Month: September 2020

Readers may recall, on Thursday, we outlined the La Nina weather pattern has likely been the culprit behind dangerous wildfires in the western U.S., and, as we highlighted as early as Aug. 13, the ‘super active‘ hurricane season. 

As Bloomberg describes, La Nina “triggers an atmospheric chain reaction that stands to roil weather around the globe, often turning the western U.S. into a tinder box, fueling more powerful hurricanes in the Atlantic and flooding parts of Australia and South America.” 

While we have covered the wildfire situation in the western U.S. – it’s now time to turn our attention back to a meteorological dilemma developing in the Atlantic basin. 

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) is tracking seven systems – yes – seven systems – which were highlighted in their Thursday morning tropical update: 

“This is what September 10, the peak of the hurricane season, looks like! We are monitoring 7 systems in the Atlantic, including Tropical Storms Paulette and Rene. The tropical waves in the eastern Atlantic have the highest chances of formation,” NHC said in a Twitter post.

Two of the disturbances are named storms, called Paulette and Rene, are both traversing the central Atlantic Ocean heading west-north-west. The other five systems are described as disturbances that have yet to become storms but should be watched carefully over the next five days. Three of the disturbances, located on the map below, are highlighted in yellow, situated near the U.S.

The Atlantic hurricane season tends to peak around Sept. 10, but with La Nina conditions formed, it suggests the back half of the season could remain very active. 

“Typically, what ends Atlantic hurricane seasons is that vertical wind shear gets too strong,” said Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University, who spoke with CNN. “So, El Niño, via its impacts on vertical wind shear, has a stronger impact on September and especially October hurricanes than it does on August hurricanes. With La Niña, vertical wind shear tends to be lower, and consequently, we end up with more active late seasons.

Some are likening this year’s La Nina as the ‘La Nina from hell.’

Authored by Wedny McElroy via The Mises Institute,m

“The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do….And that is to destroy the black family.”

–Walter E. Williams, the Wall Street Journal

On August 14, the Commission on Social Status of Black Men and Boys Act was signed into law. It establishes a nineteen-member panel within the Commission on Civil Rights to examine social problems that disproportionately affect black males.

The act is a conscious response to the death of George Floyd, with the opening section of the bill being subtitled the “George Floyd and Walter Scott Notification Act.” Floyd died on May 25 after a white police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes. Walter Scott died on April 4, 2015, after being shot by a white police officer who had stopped him for a broken brake light. Both have become symbols of police brutality against black males. Invoking them indicates that the new commission will focus on the disparity with which law enforcement and the court system treat black males.

Any spotlight shone on the neglected problem of discrimination against males deserves applause. Higher education is often used to illustrate how far the pendulum has swung from several decades ago, when discrimination against women was rife. A February 1 article in Forbes, “The Collegiate War against Males,” commented on the recent decline in college enrollment.

“Most of that fall…is concentrated among men. Between 2015 and 2019…the number of men on campuses declined by 691,643, almost double the smaller fall among women, 348,955. In percentage terms, the male decline of 8.34% was far more than double that among women, 3.18%….In 2015, there were 32% more women than men, but now the differential is nearly 40%.”

From family courts to the handling of sexual violence, from protective laws for women to harsh prison sentencing for men, the government unjustly advantages one gender over the other instead of treating all individuals equally under the same law.

The Commission on Social Status of Black Men and Boys is not likely to increase justice, however; it may well damage the cause it seems to champion.

There is reason for skepticism. A DC Commission on Black Men and Boys was established in 2001 by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), who also cochairs the Congressional Caucus on Black Men and Boys. Predictably, Norton applauds the new act, because it “mandates government action to help improve the condition of African-American men and boys.” There are two takeaways from her comment: government will become more deeply involved in directing the lives of black males, and two decades of activity by the first commission has accomplished little.

The government mandate is unfortunate, for several reasons.

Improving the status and safety of anyone is laudable, but a number of problems exist with the bill’s approach. For one thing, social status refers to a person’s standing in a community. It refers to how highly others in society value a person. As long as people are nonviolent, the government has no business dictating what or whom they value. It is akin to mandating what people must think and feel, which is a matter of social control—not justice.

