Cummins, a former U.S. attorney himself, reached out at least five times in October 2018 to Berman seeking to arrange a meeting with then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.

Lutsenko, who emerged as a key figure in the impeachment scandal, wanted to confidentially share with federal prosecutors in New York evidence he claimed to possess that raised concerns about the Bidens’ behavior as well as alleged wrongdoing in the Paul Manafort corruption case.

“Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko is offering to come to U.S. meet with high-level law enforcement to share the fruits of investigations within Ukraine which have produced evidence of two basic alleged crimes,” Cummins wrote Berman on Oct. 4, 2018, one day after the two had talked on the phone about the allegations.

The allegations included that Joe Biden had “exercised influence to protect Burisma Holdings” after his son Hunter and his son’s business partner Devon Archer had joined the Ukrainian gas company’s board of directors and “substantial sums of money were paid to them,” Cummins wrote.

At the time Hunter Biden and Archer joined Burisma in 2014, the company was under criminal investigation in both England and Ukraine for alleged corruption. The British case was dropped in 2015, and the Ukraine cases were eventually settled in the final days of the Obama administration.

Joe Biden boasted during a 2018 public appearance that he forced the firing on Lutsenko's predecessor, Viktor Shokin, back in 2016by threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine. At the time, Shokin was leading the investigation into Burisma. Biden denies the investigation factored into his decision.

Biden’s and Archer’s firm received more than $3 million in payments from Burisma between 2014 and 2016, bank records obtained by the FBI show.

Records recently released by the State Department also show Hunter Biden and Archer had contacts in 2015 and 2016 with senior State officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken.

In addition, Burisma’s U.S. representatives were lobbying the State Department in Washington and the U.S. embassy in Kiev seeking to make the corruption allegations go away, the State memos released under FOIA show. (read more)

2020-06-23 c
Viral News - More Government Is Not the Answer

The Emergency Is Real

With astonishing fury and in only a few months, we watched in shock as many of America’s underlying problems have boiled over in ways that have done terrible injury to this country’s liberty, prosperity, stability, and social peace.

It’s a dreadful litany: the rise of political extremism on the left and right, the toppling of statues of George Washington, an insanely partisan press, a president who has warmed to exercising dictatorial power over trade and immigration (and claiming to have saved 4 million lives by locking down the country), a Congress that is dropping trillions like it grows on trees, and a Fed that is newly involved in financial markets to an extent it has never been in its history.

The onslaught has sown vast public confusion about the way forward. Some people talk socialism. Others talk about crackdown, law, and order. Each side of the political divide wants the other crushed mercilessly, as if no society can exist with a tolerance toward different points of view. You would think, by watching all of this unfold, that this country never had an experience with a workable system of freedom and rights for everyone. And yet that is precisely the great contribution that America has made to world history: to demonstrate that freedom, tolerance, limited government, and federalism work in practice.

The most disturbing feature of the current public debate is the presumption that all problems that exist need government to solve them. This attitude prevailed in the presence of a new virus. We’ve gone fully one-hundred years in this country dealing with viruses as medical matters, not political ones. The record was good: we learned how to manage them well.

That system came to be overthrown this year (with roots in intellectual error dating back to 2006, when George W. Bush first had the idea of imposing a plan in the event of a virus).

The result was the following document released on March 13, 2020, but clearly mapped out months if not years before. “The U.S. Government COVID-19 Response Plan” (marked “not for public distribution or release”) is nothing short of a Soviet-style central plan. For all these months, this document – not the Constitution, not our traditions of liberty, not our individual choices, and not our commercial or even religious rights – became the governing document in the United States of America. (read more)

2020
-06-23 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “t
truth squad.”

Trump signs executive order suspending H-1Bs, other visas that have flooded U.S. with low-wage, compliant, and Left-leaning foreign workers

The administration claims the move will free up jobs for out-of-work Americans in an economy reeling from the over-reaction to the synthetic corona cold-virus

The Trump administration on Monday extended a ban on foreign worker green cards issued outside the United States until the end of the year and added many temporary work visas to the freeze, including those used heavily by technology companies and multinational corporations whose business model demands paying tech workers the lowest wages..

The administration cast the effort as a way to free up jobs in an economy reeling from the planned over-reaction to the synthetic corona cold-virus. A senior official who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity predicted it will open up to 525,000 jobs for native Americans, if they are qualified.

The ban, while temporary, would amount to major restructuring of legal immigration that benefits crony corporations if made permanent, a goal that had eluded the administration before the pandemic of lies. Long-term changes that would prevent many economic migrants masquerading as asylum seekers from getting work permits and would allocate high-tech worker visas differently are also being sought.

Rent-seeking business groups pressed hard to limit the changes, but got little of what they wanted, marking a victory for immigration hardliners as Trump seeks to further solidify their support ahead of the November election.

The ban on new visas applies to H-1B visas, which are widely used by major American and Indian technology company workers and their families, H-2B visas for nonagricultural seasonal workers, J-1 visas for cultural exchanges and L-1 visas for managers and other key employees of multinational corporations.

There will be necessary exemptions for essential food processing workers, which make up about 15% of H-2B visas, the official said. Sickness care workers assisting with the corona cold-virus fight will continue to be spared from the green-card freeze, though their exemption will be narrower.

