Similarities are starting to be drawn between Hong Kong’s mass rallies and France’s Yellow Vest movement: according to Bloomberg, both are “hard to pin down” and both are evolving. It’s a “recipe for trouble” for each country’s respective government.
The Hong Kong protests that started against legislation that would enable extradition back to the mainland have now grown to include cries for Lam’s resignation and investigations into police abuse during the protests themselves.
One anonymous 28 year protester in Hong Kong said:
“We have to continue to protest until our demands are met. There is no end in sight.”
Hong Kong is bracing for more protests on Friday while Chief Executive Carrie Lam tries to decide whether or not to make concessions, like French President Emmanuel Macron did, to take the wind out of the sails of some of the protests.
Hong Kong opposition lawmaker Claudia Mo said about the French protesters:
“We find them very inspiring. The most direct similarity is the continuation of actions. The most dissimilar is the looting. I just cannot imagine anyone looting shops, cracking cars or burning taxis to make a point—that’s not Hong Kong.”
Even though Lam shelved the bill that spurred the protests in March to begin with, rallies have evolved and expanded to additional grievances. Both Hong Kong and France are not strangers to street protests. Student protests in France in 1968 “defined the era” and the Yellow Vest protests drew comparisons with their intensity.
The movement was organized by social media groups and mobilized hundreds of thousands of people each Saturday to protest fuel prices, before evolving into protests on the French state. Fringe elements of the group engaged in burning cars, looting and torching shops. The Arc de Triomphe was even vandalized during riot battles with police.
In Hong Kong last week, protesters targeted the liaison office of China’s central government in the center of the city and, as we reported, Triad members attacked pro-democracy protesters in a train station.
Kenneth Yeung, a doctoral student from Hong Kong with a focus on social movements at the Université Paris Diderot said: “It’s about the pent-up anger that’s accumulated in the five years since Occupy. Today, even those who have never participated in any movements are thinking they must do their part.”
The lack of unified leadership between both protests is an element that could be prolonging them. Leaderless movements “adapt and evolve” using encrypted messaging apps.
“The lack of a leader is the reason the movement is still continuing,” Yeung said.
France’s protests differ from Hong Kong’s in terms of motivation. France’s protests started as “an anti-globalization movement that saw in Macron a symbol of an out-of-touch elite that had let them down.” Hong Kong’s protests center around China, the territory’s China-picked leader, Lam.
Macron eventually gave in, addressed the nation, and initiated a platform where citizens could vent their frustrations. On December 10 he announced $11.1 billion in tax cuts and increased pension and welfare spending, in addition to organizing a national debate inclusive of 10,500 town hall meetings. His response helped quell the movement.
Lam doesn’t have such flexibility, as she must appease both her citizens – and Beijing.
James Shields, professor of French politics at the University of Warwick said: “Most of those people now stay home. But their yellow vests are still in their cars, ready to be worn again if Macron presses on with a reform agenda that hits ordinary French citizens in their pockets.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/310rl9b Tyler Durden
In a recent interview with CBS This Morning host Gayle King, former First Lady Michelle Obama contrasted her husband’s presidency with that of his successor by claiming that unlike Trump, the Obama family had had “no scandal”.
“I had to sit in [Trump’s inauguration] audience, one of a handful of people of color and then listen to that speech, and all that I had sort of held onto for eight years, watching my husband get raked over the coals, feeling like we had to do everything perfectly, you know, no scandal,” Obama said.
“Yeah,” King responded.
“No nothing,” Obama said “No nothing!”
“Yes. No scandal,” King said.
You hear this claim a lot from Democrats. There was a viral tweet with tens of thousands of shares shortly before the 2016 election which read, “8 years. No scandals. No mistresses. No impeachment hearings. Just class and grace, personified.” It’s a very common refrain which resurfaces in memes and tweets periodically, usually as criticisms of the sitting president.
Of course, the only reason anyone can attempt to claim that Barack Obama had “no scandals” is because in our bat shit crazy world, murdering, oppressing and exploiting large numbers of people isn’t considered scandalous.
8 years. No scandals. No mistresses. No impeachment hearings. Just class and grace, personified. I sure am going to miss this family. pic.twitter.com/TmLwUyBytn
In a sane, healthy world, a presidency like Obama’s would be looked upon with abject horror. Actually in a sane, healthy world a warmongering Wall Street crony like Obama would never have been elected in the first place, but if you were to show the members of a healthy, harmonious society the way that president used his power to do what he did to Libya and Syria, to continue and expand all of Bush’s most evil policies, to divert the push for economic justice into a neoliberal orgy for eight years, those people would recoil in absolute revulsion.
The only reason liberals think Obama had a low-key, drama-free presidency is because that presidency was normalized for them by the establishment narrative managers of the political/media class. If that class had been shrieking about Obama’s warmongering, surveillance expansion, persecution of whistleblowers, crony capitalism etc in the way that it’s been shrieking about Trump’s nonexistent Russia ties or his obnoxious tweets, these same people would see Obama as a horrible monster. But the propagandists didn’t do that, because it would hinder the cause of bloodthirsty imperialism abroad and crushing austerity at home.