Moreover, the government can elevate the social status of a group only by changing their legal status and treatment. If the change makes all people equal under just law, then it is an improvement. If it elevates one class by harming the status of another class, then it is discriminatory and unjust on its face.

There are two basic ways that government can use the law to influence social status.

1. It can remove any legal entitlements or disadvantages for categories of people and allow the status of each individual to rise or fall on its own.

2. Or it can redistribute status—in a manner similar to redistributing wealth—by extending privileges and opportunities to one group while denying them to another; affirmative action in university admission is an example.

The new commission will almost certainly take the latter path. And the disadvantaged category will almost certainly be white males. (Women are unlikely to be disadvantaged, because they are still viewed as “oppressed.”) If the new Commission follows the lead of Norton’s original one, it will make frequent comparisons between the status of black males and white ones as a way to “prove” racial inequity. If this happens, males will be divided into warring groups—black and white—with one category of males benefiting at the expense of the other, with the interests of both in conflict.

Another objection: the new commission tacitly accepts the idea that there is institutionalized racism in America. Although racist individuals and organizations certainly exist, America has overwhelmingly purged its institutions of antiblack bias. Racism is not systemic. In an article entitled “Why Social Justice Warriors Battle ‘Institutional Racism,’” the noted black economist Walter Williams, who teaches at George Mason University, speculated on the ill-defined terms institutional racism and systemic racism. He wrote, “I suspect it means that they cannot identify the actual person or entities engaged in the practice….And it is seen by many, particularly the intellectual elite, as a desirable form of determining who gets what.”

On the other hand, a clear-cut misandry or antimale bias does exist in American institutions and culture. This is especially true of white heterosexual males, who politically lack the intersectional “advantage” of being a racial or sexual minority. But the antimale bias also applies to blacks who are disadvantaged simply because of their gender. In fighting this bias, they should find common cause with white males instead of being politically juxtaposed.

Yet another objection to the commission is that its members almost certainly accept “the legacy of slavery” as the cause of any racism in America. This means it will not address the single most powerful cause of black impoverishment: the decline of the black family, for which government bears much responsibility. The black social theorist Thomas Sowell, who teaches at Stanford University, has written extensively on the decline of the black family. In his article “A Legacy of Liberalism,” Sowell rejects the argument that current black impoverishment is the residue of slavery or due to inherent racism. He refers to “the legacy of slavery” argument as a reason not to think about the subject or rely on evidence, because it replaces research with an emotional reaction. 

“If we wanted to be serious about evidence,” Sowell observed, “we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state…

Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and ‘war on poverty’ programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.”

In his article “The Legacy of the Welfare State,” Williams agreed.

“The No. 1 problem among blacks is the effects stemming from a very weak family structure. Children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes and end up in prison. They are also likelier to live in poverty-stricken households. But is the weak black family a legacy of slavery?…Here’s my question: Was the increase in single-parent black families after 1960 a legacy of slavery, or might it be a legacy of the welfare state ushered in by the War on Poverty?”

In another article Sowell answered,

“A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression. In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67 percent of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent.” The percentage has held fairly steady since then. And, statistically, the parent figure is usually a mother or a grandmother.

Being effectively fatherless can be devastating. The paper “What Can the Federal Government Do to Decrease Crime and Revitalize Communities?,” issued by the US Department of Justice, offered statistics on children from fatherless homes. The children account for:

• Suicide: 63 percent of youth suicides

• Runaways: 90 percent of all homeless and runaway youths

• Behavioral disorders: 85 percent of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders

• High school dropouts: 71 percent of all high school dropouts

• Juvenile detention rates: 70 percent of juveniles in state-operated institutions

• Substance abuse: 75 percent of adolescent patients in substance abuse centers

Lawmakers do black people no favor when they advance a narrative that dismisses the importance of the family structure and offers instead dependence on government rather than independence as human beings. As Williams stated,

“The undeniable truth is that neither slavery nor Jim Crow nor the harshest racism has decimated the black family the way the welfare state has…

The most damage done to black Americans is inflicted by those politicians, civil rights leaders and academics who assert that every problem confronting blacks is a result of a legacy of slavery and discrimination. That’s a vision that guarantees perpetuity for the problems.”