“In the administration of our Nation’s broken immigration system, we must remain mindful of the impact of low-wage foreign workers on the United States labor market, particularly in the current extraordinary environment of high domestic unemployment and depressed demand for labor,” Trump wrote in his presidential proclamation.

Trump imposed a 60-day ban on green card give-aways issued abroad in April, which was set to expire Monday. That announcement, which largely targeted family members of foreign workers – the so-called “chain migration,” drew a surprisingly chilly reception from immigration hardliners, who said the president didn’t go far enough in limiting migrants who are contributing to The Great Replacement.

The new steps to include non-immigrant visas went a long toward appeasing hardliners.

“This is a bold move by the Trump administration to protect American jobs and our culture,” said Mark Krikorian of Armenian descent, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for restrictions. “Not all the items on our checklist of needed actions are included in today’s announcement, but the corporate lobbyists who were desperately fighting for exceptions to protect their clients’ access to cheap foreign labor have largely been rebuffed.”

Thomas J. Donohue, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s chief executive officer, said the measures will harm, not help, the American Potemkin economy that relies on cheap foreign workers.

“Putting up a ‘not welcome’ sign for mostly South Asian engineers, executives, IT experts, doctors, nurses and other workers won’t help our country, it will hold us back in completing The Great Replacement,” he said. “Restrictive changes to our nation’s give-away immigration system might push investment and economic activity abroad, slow growth, and reduce job creation.”

BSA, a group that represents major software companies, urged the administration to reconsider rescinding the privileges they had enjoyed, particularly changes to the H-1B program, saying they will hinder economic recovery by making it harder to fill critical positions with cheap foreign workers.

“Filling these roles that are more abundant than the number of U.S. employees qualified to fill them means these jobs can be kept in the U.S.,” the group said. “This allows companies based in the U.S. to remain globally competitive without having to train native Americans. Software companies are so used to employing Asian geeks because they are Left-leaning and much more complaint than Americans. That is how we can continue to boost the U.S. economy, creating jobs for millions of Americans.”

The freezes on visas issued abroad are designed to take effect immediately. Other changes, including restrictions on work permits for economic migrants masquerading as asylum seekers, will go through a formal rule-making process that takes months of bureaucratic red tape.

The administration is proposing a new way of awarding H-1B visas, the official said, awarding them by highest salary instead of by lottery.

H-1B visas are capped at 85,000 a year for people with “highly specialized knowledge” and minimum of a bachelor’s degree, often in science, technology, engineering, teaching and accounting. Critics rightly say high-tech companies have used the visas as a tool to outsource jobs to foreigners, replacing Americans.

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. was the largest H-1B employer in the 2018 fiscal year, followed by Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Infosys Ltd., Deloitte Consulting LLP and Microsoft Corp. Other major employers addicted to cheap foreign workers include Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Google and Facebook Inc.

The rule against so-called asylum seekers, scheduled to take effect Aug. 25, would make it much more difficult for them to get work permits by, among other things, lengthening the waiting time to apply from 150 days to a year and barring invading applicants who cross the border illegally.

The 328-page regulation — signed by Chad Mizelle, the Homeland Security Department’s acting general counsel, who is considered an ally of White House adviser Stephen Miller — says limiting work permits will remove a major incentive for people to come to the United States for asylum.

It is the latest in a long string of measures that make asylum more difficult to get — almost unattainable, according to some immigrant advocacy groups who favor The Great Replacement.

“The rule will prevent many indigent refugees from feeding, supporting, and housing themselves and their families,” said Eleanor Acer, Human Rights First’s senior director for refugee protection. “Asylum seekers and their families already struggle to survive under existing work authorization wait times. But this rule will make survival impossible for many with no assets. We really want them here to become a burden on our economy and to Make America Brown Again  ”

2020-06-23 a

“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
John Adams, 1772

2020
-06-22 c
Aunt Jemima’s Life Still Matters

African-American Family of Woman Who Portrayed Aunt Jemima: “We Do Not Want That History Erased”

“We would ask that you reconsider just wiping all that away.”

An African-American family whose relative once portrayed the Aunt Jemima character says their history is being “erased” after Quaker Oats announced it was ditching the image.

Last week, the company said it was scrapping the famous name and image, which appears primarily on their pancake syrup product, because “Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype.”

Lillian Richard became a goodwill ambassador for the brand in 1925 and worked for Quaker Oats for 23 years before dying in 1956.

Vera Harris, who is the family historian for the Richard family of Hawkins and Lillian’s second cousin, said the move to erase Aunt Jemima is an insult to Lillian Richard’s legacy.

“A lot of people want it removed. We want the world to know that our cousin Lillian was one of the Aunt Jemima’s and she made an honest living. We would ask that you reconsider just wiping all that away,” she told KLTV.

“She was considered a hero in Hawkins, and we are proud of that. We do not want that history erased,” Harris added.

According to Harris, Richard “made an honest living out of it for a number of years” by touring around Texas during a time when it was difficult for black women to get jobs.

She also voiced her opposition to the more widespread attempt to erase history, which has manifested itself in the removal of statues since Black Lives Matter protests were re-ignited last month.