The plutocrat-owned media and the plutocrat-owned politicians have the ability to control what people view as normal and what they view as weird, just by not reacting with alarm to occurrences they want normalized and reacting hysterically to occurrences they want rejected.
Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s fairly mild differences with US foreign policy orthodoxy, for example, are treated as so freakishly bizarre that you routinely see establishment pundits making fascinatingly absurd statements about her and getting away with it.The Hill’s Reid Wilson posted a tweet that got thousands of likes and shares saying “Hot take/prediction: Tulsi Gabbard is going to endorse Trump in the end.” Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden shared Wilson’s tweet with the hysterical caption, “My prediction: Tulsi runs as third party Green candidate to help Trump win. I will take bets on this.” Again, thousands of likes and retweets.
My prediction: Tulsi runs as third party Green candidate to help Trump win. I will take bets on this. https://t.co/PJ1RjnNoVF
Neither of these things are going to happen. Both Wilson and Tanden know they will never happen. Gabbard is a fairly conventional center-left Democrat who just wants to scale back US warmongering somewhat; she’s so well within the establishment-authorized Overton window that she just voted in favor of a House anti-BDS bill for Christ’s sake. But because she opposes a few aspects of the forever war and says it’s a good idea to communicate with world leaders who the US government doesn’t like, establishment attack dogs are acting like Hawaii’s second congressional district is being represented by some kind of eldritch tentacle beast from the Andromeda Galaxy.
I’m highlighting some of the more glaring recent examples here, but this sort of thing is happening all the time with varying degrees of subtlety. The public’s perceptions of events are continually being distorted by an establishment narrative management machine which controls what people view as normal and what they view as abnormal. You notice this very quickly when you start cultivating your news sense and paying attention to what news stories the mass media choose to give tons of coverage to and what stories they all but ignore; you notice almost immediately that there’s very little connection between how important a story is and how much news coverage it receives. The factor that determines the extent of coverage is the advancement of establishment interests and advertising revenue, in that order. Actual newsworthiness barely registers.
The way to rob the narrative managers of their ability to manipulate our sense of normalcy is to create an image of a sane and healthy world for ourselves to hold onto at all times, and to make that image into our own personal sense of what normal is. By having a vivid picture of what a sane and healthy world would look like in your mind, the false normal that the propagandists are trying to sell you will have no purchase.
Many people want to change the world, but hardly anyone ever sits down and creates a clear, positive image for themselves of a world in which all positive changes have been successfully put into full effect. Most people tend to just look at the current hot topic debates they’re seeing in the news over healthcare, immigration policies, gun control, austerity policies, abortion, LGBTQ issues, police brutality etc, and hope that those specific issues are resolved in their preferred way. But what if you zoomed out to a much bigger picture and imagined a healthy and harmonious world in which all our major problems have been resolved, and we’ve built something beautiful together? What would that be like?
I can’t envision such a world for you, because you and I will have different ideas about what a perfectly healthy and harmonious world looks like. I’m not trying to give you a specific image, I’m trying to get you to make a solid, lucid image of your own creation that can’t be replaced by the false normal the narrative managers are trying to implant in your mind day in and day out. Don’t hold back; go all the way and make the world as perfect as possible. All your ideas about what changes you might make are “realistic” or “unrealistic” are corrupted by propaganda anyway, so just create a perfect world.
She only gets to say this because in our bat shit crazy world, murdering, exploiting and oppressing large numbers of people isn’t considered scandalous. https://t.co/RhUJmjXnli
This is worth setting aside an hour or two and investing some serious mental energy into. Once you’ve got a positive image of a healthy and harmonious world, and once you have a really clear image of what it would be like to live in that world, it’s kind of like you become someone from that imaginary world who stepped into this one and gets to see it for the first time. You get to see life through the eyes of someone for whom “normal” isn’t endless violence, oppression, exploitation and degradation, but for whom normal is the absence of those things. This makes all of the insanity in this world stand out like a black fly on a white sheet of paper, and gives you the ability to clearly see and describe precisely what needs to change about our situation here.
You’ve already had a taste of this if you’ve ever had the unfortunate experience of having to explain what war is to a small child. Nothing about war makes sense to a creature who is looking at this world with fresh eyes; the confusion and upset which immediately flashes over their face will make you feel like an idiot even if you oppose war, just for being a part of a world where grown-ups engage in such idiotic behavior. Someone who came into this world from a healthy and harmonious parallel earth would see it very much the same way.
Imagine if war weren’t normalized. Imagine if a US plane dropping a bomb on foreign soil and ripping human bodies to shreds was treated as the horrific event that it actually is and given weeks of extensive investigative coverage, instead of something that happens many times every single daywithout any mention at all. A pundit on Fox or MSNBC will tell you that you’re a delusional imbecile if you think this should cease immediately. Anyone who’s seeing our world with unindoctrinated eyes knows you’re a delusional imbecile if you don’t.
All the injustices we’re trained like dogs to see as normal are like this. Corruption. Plutocracy. Wage slavery. The way the homeless are treated. The fact that there are homeless at all. Police militarization. The drug war. Prisons for profit. Government surveillance. Propaganda. All of these things are inherently disgusting, but we lose our accurate sense of disgust because we’ve been tricked into accepting them as normal. So remove the scales from your eyes by creating a new normal for yourself.