New findings from a survey by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, published by NPR News on Wednesday, reveal low-income minority households have experienced the most financial hardships in the virus-induced recession.  

The pandemic heavily impacted Black and Latino households across America’s four largest cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston) with massive job loss or reduction in hourly wages or a decline in working hours. 

The survey, conducted from July 1 through Aug. 3, found Latino households (77%) and Black households (81%) in the Greater Houston area incurred “serious” financial problems. 

Houston

As for the three other major cities, the survey showed 73% of Latinos in New York City experienced severe financial hardships, 71% of Latinos in Los Angeles, and 63% in Chicago. Black households in New York City (62%), Los Angeles (52%), and Chicago (69%) also reported severe financial distress because of the downturn. 

New York City

Los Angeles

Chicago

The survey found a majority of low-income minority households had their savings wiped out, which is similar to our recent report detailing how tens of millions of Americans depleted emergency savings this year.

Nationally, white households and ones that have incomes over $100,000 escaped much of the financial distress. But for low-income minorities, which mostly survived on direct transfer payments from the government (i.e., Trump stimulus checks), the exhaustion of the checks has caused more financial stress ahead of the presidential election in November. 

“Before federal coronavirus support programs even expired, we find millions of people with severe problems with their finances,” said Robert Blendon, a poll co-director and executive director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program at the Harvard Chan School. “And it’s going to get worse because there is nothing for the people we surveyed who earn under $100,000 a year to fall back on.”

Blendon said the downturn has produced substantial economic damage among low-income minority households. 

He warned: “This is much, much, much worse than I would’ve predicted.” 

“This is what I would expect without a national emergency relief bill,” Blendon said. “We had a $2 trillion relief bill to lift people up and put a pillow under them. But it is not helping nearly as many people as we had expected.”

If readers have been counting, the dangerous fiscal cliff has been underway in the US for 39 days, one where tens of millions of Americans are no longer receiving weekly stimulus checks of $600. 

With the economic recovery stalling and the labor market deteriorating, much of the financial distress, due to the virus pandemic, has been exerted onto the working poor. 

This is just more bad news for an economy that is 70% based on consumption… 

Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

The terms liberal (left) and conservative (right) define the conventional political spectrum. But the terms are floating abstractions, with meanings that change with every politician.

In the nineteenth century, a “liberal” believed in free speech, social mobility, limited government and strict property rights. The term has since been appropriated by those who, while sometimes still believing in limited free speech, always support strong government and weak property rights and who see everyone as a member of a class or group.

Conservatives have always tended to believe in strong government and nationalism. Bismarck and Metternich were archetypes. Today’s conservatives are sometimes seen as defenders of economic liberty and free markets, although that is mostly only true when those concepts are perceived to coincide with the interests of big business and economic nationalism.

Locating political beliefs on an inaccurate scale, running only from left to right, constrains political thinking. It’s like trying to reduce chemistry to the elements with air, earth, water and fire.

Politics is the theory and practice of government. It concerns itself with how force should be applied to control people, which is to say, to restrict their freedom. It should be analyzed on that basis. Freedom is indivisible, but in the abstract, it can be seen as composed of two basic elements: social freedom and economic freedom. According to current usage, liberals tend to allow social freedom but restrict economic freedom, while conservatives tend to restrict social freedom but allow economic freedom.

An authoritarian (they now style themselves “middle-of-the-roaders”) want both types of freedom restricted.

But what do you call someone who believes both social and economic freedom should be allowed maximum rein? Unfortunately, something without a name may get overlooked, or if the name is only known to a few, it may be ignored as unimportant. That may explain why so few people who believe in both of these dimensions of freedom know they are libertarians. A more useful way of looking at the political field can be found in the diagram below:

Source: Advocates for Self-Government

A libertarian believes individuals have a right to do anything that doesn’t impinge on the common-law rights of others—basically anything but force or fraud. Libertarians are the human equivalent of the Gamma rat, which bears a little explanation. Some years ago, scientists experimenting with rats categorized the vast majority of their subjects as Beta rats. These are followers who get the Alpha rats’ leftovers. The Alpha rats establish territories, claim the choicest mates, and, generally, lord it over the Betas. This pretty well corresponded with the way the researchers thought the world worked.