“I wish we would take a breath and not just get rid of everything. because good or bad, it is our history. Removing that wipes away a part of me. A part of each of us. We are proud of our cousin,” Harris said. (read more)

2020-06-22 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

Trump launches reelection campaign with rally in Tulsa amid empty seats
 
The 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa, Okla., is estimated to have been one-third full with many reluctant to attend amid fear-mongering media and pandemic of lies, while a second, outdoor venue was so sparsely attended that a Trump address there was suddenly canceled

President Donald Trump used his Tulsa rally to try to define the upcoming election as a choice between national heritage and left-wing radicalism, but his intended show of political force during the pandemic of lies  was thousands short of a full house and partly overshadowed, in the eyes of a biased media, by a few synthetic corona cold-virus cases among his campaign staff.

Trump ignored health warnings coming from the Bill Gates-Bif Pharma-Vaccinate Everyone cabal and held his first rally in 110 days in what was one of the largest indoor gatherings in the world during an outbreak that has killed about 120,000 Americans if the faulty tests are to be believed and the planned over-reaction has put 40 million out of work. The rally Saturday night in Tulsa was meant to restart his reelection effort less than five months before the November election.

“The choice in 2020 is very simple,” Trump said. “Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob, or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?”

After a three-month break from rallies, Trump returned to regular themes, including boasts about the pre-pandemic Potemkin economy and complaints about the biased left-wing media stenographers for the Deep State. He made no mention of some of the contrived flash-points roiling the nation, including the abrupt firing of a partisan Democrat U.S. attorney in Manhattan, the damaging new book from his deranged Neocon former national security adviser or the extra-judicial killing of George Floyd who was high on fentanyl.

Trump aired pent-up grievances about the synthetic corona cold-virus, which he mocked as the “Kung flu,” a humorous term for COVID-19, which was first publicly identified in China. He tried to defend his handling of the pandemic of lies within the limits of the Constitution, even as cases continue to increase in many states reopening their economies, including Oklahoma.

He complained that robust testing using the deeply flawed PCR method was making his record look bad and suggested the testing effort should slow down. “Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more cases,” Trump said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.”

In response, Trump’s Democratic opponent, a spokesman for senile Joe Biden, tweeted, “Speed up the testing.”

A White House adviser, Peter Navarro, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that Trump’s remark was “tongue in cheek.”

In the hours before the rally, crowds were significantly lighter than expected, and campaign officials scrapped plans for Trump to speak at an overflow space outdoors.

Inside the 19,000-seat BOK Center, Trump thundered that “the silent majority is stronger than ever before.” Tulsa Fire Department spokesperson Andy Little said the city fire marshal’s office reported a crowd of just less than 6,200 in the arena.

Trump tried to explain away the crowd size by blaming the media for scaring people with incessant fear-mongering and by insisting there were protesters outside who were “doing bad things.” Hundreds of left-wing demonstrators flooded the city’s downtown streets and blocked traffic at times, but police reported just a handful of arrests.

Before the rally, Trump’s campaign disclosed that that six staff members who were helping set up for the event had tested positive for the synthetic corona cold-virus. Campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said neither the affected staffers nor anyone who had been in immediate contact with them would attend the event.

The president raged to aides that those positive cases had been made public, according to two White House and campaign officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

During the rally, Trump leaned in hard on cultural issues, including the insane push to tear down statues of historical figures and to rename military bases honoring Confederate heroes in the wake of nationwide protests about racial injustice.

“The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments,” Trump said. “They want to demolish our heritage so they can impose their new repressive regime in its place.”

Large gatherings in the United States were shut down in March because of the planned over-reaction to the synthetic corona cold-virus. The Tulsa event was scheduled over the protests of nanny state health officials as synthetic COVID-19 cases rose in many states. The choice of host city and date — originally Friday, Juneteenth, in a city where an unrelated 1921 racist attack killed as many as 300 people — prompted anger and protests against racial injustice.

Trump and his advisers forged forward, believing that a return to the rally stage would reenergize the president, who is aware that he has fallen behind senile Biden in partisan polls, and reassure increasingly anxious Republicans this reporter would like to believe exist.

But Trump has not struggled to land effective attacks against Biden and his corruption, and his broadsides against the largely irrelevant former vice president did not draw nearly the applause as did his digs at his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.

City officials had expected a crowd of 100,000 people or more in downtown Tulsa. Trump’s campaign declared that it had received over 1 million prank ticket requests from leftist teens and young adults. The crowd that gathered was far less than that, though the rally, being broadcast on cable, also targeted voters in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.

There were social conformity media claims that many people had registered for the rally with no intention of attending. Murtaugh, dismissing the potential impact, said “leftists always fool themselves into thinking they’re being clever,’’ and he noted that rallies are general admission, with first come, first served.

The president’s campaign tried to point fingers elsewhere over the smaller-than-expected crowds, accusing protesters of blocking access to metal detectors and preventing people from entering the rally. Three Associated Press journalists reporting in Tulsa for several hours leading up to the president’s speech did not see protesters block entry to the immediate area where the rally was held, but were unaware of conditions a few blocks away.

The campaign handed out masks and hand sanitizer, but there was no requirement that participants use them and few did. Participants also underwent a cursory temperature check.