* * *
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Stock buybacks as a result of cheap debt in the United States have been one of the key catalysts helping ram the stock market higher without rhyme or reason for the last decade.
And it isn’t until the U.S. enters into a recession that we will find out exactly how value-destructive companies buying back their own stock at ridiculous prices will have been.
But India isn’t waiting around to find out.
This month, it imposed a curb on its companies’ share repurchases in order to close a loophole after introducing a dividend tax two years ago. The goal is to make sure that companies wind up paying something, no matter how they return cash to shareholders, according to Yahoo Finance. India has been taxing its markets for about 15 years, after it put a duty on most financial transactions.
The taxes haven’t stopped the growth of India’s equity market, which now exceeds $2 trillion. This makes it three quarters of the size of the country’s economy. There has been some protest from the industry, both in India and echoing on Wall Street, that the taxes do more harm than good.
Nilesh Shah, who helps oversee $25 billion in assets at Kotak Asset Management Co. said:
“We need to reduce taxation on markets rather than increase it. Trust in the market is missing in every way. India’s government treats market players as speculators, not investors.”
Of course, share buybacks and dividends are nearly as old as the capital markets themselves and are two ways to return value back to shareholders. The argument is that taxing hurts entrepreneurialism and ultimately the investment that policymakers want in the first place.
Jeffrey Pontiff, a finance professor at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management said: “The big assumption that people are making in the background when they talk about preventing or limiting repurchases is, well, if shareholders get this money they are going to drink champagne. In reality people are going to invest it in other ideas.”
Regardless, the 20% levy went into effect on July 23. Some companies had already abandoned their plans for share repurchases after the plan was announced on July 5.
A long-term capital gains tax of 10% on stock appreciation of more than 100,000 rupees ($1,449)
A 15% tax on companies distributing dividends, with a 10% levy on payouts exceeding 1 million rupees
A 10% tax on dividends paid out by equity mutual funds
A 0.1% tax on both the buyer and the seller in equity transactions. Differing levels of duties apply to transactions in bonds, mutual funds, commodities and stock derivatives
To help further address income inequality and fund the budget, the Modi administration this month unveiled plans to ramp up fees on the super-rich, with an income-tax surcharge on the highest earners more than doubling to 37%. The niggle there is that the move also affected some foreign investment vehicles. Perhaps not coincidentally, overseas investors pulled $1.8 billion in funds from Indian equities this month.
Samir Arora, the Singapore-based founder of Helios Capital Management said simply: “Forget about raising animal spirits — you have scared people.”
And these sentiments are echoing in the United States, too, as Republican Senator Marco Rubio has blasted the Trump administration for its tax cuts. Rubio has stated that the cuts benefit companies more than workers at a time where buybacks are at their highest in decades.
Alberto Manconi, a professor at Bocconi University in Milan said: “From both sides of the political spectrum, there are accusations that companies spend a lot of money on buybacks, and they invest less. That is an argument that is very puzzling to an academic. Whatever way you look at it, it is not clear the buyback is subtracting any money from the economy that could be used in a useful way.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30XehkP Tyler Durden
California is being hit by a “plague of rats”, and some commentators are suggesting that this is exactly what they deserve. In fact, some have even gone so far as to suggest that the name of Los Angeles should be formally changed to “Los Ratas” because the rat problem is so severe there. From Crescent City in the north all the way down to Chula Vista in the south, the rats are seemingly everywhere. There are millions of them, and the more poison that people put out the more they seem to multiply. The state of California has never seen anything like this before, and it is getting worse with each passing month.
Pest control and public health experts are calling on California Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a public health emergency over what they say is a sharp rise in the state’s rodent population.
“California is being overrun by rodents – and without immediate emergency action by state and local government, we face significant economic costs and risk a public health crisis,” said Carl DeMaio, chairman of Reform California, at a news conference Tuesday at City Hall in downtown Los Angeles.
It would be difficult to overstate the severity of this crisis. According to a recent survey of California pest control companies, rat service requests are up “as much as 60% in the last 12 months”.
If you have ever lived some place where you can literally hear rodents crawling in the walls and in the ceiling, then you know how deeply unsettling it can be.
And in some instances, rodents are literally starting to fall out of the ceilings in California. Just consider this example…
Maggots and mice have fallen onto inmates’ dining tables at a California state prison where holes in the roof also allow rain and bird droppings to seep through and streak the walls, according to an inmate lawsuit that charges the state isn’t moving fast enough to repair deteriorating prisons.
California has committed $260 million over four years to repair leaking roofs and clear dangerous mold at more than two dozen deteriorating prisons where the cost of overdue maintenance is pegged at more than $1 billion.
Customers at a Los Angeles, Calif., Buffalo Wild Wings were in for a stomach-churning incident when a rat reportedly fell from the ceiling and landed on a table.
Alisha Norman, who was visiting Los Angeles from Texas, was getting ready to order at the chain restaurant when she heard something crawling above her, she told FOX35. Soon after, a rat fell and landed on a menu on the table.