But they were surprised to find a third type of rat as well, the Gamma. This creature staked out a territory and chose the pick of the litter for a mate, like the Alpha, but didn’t attempt to dominate the Betas, a go-along-get-along rat. A libertarian rat, if you will. My guess, mixed with a dollop of hope, is that as society becomes more repressive, more Gamma people will tune in to the problem and drop out as a solution. No, they won’t turn into middle-aged hippies weaving baskets and stringing beads in remote communes; rather, they will structure their lives so that the government—which is to say taxes, regulation, and inflation—is a nonfactor. Hippies used to ask: suppose they had a war and nobody came? Personally, I would take it further: suppose they had an election and nobody voted; levied a tax and nobody paid; imposed regulation and nobody obeyed?

Libertarian beliefs are strong among Americans, but the Libertarian Party has never gained much prominence, possibly because the type of people who might support it have better things to do than play political games. Even among those who believe in voting, many tend to feel they are “wasting” their vote on someone who can’t win. But voting is itself another part of the problem.

None of the Above

Since 1960, the trend has been for an ever-smaller percentage of the electorate to vote. Increasingly, the average person is fed up or views elections as pointless. In some years, more than 98 percent of incumbents retain office. That is a higher proportion than in the Supreme Soviet of the defunct U.S.S.R., and a lower turnover rate than in Britain’s formerly hereditary House of Lords, where people lost their seats only by dying. The political system in the United States has, like all systems that grow old and large, become moribund and corrupt. The conventional wisdom holds that this decline in voter turnout is a sign of apathy. But it may also be a sign of a renaissance in personal responsibility. It could be people saying: “I won’t be fooled again, and I won’t lend power to them.” Politics has always been a way of redistributing wealth from those who produce to those who are politically favored. As H. L. Mencken observed, an election amounts to no more than an advance auction of stolen goods—a process few would support if they saw its true nature. Protesters in the ’60s had their flaws, but they were quite correct when they said, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” If politics is the problem, what is the solution? I have several answers that may appeal to you.

The first step in solving the problem is to stop actively encouraging it. Many Americans have intuitively recognized that government is the problem and have stopped voting. There are at least five reasons many people don’t vote:

1. Voting in a political election is unethical. The political process is one of institutionalized coercion and force; if you disapprove of those things, then you shouldn’t participate in them, even indirectly.

2. Voting compromises your privacy. It gets your name in another government computer.

3. Voting, as well as registering, entails hanging around government offices and dealing with petty bureaucrats. Most people can find something more enjoyable or productive to do.

4. Voting encourages politicians. A vote against one candidate—a chief, and quite understandable, reason many people vote—is always interpreted as a vote for his opponent. And even though you may be voting for the lesser of two evils, the lesser of two evils is still evil. It amounts to giving the candidate a tacit mandate to impose his will on society.

5. Your vote doesn’t count. Politicians like to say it counts because it is to their advantage to get everyone into a busybody mode. But statistically, one vote in scores of millions makes no more difference than a single grain of sand on a beach. That’s entirely apart from the fact that officials manifestly do what they want, not what you want, once they are in office.

Some of these thoughts may impress you as vaguely “unpatriotic”; it’s certainly not my intention to “trigger” anyone. But unfortunately, America isn’t the place it once was, either. The United States has devolved from the land of the free and the home of the brave to something more closely resembling the land of entitlements and the home of whining lawsuit filers. The founding ideas of the country, which were intensely libertarian, have been thoroughly perverted. What passes for tradition today is something against which the Founding Fathers would have led a second revolution.