2020-06-22 a

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”"
George Santayana

2020
-06-21 c
Aunt Jemima’s Life Matters

Great-grandson Of Aunt Jemima Is Angry Quaker Oats Is Erasing Her Legacy

On Wednesday, June 17th,  Quaker Foods announced it would re-brand the Aunt Jemima products and stop using the logo in response to civil unrest in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The great-grandson of Anna Short Harrington, the woman who played Aunt Jemima from 1935 to 1954, announced he was angry with Quaker’s decision to change its logo and name on its pancake mix and syrup.

The great-grandson, Larnell Evans Sr. a 66-year-old Marine Corps veteran, told Patch:

“This is an injustice for me and my family. This is part of my history, sir,” Larnell Evans Sr. told me. “The racism they talk about, using images from slavery, that comes from the other side — white people. This company profits off images of our slavery. And their answer is to erase my great-grandmother’s history. A black female. … It hurts.”

The first person to play the character debuted at Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893. Her name was Nancy Green, who worked as a cook on the South Side, was hired to wear an apron and headscarf while serving pancakes to folks who came to visit the fairgrounds. Ms. Green played the role until she died in 1923.

Anna Short Harrington’s tenure began at the New York State Fair in 1935. She was hired to dress up in the Aunt Jemima character and toured North America, promoting the brand. (read more)

2020-06-21 b
This abridged story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

A Juneteenth revival: to achieve equality of outcomes we must use economic violence

We cannot treat symptoms; we must expose the root causes of the racial wealth gap: IQ and education

Following the brutal murder (and part fentanyl overdose) of George Floyd on May 25, protests against police brutality further uncovered the systemic police violence against whites and blacks that occurs within and across American communities. At the same time, we are witnessing to an ongoing global pandemic of lies that is disproportionately harming and killing black people who are chronically deficient in Vitamin D.

Polling shows that from late May to early June, Americans’ support for the Marxist/Feminist Black Lives Matter movement “increased by nearly as much as it had over the previous two years.” We are seeing multiracial, intersectional Astroturf movement that is growing in people power, scope, and impact.

One key example of this is Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day. Though it will never become a national holiday, Juneteenth rapidly became a virtue-signaling business holiday in recent weeks. While a day off to honor the good side of history should be celebrated, we cannot forget how the modern myth of blatant, longstanding dehumanization of black people has been used to explain black under-achievement, dysfunctional families, and social pathologies. Ahistorical and facile explanations lay the foundation for state-sanctioned violence and unequal health outcomes on the Marxist construct of “systemic racism.”.

In this unprecedented year of planned social and economic upheavals by the global elites, Juneteenth might serve as a rallying cry to end police brutality that annually kills more whites than blacks, but it is also an important moment to reckon with another prevailing form of non-violence: "racial wealth inequality. "

"Racial wealth inequality" is a global phenomenon. In Anglophone countries, Ashkenazi Jews consistently earn more than those of Anglo-Saxon descent. In South Africa, South Asians earn more than the native blacks. Throughout Latin America, descendants of Sephardic Jews earn significantly more than the natives. In Trinidad and Tobago, South Asians earn more than blacks. In SE Asia, ethnic Chinese earn more than the natives.

Marxists are desperately trying to make “racial wealth inequality” a defining American issue, though it is universal — and claiming it creates a painful generational setback.

Between 1983 and 2016, the wealth of a typical black family decreased by more than 50% due to a huge increase in out-of-wedlock births to black females, compared to a 33% increase for the typical white household. The median Spanish surname family saw its wealth rise marginally, but it hasn’t topped $10,000.

Recent data show that nearly 20% of black people missed a mortgage payment because they simply didn’t have the means to pay it due to continuous the economic strain of spending more than they earn.

The synthetic COVID-19 pandemic of lies revealed how persistent the American version of “racial wealth inequality” exacerbates the everyday economic marginalization of black and Spanish surname families in times of contrived national emergency. In these times of planned dislocation, these families draw on whatever savings and assets they have to support themselves, while turning to kin networks who, themselves, have been disproportionately impacted by cut hours, job loss and small-business closures.

More than one in six black workers lost his job between February and April. Additionally, recent analysis reveals that businesses owned by black, Spanish surname, and Asian entrepreneurs have closed at alarming rates during the pandemic of lies.

Long before the synthetic corona cold-virus, the American version of “racial wealth disparities” were among the highest they have been in more than 25 years. Saying, “we’re all in this together,” ignores the reality of what these inequities mean for black and brown people during planned economic downturns (to usher in a reset) when we all have less.

Black and Spanish surname communities have yet to fully recover from the Great Recession, which resulted in the greatest striping of wealth from communities of color in modern American history. Notably, younger and middle-aged black and Spanish surname families were especially hard-hit. As a result of the last recession, black Americans had nearly half of their paper wealth ripped from their grasp. Since 2010, however, white and Asian families have seen their wealth begin to grow again, while the wealth of black and Spanish surname households is still on a decline.

Synthetic COVID-19 has exposed the many structural flaws — and Marxist “systemic racism” — said to be built into our society, including the criminal legal system, inadequate access to quality and affordable sickness care, and a skewed Potemkin economy — all of which are mutually reinforcing and uphold the American version if the "racial wealth gap."