This isn’t some third world country that we are talking about. The state of California is the wealthiest state in the entire country, and they are being absolutely overrun by rats.
Of course it certainly doesn’t help that many California cities have a major trash collection problem. The following was published by NBC Los Angeles earlier this year…
Rat-infested piles of rotting garbage left uncollected by the city of Los Angeles, even after promises to clean it up, are fueling concerns about a new epidemic after last year’s record number of flea-borne typhus cases.
Even the city’s most notorious trash pile, located between downtown LA’s busy Fashion and Produce districts, continues to be a magnet for rats after it was cleaned up months ago. The rodents can carry typhus-infected fleas, which can spread the disease to humans through bacteria rubbed into the eyes or cuts and scrapes on the skin, resulting in severe flu-like symptoms.
Officials at Los Angeles’ City Hall are considering ripping all of the building’s carpets up, as rats and fleas are said to be running riot in its halls.
A motion was filed by Council President Herb Wesson on Wednesday to enact the much needed makeover amid a typhus outbreak in the downtown area.
Wesson said a city employee had contracted the deadly bacterial disease at work, and now he’s urging officials to investigate the ‘scope’ of the long-running pest problem at the council building.
When there is a huge problem like this that gets national attention, it is inevitable that California legislators will throw a lot more money at the problem, but that hasn’t worked so well in other cases.
For instance, two years ago New York Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a 32 million dollar program to fight the rat problem in his city, but that didn’t help. In fact, the number of rat complaints actually increased by 38 percent last year…
According to the New York Times, rat complaints have risen from 12,617 in 2014 to 17,353 last year. That’s a 38% jump citywide — and comes even after Mayor Bill de Blasio allocated $32 million in 2017 to reduce the number of the rodents.
And things are particularly bad on the Upper West Side. They may have mountains of money over there, but they just can’t seem to keep the rats away…
OpenTheBooks.com analyzed the number of calls for rats to 311 and found that, according to the Post, “the rats are running wild in this fancy area.”
A local publication called West Side Rag agreed that the Upper West Side has an extreme rat problem. “We’re like the Tom Brady of rats. All we do is win,” an article reads.
Despite all of our advanced technology, we cannot even handle the rats.
Somehow it seems fitting that the rat epidemic is most severe in the areas that are on the cutting edge of America’s social decline. In life, you can try to run from the consequences of your actions, but they will catch up with you eventually.
As I have discussed previously, under ideal conditions rats can multiply very, very rapidly. In fact, it has been estimated that two healthy rats could potentially become 482 million rats in just three years.
Perhaps Californians should just give up and let the rats take over. After all, they couldn’t possibly do any worse than the politicians in the state are currently doing.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2SGeFBx Tyler Durden
After a three-year investigation by journalist David Steinberg resulted in a House ethics complaint against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) calling for probes into potential crimes committed by Omar and her brother, the far-left Congresswoman has left her husband for the second time, and are heading for yet another divorce according to the Daily Mail.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), husband Ahmed Hirsi
Omar has now dumped her current husband Ahmed Hirsi – who she first married in a religious ceremony in 2002 and divorced in 2008 – and moved into a penthouse apartment in one of Minneapolis’s trendiest neighborhoods, DailyMail.com has learned exclusively.
But Hirsi, is also spending time at the apartment, which is in the Mill District sector of Minnesota’s largest city, when she is out of town.
…
‘Wow,’ said Hirsi, when approached about the split by DailyMail.com outside the complex. ‘I can’t comment on that.
‘I’m sorry, I just can’t say anything,‘ he added before driving off in his BMW car. –Daily Mail
Of note, Omar married UK citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who has been identified as her brother. The two divorced in 2017, after which Omar married Hirsi again in 2018.
Timeline of Omar’s two marriages via the Daily Mail
Omar has three children with the 39-year-old Hirsi, who has been seen going in and out of the $2,860 per month rental.
“He only goes there when Ilhan is in DC,” said one family friend. “When she’s in Minneapolis he sleeps at his house.”
Hirsi was noticeably absent when Omar returned to a hero’s welcome at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport last week after being attacked by President Donald Trump.
At the time, he was sitting morosely in a Starbucks coffee shop close to the now-overgrown home that he and Omar shared during their marriage, sources tell DailyMail.com.
Omar told supporters at the airport she would continue to be Trump’s ‘worst nightmare.’
‘His nightmare is seeing a Somali immigrant refugee rise to Congress,’ she said. ‘His nightmare is seeing the beautiful mosaic fabric of our country welcome someone like me as their member of Congress home to Minnesota. –Daily Mail
Crowds cheered her at the airport, then Minnesota representative, Ilhan Omar, told them what she came to do. pic.twitter.com/oGgwQgV3LY
The split with Omar may come at a great time for Hirsi, as his wife is currently the subject of much speculation. According to the Congressional complaint filed against her by Judicial Watch, “Substantial, compelling and, to date, unrefuted evidence has been uncovered that Rep. Ilhan Omar may have committed the following crimes in violation of both federal law and Minnesota state law: perjury, immigration fraud, marriage fraud, state and federal tax fraud, and federal student loan fraud.”