This sorry, scary state of affairs is one reason some people emphasize the importance of joining the process, “working within the system” and “making your voice heard,” to ensure that “the bad guys” don’t get in. They seem to think that increasing the number of voters will improve the quality of their choices. That argument compels many sincere people, who otherwise wouldn’t dream of coercing their neighbors, to take part in the political process. But it only feeds power to people in politics and government, validating their existence and making them more powerful in the process.

Of course, everybody involved gets something out of it, psychologically if not monetarily. Politics gives many people a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves, and so has special appeal for those who can’t find satisfaction within themselves. We cluck in amazement at the enthusiasm shown at Hitler’s giant rallies but figure that what goes on here, today, is different. Well, it’s never quite the same. But the mindless sloganeering, the cult of personality and certainty of the masses that “their” candidate will kiss their personal lives and make them better are identical.

And even if the favored candidate doesn’t help them, then at least he’ll keep others from getting too much. Politics is the institutionalization of envy, a vice that proclaims: “You’ve got something I want, and if I can’t get it, I’ll take yours. And if I can’t have yours, I’ll destroy it, so you can’t have it, either.” Participating in politics is an act of ethical bankruptcy.

The key to getting “rubes” (i.e., voters) to vote, and “marks” (i.e., contributors) to give is to talk in generalities while sounding specific and to look sincere and thoughtful yet decisive. Vapid, venal party hacks can be shaped, like Silly Putty, into saleable candidates. People like to kid themselves that they are voting for either “the man” or “the ideas.” But few campaign “ideas” are more than slogans artfully packaged to push the right buttons. Voting “the man” doesn’t help much, either, since these guys are more diligently programmed, posed and rehearsed than any actor.

This is probably truer today than it has ever been since elections are now won on television, and television is not a forum for expressing complex ideas and philosophies. It lends itself to slogans and glib people who look and talk like game show hosts. People with really new ideas wouldn’t dream of introducing them to politics because they know such ideas can’t be explained in sixty seconds. I’m not intimating, incidentally, that people disinvolve themselves from their communities, social groups, or other voluntary organizations—just the opposite since those relationships are the lifeblood of society. But the political process or the government is not synonymous with society or even complementary to it. The government is a dead hand on society.

“Wait, wait,” I can hear many of you saying, “That may all be true in theory. But it’s irrelevant in 2020; this time it’s different. We’re on the cusp of a civil war in the US. It makes a big difference who wins this time.” That’s true enough. Whoever runs a government can, indeed, make a huge difference sometimes. France was different under Louis XVI than it was under Robespierre, and Russia was different under Nicolas II than it was under Lenin. At this point, the US will be different under Trump than under the Democrats.

I’ll explore the likelihood of a Trump victory or loss next week.

And what happens next.

*  *  *

Disturbing economic, political, and social trends are already in motion and now accelerating at breathtaking speed. Most troubling of all, they cannot be stopped. There will likely be unprecedented volatility of every kind in the months and years ahead. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive the crisis ahead. It will help you understand what is unfolding right before our eyes and what you should do so you don’t get caught in the crosshairs. Click here to download the PDF now.

Joe Biden’s National Press Secretary, TJ Ducklo, just gave a trainwreck of an interview on Fox News – where he shifted between anti-Trump talking points and backpedaling defensively over simple questions, such as Biden’s reliance on teleprompters and what the former VP would have done better than Trump in terms of the national response to COVID-19.

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping moment was when host Bret Baier asked Ducklo a simple question over Joe Biden’s use of teleprompters that goes back to at least July:

“Has Joe Biden ever used a teleprompter during local interviews, or to answer Q&A with supporters?” asked Baier, to which Ducklo launched into a defensive tirade – accusing Baier of parroting Trump campaign talking points, and “trying to distract the American people.”

Baier asked two more times to “answer the question,” while Ducklo deflected – scolding the host and accusing the network of ‘funneling Trump campaign questions.’

Bret Baier just asked Biden’s National Press Sec a simple yes or no question:

Has Joe Biden ever used a teleprompter during a TV interview?