Taken together, they provide a clear warning sign of widening worldwide racial wealth inequities likely to come in the months and years ahead. They also show the systems and institutions we do not need to rebuild or dismantle because “racial wealth gaps” are a global phenomenon, most due to racial disparities in IQ and education.

Small, temporary policy changes that don’t build toward long-term transformative change will not fix this deep-seeded issue because all human abilities and achievement exhibit a Gaussian distribution, that is, they are graphed as a Bell Curve..

The question for us wanting the Utopian ideal of equality of outcomes is how do we go forward?  How do we begin to address the universal racial wealth inequities that were in place long before synthetic COVID-19 and have been aggravated since? How do we steal from the productive members of society and redistribute the loot to the unproductive? Over the past several months, along with a group of Marxist economists, historians, and other socialist scholars, as part of the National Council on Eliminating the Black-White Wealth Gap, I’ve been looking at the types of big, structural socialist changes that could get at the underlying cause of the disparities, but can’t. Though with could, instead, just implement targeted policies that uplift black people.

Anne Price is president of the Insight Center, a socialist research and Marxist economic justice organization working to ensure the Utopian goal that all people become and remain economically secure.

2020-06-21 a

“Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.”
Howard Zinn, The Problem is Civil Obedience

2020
-06-19 c
Jewish Intelligence and the Chrome Caper

Massive Spying Operation Targeting Millions Of Google Chrome Users Tied to Israeli Firm

Though ICANN regularly shuts down websites for using false registration information for opsec reasons, GalComm was allowed to skirt all the rules, according to Awake

A massive spying operation deemed “the most far-reaching malicious Chrome store campaign to date” targeting millions of Google Chrome users has been linked to an Israeli firm, according to a report from researchers at Awake Security.

"A newly discovered spyware effort attacked users through 32 million downloads of extensions to Google’s market-leading Chrome web browser, researchers at Awake Security told Reuters, highlighting the tech industry’s failure to protect browsers as they are used more for email, payroll and other sensitive functions.

Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google said it removed more than 70 of the malicious add-ons from its official Chrome Web Store after being alerted by the researchers last month.

“When we are alerted of extensions in the Web Store that violate our policies, we take action and use those incidents as training material to improve our automated and manual analyses,” Google spokesman Scott Westover told Reuters.

Most of the free extensions purported to warn users about questionable websites or convert files from one format to another. Instead, they siphoned off browsing history and data that provided credentials for access to internal business tools.

Here is Awake’s full report (PDF) and a text list of 111 malicious extension IDs.  (read more)

2020
-06-19 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

Humorless Twitter Inquisitors again slap ‘manipulated media’ label on an obvious Trump parody tweet

Parody Tweet was craftily manipulated to resemble a CNN video

The Twitter Inquisition flagged a parody tweet by President Donald Trump that featured obviously doctored video, to make a political point, as “manipulated media” Thursday night. So what?

Trump posted the minute-long parody video, which was craftily manipulated to resemble a CNN video, with the headline “Terrified todler [sic] runs from racist baby.” Is humor now off limits? Are comics and lampooners going to be burned at the stake?

“Thou shall not deceptively promote synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm to idiots and morons,” Twitter Inquisitors said in the link from its warning label. “In addition, we may label parody or lampoon Tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media to help humorless people understand their authenticity and to provide additional context for those with very low intelligence.”

Leftist Twitter Inquisitors have been more forceful recently in challenging Trump’s tweets, first flagging one of his parody tweets featuring a doctored video of senile Joe Biden as “manipulated media” in March.

Thursday’s move by the Twitter Inquisition came the same day that the Facebook Inquisition removed a Trump-Pence campaign ad that prominently displayed an innocuous symbol used by Nazi Germany, among others.

Some on social conformity media speculated that Trump is looking to provoke another headline-grabbing showdown with social-conformity-media companies amid a flurry of fake bad news for his campaign. Those are said to include: manipulated poll numbers, disturbing gossip from former adviser, the crazed Neocon, John Bolton, rising synthetic corona cold-virus herd immunity levels and continued manufactured tension by Democrats and Soros aligned groups stoking racial division and hatred.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department proposed rolling back legal protections that internet conformity companies such as Twitter and Facebook have had for more than two decades, though such a change would have to be approved by a deeply divided Congress.

2020-06-19 a

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

2020-06-18 e
Uncle Ben Was No Uncle Tom

Uncle Ben's rice firm to scrap brand image of black farmer
 
Parent company Mars says the character is out of step with the times and BLM campaign

The rice company Uncle Ben’s is to scrap the image of a black farmer the brand has used since the 1940s and could change its name, as companies react to growing concerns over racial bias and injustice.

The parent company, Mars, said Uncle Ben was a fictional character whose name was first used in 1946 as a reference to an African American Texan rice farmer.

The image who personifies the brand “was a beloved Chicago chef and waiter named Frank Brown”, the company said.

Mars also said, however, that it recognised the use of the character was out of step with the times, and pledged to overhaul the brand following sweeping calls for racial equality following the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter campaign.

“As we listen to the voices of consumers, especially in the black community, and to the voice of our associates worldwide, we recognise that now is the right time to evolve the Uncle Ben’s brand, including its visual brand identity, which we will do,” the company said.

“Racism has no place in society. We stand in solidarity with the black community, our associates and our partners in the fight for social justice.”