“The evidence is overwhelming Rep. Omar may have violated the law and House rules. The House of Representatives must urgently investigate and resolve the serious allegations of wrongdoing by Rep. Omar,” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “We encourage Americans to share their views on Rep. Omar’s apparent misconduct with their congressmen.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YuUsDX Tyler Durden
Hackers broke into Equifax’s databases and stole personal and financial records of 147 million people.
And we’re talking EVERYTHING– names, addresses, Social Security Numbers… all the ingredients that an identity thief needs to destroy your life.
Equifax was totally at fault; the company had sloppy, irresponsible controls in place to safeguard this critical personal data.
So sloppy, in fact, that the hackers had been inside their system pillaging data for 10 weeks before the company realized anything was wrong.
Perhaps that’s not such a surprise given that the company’s Chief Security Officer had zero credentials related to either IT or security.
Last week Equifax was fined $700 million by the US Federal Trade Commission.
I found this interesting, given that it took TWO YEARS for this fine to be issued… even though Equifax already admitted to wrongdoing.
(I wonder how much money the FTC wasted investigating this data breach…)
The other thing that sticks out, though, is that the $700 million fine is roughly the amount of money that Equifax used to make each year.
In 2016, for example, the last full year prior to the breach, Equifax’s operating cash flow was $796 million. And in 2015 it was $742 million.
So Equifax was fined less than a year’s profit… And by the way, that $700 million fine constitutes less than $5 for each of the 147 million people who had their data stolen.
On the black market (and in the Internet’s infamous ‘dark web’), that sort of personal data can easily fetch more than ten times that amount.
Less than half of the money will be earmarked for victims; the rest will end up in the government’s pocket.
Obesity is a “disability,” so you can’t discriminate
Some jobs are dangerous. And sometimes, they are even more dangerous when you are unhealthy, or obese.
A company in Washington required health screening before hiring a railroad technician. They had preset health standards for the job, for the safety of employees.
One man was given preliminary approval for the job, but his health screening revealed that he was considered obese by medical standards.
Instead of downright rejecting the man for the job, the company explained that it would still hire him if he lost 10% of his body weight.
Naturally, the man sued, claiming discrimination.
And now the Washington Supreme Court agreed that obesity is a covered disability, protected under the state’s anti-discrimination laws.
“It is illegal for employers in Washington to refuse to hire qualified potential employees because the employer perceives them to be obese. . .” even when being physically fit is a necessary job requirement.
The mobile phone app “FaceApp” has been hugely popular as of late; it allows users to upload images of their own faces, and, through digital editing, show you what your face would look like decades into the future.
It turns out that everyone who downloaded and used FaceApp gave the company a never-ending, irrevocable, royalty-free license to do whatever it wants with your name and pictures.
FaceApp could, for instance, use your picture on a billboard. Or they could edit the photo, and use it in a commercial for acne medicine. They could even put your real name next to the photo. Users gave them permission to do all of this.
But more likely, the company will sell the 150 million faces and names to whoever they want… probably a company training facial recognition programs.
The City of Berkeley, California goes gender neutral
In the City of Berkeley, California, manholes are now maintenance holes. Craftsmen are artisans. And pregnant women have become pregnant employees.
According to a new ordinance, all words and phrases written in the official city legal code must be changed to become gender neutral.
“Language has power. And the words we use are important,” the local politician who introduced the provision said.
That’s true. Which is why we have specific words that clearly refer to particular objects and ideas.
For instance, fraternities and sororities are supposed to refer to different things. But they are now known in Berkeley as “collegiate Greek system residencies.”
It’s not been a great week for the great-left-hopers.
Having been summarily embarrassed by Mueller’s performance, Democrats just lost another ‘fight’ as Bloomberg reports that the Supreme Court has cleared President Trump’s administration to start using disputed funds to construct more than 100 miles of fencing along the Mexican border.
The decision allows the president to take his biggest step yet toward erecting his long-promised wall.
How did we get here?
As The Hill details,U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam in California, an Obama appointee, issued a permanent injunction blocking officials from utilizing $2.5 billion of the roughly $6 billion in diverted military dollars, siding with the groups’ arguments that building the wall would cause “irreparable harm” to their interests at the border.
And the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling earlier this month, declined to temporarily halt that injunction, finding that “the use of those funds violates the constitutional requirement that the Executive Branch not spend money absent an appropriation from Congress.”
House Democrats also attempted to sue to stop the diversion of the Pentagon dollars for a wall, claiming that only lawmakers can allocate federal funding under the Constitution.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued that the needs of the administration outweighed those of groups like the ACLU and Sierra Club who are challenging the use of the Defense Department funds for the wall. And he said that if the funds remain frozen until the end of the fiscal year, authorities may not be able to use them at all.
And now, with the court’s four liberal justices at least partially dissenting, the justices lifted the lower court freeze, confirming the Trump administration can start using military funds to construct a wall on the southern border, handing the president a major legal victory.
Full decision below:
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZgWPay Tyler Durden
This is starting to feel like a Twilight Zone episode.
Having been embarrassed by Mueller’s mumblefest, it seems Democrats have merely cranked up their conspiracy theories in an effort to save themselves from mental health crises.
California Rep. Ted Lieu was the best example by far (which is saying something with Rep. Swalwell on the committee) as he gloated that, during his discussion with Special Counsel, Mueller dropped a potential bombshell that the reason he did not indict Trump for obstructing the Russia probe was because of a Justice Department office of legal counsel opinion that prohibits indicting sitting presidents.
“The reason again that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?” Lieu asked Mueller in the hearing.
“That is correct,” Mueller said.
This seemed to contradict Mueller’s own previous comments and his report, but nonetheless, Lieu excitedly took to Twitter to proclaim “nobody should be above the law” and various leftists quickly created memes suggesting #LockHimUp etc…
But – and it’s a big but… as Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross notes, before Democrats could celebrate too much, Mueller corrected his testimony when he appeared hours later before the House Intelligence Committee for a second round of testimony about his Russia investigation…
“Now before we go to questions, I want to add one correction to my testimony this morning,” Mueller began in his opening remarks.
“I want to go back to one thing that was said this morning by Mr. Lieu, who said, and I quote, ‘you didn’t charge the president because of the OLC opinion.’”
“That is not the correct way to say it,” he said, adding, “as we say in the report, and as I said in the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime.”
Crushing the dreams of every leftist.
But – and here’s the leap towards the irrational and mentally ill – Lieu suggested to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer during an interview later in the day that “somebody got to” Robert Mueller to force the former special counsel to correct his testimony. “[Y]ou say Mueller fully understood your question. Doesn’t Mueller’s correction, which he later provided, prove otherwise?” Blitzer asked.
“This is what’s so odd about that exchange. Special counsel Robert Mueller agreed that the OLC opinion prevented a sitting president from being indicted, and then the Republican member after me asked him a series of questions to try to get him to walk it back, and he did not do that.”
“And then it wasn’t until there was a recess with the Intel committee that he started to walk some of it back,” said Lieu.
“I don’t know who got to him. I don’t know who talked to him, but that was very odd, what he did.”
Blitzer asked Lieu, “What are you suggesting? … Are you saying he only did that because of pressure from someone?”
“I don’t know,” said Lieu, “but he clearly answered the way he answered to me, and then he had numerous times to walk that back by the next Republican member who asked him a series of questions on the exact same issue trying to get him to walk it back.”
Lieu then took one more step towards his insanity by analogizing the entire episode to a ham sandwich!!! We shit you not!
Analogy: Mueller gives us a slice of bread, puts ham on it, and then another slice of bread. We say that’s a ham sandwich. Mueller says I didn’t make a determination whether or not it’s a ham sandwich because I was instructed I can’t call it that.
And finally, as further evidence of the level of cognitive dissonance among the various never-Trump-ers, Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross just reported that “Nadler just cited Mueller’s exchange with Ted Lieu – which he later corrected – but without noting that it was corrected.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JYQFa9 Tyler Durden
[Editorial note: This remnant of a manuscript, discovered in a vault near the coastal town of Walpole, Massachusetts, appears to have been part of a larger project, probablyenvisioned as an interpretive history of the United States since the year 2000. Only a single chapter, probably written near the midpoint of the 21st century, has survived. Whether the remainder of the manuscript has been lost or the author abandoned it before its completion is unknown.]
Chapter 1: The Launch
From our present vantage point, it seems clear that, by 2019, the United States had passed a point of no return. In retrospect, this was the moment when indications of things gone fundamentally awry should have become unmistakable. Although at the time much remained hidden in shadows, the historic pivot now commonly referred to as the Great Reckoning had commenced.
Even today, it remains difficult to understand why, given mounting evidence of a grave crisis, passivity persisted for so long across most sectors of society. An epidemic of anomie affected a large swath of the population. Faced with a blizzard of troubling developments, large and small, Americans found it difficult to put things into anything approximating useful perspective. Few even bothered to try. Fewer succeeded. As with predictions of cataclysmic earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, a not-in-my-lifetime mood generally prevailed.
During what was then misleadingly known as the Age of Trump, the political classes dithered. While the antics of President Donald Trump provoked intense interest— the word “intense” hardly covers the attention paid to him — they also provided a convenient excuse for letting partisan bickering take precedence over actual governance or problem solving of any sort. Meanwhile, “thought leaders” (a term then commonly used to describe pontificating windbags) indulged themselves with various pet projects.
President Trump in 2019. (White House/Flickr)
In the midst of what commentators were pleased to call the Information Age, most ordinary Americans showed a pronounced affinity for trivia over matters of substance. A staggering number of citizens willingly traded freedom and privacy for convenience, bowing to the dictates of an ever-expanding array of personalized gadgetry. What was then called a “smartphone” functioned as a talisman of sorts, the electronic equivalent of a rosary or prayer beads. Especially among the young, separation from one’s “phone” for more than a few minutes could cause acute anxiety and distress. The novelty of “social media” had not yet worn off, with its most insidious implications just being discovered.