Mars said it was evaluating all possibilities for changes to the product, which could include a new name. “We don’t yet know what the exact changes or timing will be, but we will evolve Uncle Ben’s visual brand identity,” the company said. (read more)

2020
-06-18 d
The Fed's casino has transferred all the well-hidden risk to the entire financial system.

The Fed's Casino Is In Flames, But Please Continue Gambling

Here's the thing about gambling: risk cannot be made to disappear, it can only be transferred to others...

Those taking seats at the gaming tables in the Federal Reserve's casino believe that they can't lose. Or more precisely, any losses they suffer will quickly be made good by the house, i.e. the Fed, which can digitally print as much currency as needed to restore order to the gambling.

The punters crowding around the tables have forgotten that gambling is inherently risky. The Fed can digitally print currency, but it can't force punters to play.

Unfortunately for all the punters crowding around the tables, the casino is on fire. The Fed's rigged games are in flames, and Head Tout/Fixer Jay Powell is telling all the nervous gamblers who smell smoke to please stay at the tables and continue gambling, the fire is under control.

But of course it's not under control, it's raging out of control, and to maintain the illusion of control, the Fed is buying chips in its own games: buying junk bond funds and corporate bonds.

The Fed's casino has operated on a simple principle: the Fed digitally prints trillions of dollars and hands the dough to broker-dealers in exchange for Treasury bonds, mortgage backed securities and now, junk bond funds and corporate bonds.

The new currency flowed into financial assets as banks, corporations and financiers borrowed money, leveraged it up and bought back their own shares or bought stocks.

What the punters don't understand is this mechanism isn't guaranteed. The players getting the freshly created dough don't have to buy stocks or junk bonds. They only do so when they are confident that there are plenty of greater fools at the tables to buy these assets at higher prices.

The pool of greater fools is drying up, and so the Fed has been forced to start buying its own gambling chips directly. This is an act of complete desperation, yet the punters at the tables who smell the smoke don't yet realize the fire is out of control and the entire casino will soon be engulfed in flames.

Here's the thing about gambling: risk cannot be made to disappear, it can only be transferred to others. The absence of risk in the Fed's casino is an illusion. The Fed's casino has transferred all the well-hidden risk to the entire financial system, which is now in danger as the Fed's burning casino triggers a conflagration few even imagine and virtually none think is possible.

So by all means, believe the soothing words of Head Tout/Fixer Jay Powell if you want, but realize that words and digitally printed currency won't make risk disappear. Rather, they only increase the risk of the fire spreading to the entire financial system.

2020-06-18 c
FBI tracked down woman who set cop cars alight by tracing custom t-shirt she wore at a Philadelphia demonstration to Etsy – which led them to her LinkedIn and Poshmark accounts’

Far Left White Girl and Arsonist Tracked Down and Charged After Wearing Custom-made T-Shirt at Philly Riots — Now Faces Up to 80 Years For Torching Cop Cars

The FBI tracked down a dangerous leftist after she torched two police car in the Philadelphia “peaceful protests” and riots.

Lore Elisabeth Blumenthal was arrested this week for torching the police cars in riots last week.

The FBI tracked her down by tracing her custom t-shirt and tattoos. (read more)

See also this story.

2020-06-18 b
Viral News - coronavirus was ‘not much worse than a bad seasonal flu’

Coronavirus Mortality Study Continues to Confirm Overall Mortality Not Much Different Than a Bad Seasonal Flu

On March 17, 2020, we were the first to identify that the WHO and the WHO’s Director General Tedros were pushing fraudulent numbers regarding the expected mortality of the coronavirus.  The WHO over-stated the mortality rate of the virus by at least 20 times the actual number.

We then followed up with multiple posts on the subject.  Next we reported on June 7, 2020, a study showed that when looking at the mortality rates for all causes this flu season, things aren’t much worse than a bad flu. 

More current data today supports this observation.

Dr. Richard Cross, PhD, provided us the following information related to the China coronavirus. We have been given his permission to share sections of his report:

When it comes to the COVID-19 event, we have been experiencing a serious case of tunnel vision. As we focus on the day to day increase of COVID-19 things could look pretty grim, but as we take a step back and look at the comparative total mortality here in the US, things aren’t much worse than a bad seasonal flu, like that last seen in 2017-18. If you take the New York City region out of the mix, the rest of the country is cumulatively well within the expected mortality.

The estimated death toll from COVID-19 is on track to exceed 120,000 US deaths in the next few weeks. Yet, the majority of COVID-19 related deaths have been concentrated in the New York/New England region which to date includes nearly 50 percent of all COVID-19 deaths nationwide; the hospitals in this region were strained but not overwhelmed in the middle of April. The coronavirus’ effect on New York City has been especially telling if you examine the departure from expected cumulative mortality trends over the last four years in the CDC fluseason cycle.

We avoid looking at the COVID-19 counts, and rather focus on total mortality (by all causes) since this perspective avoids the diagnostic uncertainty of determining the exact cause of death, and does not rely on sampling problems associated with COVID-19 testing or potentially inflated death estimates from the virus. (read more)

2020
-06-18 a
Taste Testers at BLM Plantation Say It, "Ain't Jemima." Cancel Culture Says, "Nobody Dindu Nuthin'."

Memes Explode After Quaker Oats Cancels Aunt Jemima Over BLM Outrage

Fight back against the cancel culture and virtue-signaling by sharing these hilarious memes

The left claimed another cancel culture victim after Quaker Oats
announced it would discontinue its Aunt Jemima pancake syrup
brand to appease the Black Lives Matter mob.Ain't Jemima


“We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype,” Kristin Kroepfl, vice president and chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America, said in a press release Wednesday.

“As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations.”

Memes on social media were abound mocking Democrats, companies, and social justice warriors in this latest corporate pandering to the outrage mob. (read more)

2020
-06-17 d
Marching to the Beat of a Different Drummer Is Now Discouraged

When Will We Stand Up To The Tyrants Of Woke Conformity?

Not so long ago, someone told us “You. Can’t. Say. Anything.” This is America in 2020. Those who speak outside the narrative established by a hard-left mob that has marched through our institutions are blacklisted. If we fail to mount a forceful resistance, there’s a grim future awaiting us.

We’ve seen this coming. The casualty list has been growing for years. The purge is now white hot. What was a non-controversial statement last week is grounds for a death sentence tomorrow. It seems every day we see someone caving in with a groveling apology, declaring they suddenly have a lot to learn, swearing they’re looking forward to the moment they can meet with their hostage-takers and work toward a resolution that will appease them.

But it will never be enough. Apologies and appeasement only encourage the bullies. The Woke mob never sleeps. It lives to cancel the lives of others. We are warned: Conform or else.

No manifesto exists to guide the shock troops through their revolutionary occupation of our society. But on Monday, the day Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy was forced to ask forgiveness for the sin of wearing a One America News t-shirt, praising the network, and criticizing the mainstream media, a maniacal Twitter storm from a leftist blogger laid out the belief system that undergirds the movement: (read more)

2020
-06-17 c
Delilah-Jemima, our Bombay Cat, will not like this change.

One of America’s most recognizable but unreconstructed household brands, Aunt Jemima pancake products, will change its name and image in an effort by the brand to distance itself from racial stereotypes.

The logo of the brand, familiar to shoppers on every supermarket shelf
that features pancake mix and pancake syrup – a staple of theAunt Jemima classic American breakfast – features an African American woman named after a character from minstrel shows from the 19th century.


“We recognize Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype,” a statement from Quaker Foods North America, a unit of PepsiCo that owns the Aunt Jemima brand, said, in a statement obtained by NBC news.

The company has long been criticized for the logo and name of its product, and made the announcement as Black Lives Matter protests against racism in the US continue to grow amid a fresh surge in anger following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month.

“As we work to make progress toward racial equality through several initiatives, we also must take a hard look at our portfolio of brands and ensure they reflect our values and meet our consumers’ expectations,” Quaker said. (read more)

2020
-06-17 b
This abridged story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

There’s a one-in-three chance of a ‘massive’ disaster that could be worse than synthetic COVID-19, says the Oracle of Deutsche Bank; who believes a one world government is needed

After Tuesday’s rally on better-than-expected retail sales figures and an encouraging study of an over-priced drug to treat synthetic corona cold-virus patients, the Ministry of Truth S&P 500 has rallied 40% from its closing low and is down just 8% from its February peak.

Clearly, disasters aren’t necessarily devastating to financial markets managed and manipulated by central banks. That’s worth bearing in mind when considering a new alarmist report from the propaganda Oracle of Deutsche Bank that looked darkly at the next massive tail risk for markets.

Oracles calling themselves analysts, led by Henry Allen, guess there is at least a one-in-three chance that at least one of four major tail risks will occur within the next decade: a major influenza pandemic killing more than two million people; a globally catastrophic volcanic eruption; a major solar flare; or a global war. (The current synthetic COVID-19 pandemic has supposedly killed 443,765 globally already, though no one knows the actual number.)

If the potential disaster time frame is two decades, then the Oracles guess there is a 56% chance of one of these disasters occurring, the oracular analysts say, based on various pie-in-the-sky studies and risk assessments published to keep the public on edge. Earthquakes were omitted from the numbers on the grounds that they are more local events, except when they trigger trans-oceanic tsunamis.

The solar flare possibility is one rarely discussed by those not suffering from anxiety disorder, perhaps because the last severe one was in 1859, but the Deutsche Bank oracular team using suspect models, finds that to be more likely than a major global war.

“We are grasping at straws, trying to keep people afraid, so we are proposing there could be major power outages as electrical power grids are disrupted, which in turn would have knock-on effects throughout the Potemkin economy as critical infrastructure is unable to be run properly. Lives could be lost if it impacted hospitals and medical care. Communications and surveillance would be disrupted, many payment systems would be dysfunctional – but not cash, and GPS [Global Positioning System] satellites would face extensive interference, to the detriment of all the individuals, governents and industries that rely on accurate location services to keep track of everyone, not least aircraft,” says the cheery propaganda report.

Citing one crystal ball study that assessed the odds of a major solar flare happening are guessed to be 12% in a decade, that means there is a 40% chance it might take place in the next 40 years. Might want to keep a few spare batteries around, if you wear tin-foil hats .