Divided, distracted, and desperately trying to keep up: these emerged then as the abiding traits of life in contemporary America. Craft beer, small-batch bourbon, and dining at the latest farm-to-table restaurant often seemed to matter more than the fate of the nation or, for that matter, the planet as a whole. But all that was about to change.
Scholars will undoubtedly locate the origins of the Great Reckoning well before 2019. Perhaps they will trace its source to the aftermath of the Cold War when American elites succumbed to a remarkable bout of imperial hubris, while ignoring (thanks in part to the efforts of Big Energy companies) the already growing body of information on the human-induced alteration of the planet, which came to be called “climate change” or “global warming.” While, generally speaking, the collective story of humankind unfolds along a continuum, by 2019 conditions conducive to disruptive change were forming. History was about to zig sharply off its expected course.
Craft beer was in vogue.
This disruption occurred, of course, within a specific context. During the first two decades of the 21st century, American society absorbed a series of punishing blows.
First came the contested election of 2000, the president of the United States installed in office by a 5-4 vote of a politicized Supreme Court, which thereby effectively usurped the role of the electorate. And that was just for starters.
Following in short order came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which the world’s (self-proclaimed) premier intelligence services failed to anticipate and the world’s preeminent military establishment failed to avert.
Less than two years later, the administration of George W. Bush, operating under the delusion that the ongoing war in Afghanistan was essentially won, ordered U.S. forces to invade Iraq, a nation that had played no part in the events of 9/11. The result of this patently illegal war of aggression would not be victory, despite the president’s almost instant “mission accomplished” declaration, but a painful replay of the quagmire that U.S. troops had experienced decades before in Vietnam. Expectations of Iraq’s “liberation” paving the way for a broader Freedom Agenda that would democratize the Islamic world came to naught. The Iraq War and other armed interventions initiated during the first two decades of the century ended up costing trillions of taxpayer dollars, while sowing the seeds of instability across much of the Greater Middle East and later Africa.
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 destroyed many areas of New Orleans. (Marines/Rocco DeFilippis)
Then, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf Coast, killing nearly 2,000 Americans. U.S. government agencies responded with breathtaking ineptitude, a sign of things to come, as nature itself was turning increasingly unruly. Other natural disasters of unnatural magnitude followed. In 2007, to cite but one example, more than 9,000 wildfires in California swept through more than a million acres. Like swarms of locusts, fires now became an annual (and worsening) plague ravaging the Golden State and the rest of the West Coast. If this weren’t enough of a harbinger of approaching environmental catastrophe, the populations of honeybees, vital to American agriculture, began to collapse in these very same years.
Americans were, as it turned out, largely indifferent to the fate of honeybees. They paid far greater attention to the economy, however, which experienced its own form of collapse in 2008. The ensuing Great Recession saw millions thrown out of work and millions more lose their homes as a result of fraudulent mortgage practices. None of the perpetrators were punished. The administration of President Barack Obama chose instead to bail out offending banks and large corporations. Record federal deficits resulted, as the government abandoned once and for all even the pretense of trying to balance the budget. And, of course, the nation’s multiple wars dragged on and on and on.
Protesters in NYC, Sept. 24, 2011. (Carwil Bjork-James via Flickr)
Through all these trials, the American people more or less persevered. If not altogether stoic, they remained largely compliant. As a result, few members of the nation’s political, economic, intellectual, or cultural elites showed any awareness that something fundamental might be amiss. The two established parties retained their monopoly on national politics. As late as 2016, the status quo appeared firmly intact. Only with that year’s presidential election did large numbers of citizens signal that they had had enough: wearing red MAGA caps rather than wielding pitchforks, they joined Donald Trump’s assault on that elite and, thumbing their noses at Washington, installed a reality TV star in the White House.
To the legions who had found the previous status quo agreeable, Trump’s ascent to the apex of American politics amounted to an unbearable affront. They might tolerate purposeless, endless wars, raise more or less any set of funds for the military that was so unsuccessfully fighting them, and turn a blind eye to economic arrangements that fostered inequality on a staggering scale. They might respond to the accelerating threat posed by climate change with lip service and, at best, quarter-measures. But Donald Trump in the Oval Office? That they could not abide.
As a result, from the moment of his election, Trump dominated the American scene. Yet the outrage that he provoked, day in and day out, had this unfortunate side effect: it obscured developments that would in time prove to be of far more importance than the 45th American president himself. Like the “noise” masking signals that, if detected and correctly interpreted, might have averted Pearl Harbor in December 1941 or, for that matter, 9/11, obsessing about Trump caused observers to regularly overlook or discount matters far transcending in significance the daily ration of presidential shenanigans.
Here, then, is a very partial listing of some of the most important of those signals then readily available to anyone bothering to pay attention. On the eve of the Great Reckoning, however, they were generally treated as mere curiosities or matters of limited urgency — problems to be deferred to a later, more congenial moment.
Item: The reality of climate change was now indisputable. All that remained in question was how rapidly it would occur and the extent (and again rapidity) of the devastation that it would ultimately inflict.
2013 Alder fire in Yellowstone National Park. (Mike Lewelling, National Park Service)
Item: Despite everything that was then known about the dangers of further carbon emissions, the major atmospheric contributor to global warming, they only continued to increase, despite the myriad conferences and agreements intended to curb them. (U.S. carbon emissions, in particular, were still rising then, and global emissions were expected to rise by record or near-record amounts as 2019 began.)