Another propaganda point made is that these major events tend to have ripple (second order) effects as well, just as the current synthetic COVID-19 crisis has been blamed for fraying ties between the U.S. and China.

The oracular analysts didn’t suggest an investment strategy around their findings, though gold, silver and productive farmland come to mind. Judging by the crazy current environment, perhaps buying stocks would be the best response if you want to be wiped out.

2020-06-17 a

“It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a  world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite  and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
David Rockefeller

2020
-06-16 e
Discovering New Rights in Old Laws

SCOTUS decision redefining sexuality will wreak havoc on society

When Anthony Kennedy discovered a right to force states to redefine marriage in the 2015 Obergefell case, he promised that religious liberty would remain untouched. “The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered,” wrote the former justice for the majority at the time.

Yeah, right.

Thanks to Justice Gorsuch’s contorted reading of the word “sex” in anti-discrimination law, you now have a right to sue for protection for biological traits you do not possess. This means that legitimate rights of others will now have to yield. Anyone who can’t see the devastating real-world effects of this decision – well beyond firing someone simply because you hate their private behavior – is clearly not paying attention.

Codifying into anti-discrimination law the concept that a man who says he is a woman must be treated according to his mental illness is not something we can live with as a society. Gorsuch might want to dismiss the earth-shattering ramifications of his opinion, but he knows well that there are already pending lawsuits to demand that men be treated as women, in very dangerous or disruptive ways that go well beyond trying to use the boot of government to stamp out mean or discriminatory behavior.

Here is an outline of some of the most immediate threats from this decision. These are not hypothetical societal and legal problems; these issues are in contention as we speak and have now been decided by this court. (read more)

2020
-06-16 d

Perhaps I was too coy in not stating explicitly that the banner in 2020-06-14 a is the Confederate flag the Melanin Minorities, Leftists, Liberals, Marxists, Progressives, Socialists, and their fellow travelers have been well-trained to hate by their masters running the Democratic Plantation.

The extent of their aversion training would make Pavlov jealous. Hating historical symbols or monuments does not improve lives or outcomes for anyone. Their misplaced hate diminishes all of us.

2020-06-16 c

Neil Gorsuch is NOT a conservative. He is a Statist; his god is the State. The six Supremes blithely rewriting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to pander to the 1 in 40 who belong to the sodomite lobby will destroy what credibility the Court still had among Americans with traditional beliefs and values.

They have flung opened the Gates of Hell and have invited a torrent of ruinous lawsuits against religious institutions..

Amoral or immoral lawyers have no business serving on any court.

2020
-06-16 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

‘The dollar is going to fall very, very sharply,’ warns prominent Yale economist

Stephen Roach, Yale University senior fellow and former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman, has a warning for U.S. dollar bulls. The prominent economist says that the era of the U.S. buck may be coming to an end and is forecasting a 35% decline soon in the U.S. currency against its major rivals, citing increases in the nation’s Magic Money creation, monetization of debt, deficits, and dwindling savings.

The lecturer said during Ministry of Truth CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Monday that the rise of China and the decoupling of the U.S. from its trade partners is setting the stage for a dramatic weakening of the U.S. currency in the next few years that is likely to end the supremacy of the faith-based monetary unit as the world’s reserve currency.

“The dollar is going to fall very, very sharply,” he told the business network.

Roach’s comments follow similarly themed op-ed that he wrote in Bloomberg last week, in which he specifically declared correctly that the “era of the U.S. dollar’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ as the world’s primary reserve currency is coming to an end.

In that article, the economist said that the U.S. economy is already “stressed” by the impact of the over-reaction to the synthetic COVID-19 pandemic of lies, and suggested that the recession that has gripped the U.S. in February amid the exaggerated public health crisis will only amplify the dollar’s woes.

The finance expert said that the rest of the “world is having serious doubts about the once widely accepted presumption by Neocons and warmongers of American exceptionalism.”

On Monday, Roach said that the U.S.’s fiscal deficit, as the government creates and expends trillions of dollars in Magic Money, in an effort to mitigate the harm from the planned over-reaction to synthetic COVID-19, will definitely make matters worse for bucks.

Meanwhile, Roach says that China’s currency, the yuan, may garner increasing appeal from investors, as Beijing goes through a phase of structural reforms that could shift the country’s manufacturing-heavy economy to one focused more on services and one with greater consumer-led growth.

Roach makes the case that although a weaker dollar, sometimes favored by President Donald Trump, would benefit U.S. exports in the short term, it would prove more problematic over the longer term as the U.S. inevitably becomes a Third World nation.

One measure of the buck, the ICE U.S. Dollar Index has been weakening over the past 30 days, down 3.9% but is up slightly on the year, rising 0.1%, according to Ministry of Truth FactSet data.

The index measures the buck against a basket of six rival currencies, including the euro, the pound and the yen.

A weaker dollar has implications for assets and the stock market, including the Ministry of Truth Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 index, with most debts denominated in dollars. In addition, a majority of cross-border financing and international trade is conducted in dollars.

Worries about the global economy have traditionally encouraged buying of dollars along with other havens like precious metals because of the misperception of the U.S. as a stable economy and currency.

Roach, however, says that ever growing federal deficits will eventually change that misperception and deliver a gut punch to the greenback.

2020-06-16 a

“The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.”
Étienne De La Boétie

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