Item: The polar icecap was disappearing, with scientists reporting that it had melted more in just 20 years than in the previous 10,000. This, in turn, meant that sea levels would continue to rise at record rates, posing an increasing threat to coastal cities.
In early 2017, the western U.S. was hit by rain and flooding from a series of storms flowing on multiple streams of moist air. A satellite image of these “atmospheric rivers” shown here. (NASA)
Item:Approximately 8 million metric tons of plastic were seeping into the world’s oceans each year, from the ingestion of which vast numbers of seabirds, fish, and marine mammals were dying annually. Payback would come in the form of microplastics contained in seafood consumed by humans.
Item: With China and other Asian countries increasingly refusing to accept American recyclables, municipalities in the United States found themselves overwhelmed by accumulations of discarded glass, plastic, metal, cardboard, and paper. That year, the complete breakdown of the global recycling system already loomed as a possibility.
Polar bears in 2008 became the first species to be listed as endangered because of forecasted population declines from the effects of climate change. (National Park Service)
All of these fall into the category of what we recognize today as planetary issues of existential importance. But even in 2019 there were other matters of less than planetary significance that ought to have functioned as a wake-up call. Among them were:
Item: With the federal government demonstrably unable to secure U.S. borders, immigration authorities were seizing hundreds of thousands of migrants annually. By 2019, the Trump administration was confining significant numbers of those migrants, including small children, in what were, in effect, concentration camps.
Item: Cybercrime had become a major growth industry, on track to rake in $6 trillion annually by 2021. Hackers were already demonstrating the ability to hold large American cities hostage and the authorities proved incapable of catching up.
Item: With the three richest Americans — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet —controlling more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the entire population, the United States had become a full-fledged oligarchy. While politicians occasionally expressed their dismay about this reality, prior to 2019 it was widely tolerated.
Item: As measured by roads, bridges, dams, or public transportation systems, the nation’s infrastructure was strikingly inferior to what it had been a half-century earlier. (By 2019, China, for instance, had built more than 19,000 milesof high-speed rail; the U.S., not one.) Agreement that this was a problem that needed fixing was universal; corrective action (and government financing), however, was not forthcoming.
Item: Military spending in constant dollars exceeded what it had been at the height of the Cold War when the country’s main adversary, the Soviet Union, had a large army with up-to-date equipment and an arsenal of nuclear weapons. In 2019, Iran, the country’s most likely adversary, had a modest army and no nuclear weapons.
Item: Incivility, rudeness, bullying, and general nastinesshad become rampant, while the White House, once the site of solemn ceremony, deliberation, and decision, played host to politically divisive shouting matches and verbal brawls.
To say that Americans were oblivious to such matters would be inaccurate. Some were, for instance, considering a ban on plastic straws. Yet taken as a whole, the many indications of systemic and even planetary dysfunction received infinitely less popular attention than the pregnancies of British royals, the antics of the justifiably forgotten Kardashian clan, or fantasy football, a briefly popularearly 21st century fad.
People working on their fantasy football drafts. (Daniel Means/Flickr)
Of course, decades later, viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the implications of these various trends and data points seem painfully clear: the dominant ideological abstraction of late postmodernity — liberal democratic capitalism — was rapidly failing or had simply become irrelevant to the challenges facing the United States and the human species as a whole. To employ another then-popular phrase, liberal democratic capitalism had become an expression of “fake news,” a scam sold to the many for the benefit of the privileged few.
“Toward the end of an age,” historian John Lukacs (1924-2019) once observed, “more and more people lose faith in their institutions and finally they abandon their belief that these institutions might still be reformed from within.” Lukacs wrote those words in 1970, but they aptly described the situation that had come to exist in that turning-point year of 2019. Basic American institutions — the overworked U.S. military being a singular exception — no longer commanded popular respect.
In essence, the postmodern age was ending, though few seemed to know it — with elites, in particular, largely oblivious to what was occurring. What would replace postmodernity in a planet heading for ruin remained to be seen.
Only when…
[Editor’s note: Here the account breaks off.]
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An armed group of thieves dressed as police officers stormed the Guarulhos Airport in Brazil, took two hostages, and stole more than 1,600 lbs (750kg) of gold and other metals valued at more than $40 million, according to Reuters.
Gold: Airport of Garulhos in San Paolo(Brazil).
Military command steals 752 KG of Gold destinated to USA and Switzerland (value 30 Million USD) from Brinks facilities. pic.twitter.com/rautSJ30Tu
The group split up, with several suspects taking off in a black pickup truck with livery resembling Brazil’s federal police.
Four men left the vehicle with their faces covered, at least one of whom had a rifle, and confronted workers at the airport, who then proceeded to fill up the pickup truck with cargo.
A police report said the thieves left with about 750 kg (1,650 lbs) of gold and other precious metals, along with two airport workers taken as hostages, and remained at large. –Reuters
An airport spokeswoman said that nobody was harmed during the assault, though no word on the hostages.
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