TJ Ducklo refused to answer and instead had a meltdown. Disaster of an interview for the Biden campaign. pic.twitter.com/OEyi2eb31L

— Kelb Hull (@CalebJHull) September 10, 2020

Ducklo has been answering questions over Biden’s teleprompter use since at least July – when he said the notion that the former VP is using them to answer questions is “laughable, ludicrous, and a lie.“

Yet, here he is earlier in the week doing just that:

Last week, Biden read teleprompter cues on multiple occasions.

Biden just pulled another Ron Burgundy moment by reading the words “end of quote” out loud from the teleprompter

pic.twitter.com/1gEQBtWOz3

— Courtney Holland – Text COURTNEY to 88022 (@hollandcourtney) September 4, 2020

Earlier in the interview with Ducklo, Baier asked what Biden would have done differently in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic – since a new campaign talking point is that President Trump mishandled the virus, the Biden spox went into defensive overdrive – robotically barking anti-Trump talking points without actually answering the question.

Video: Here’s just a sample of the back-and-forth between Fox News Channel’s @BretBaier and TJ Ducklo from the Biden campaign. Baier repeatedly asked the simple question of what Biden would have done differently on COVID, and Ducklo accuses him of being a Trump campaign stooge pic.twitter.com/kQw9PZJAUk

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 10, 2020

Watch the full interview here:

That TJ Ducklo clip confirms my theory that Biden’s campaign is run by smug children with nervous energy

— Blocked by Netflix Poso (@JackPosobiec) September 11, 2020

If Biden’s National Press Secretary can’t answer simple questions without deflecting, how will the former Vice President perform in a debate? And as some have half-joked (or not), will Biden even show up?

pic.twitter.com/enJM7aNog8

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) September 2, 2020

Authored by Michael Tracey via UnHerd.com,

The Left justifies extreme and violent action by framing Trump as an existential threat to America…

It might not seem immediately apparent that Joe Biden would have anything in common with insurrectionary anarchists. After all, Biden has been deeply entrenched in the uppermost echelons of American political power for nearly five decades straight — whereas insurrectionary anarchists generally seek to overthrow those systems, by violent force if necessary.

The former Vice-President is not exactly the type you would imagine clad in all-black combat-style street apparel, hurling commercial-grade fireworks at police officers. Rather, he drafted the infamous 1994 omnibus crime bill in concert with the National Association of Police Organizations. He is even known to venerate the arcane institutionalist ethos of the US Senate — whereas to insurrectionary anarchists, such institutions could only be tools of oppression.

But the Trump Era has an odd way of bringing about unexpected ideological convergences. In the announcement video that formally kicked off his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden paid homage to what he called the “courageous group of Americans” who descended upon Charlottesville, VA in August 2017 to confront an assembly of Right-wing rally-goers. Among that “courageous group” were Left-wing activist factions broadly classified under the banner of “antifa”.

For Biden, what transpired in Charlottesville was a “defining moment,” and formed the basis for his decision to launch a third campaign for the presidency at age 76. While Biden did herald generic American idealism in that announcement video — which would be anathema to most insurrectionary anarchists — in the gravity he assigned to the Charlottesville episode, he also affirmed a core tenet of the “antifa” worldview: the notion that a uniquely pressing fascistic threat has gripped the country, and crushing this threat is a matter of unparalleled world-historic urgency.

Certainly, if you picked any “antifa” member at random, there’d be an almost 0% chance that they would express any kind of personal enthusiasm for Joe Biden. But there’d be a virtually 100% chance that they’d express a great deal of enthusiasm for the theory that “fascism” is an accurate characterisation of America’s current state of governance. Biden would be similarly enthused to present a variation of this analysis, albeit from a slightly different ideological angle. He typically intones things like, “This is not who we are”, rather than “All Cops Are Bastards”.

Still, where Biden is united with “antifa” is in assigning such outsized importance to the role of small-time “fascist” agitators like the ones who gathered that weekend three years ago in Charlottesville (despite ultimately being outnumbered by Left-wing activists) on account of the validation they are purported to have received from Donald Trump. For both Biden and “antifa,” this dynamic constitutes the chief prism through which contemporary American political affairs must be viewed.

And for both Biden and “antifa,” this mode of analysis has been hugely successful. “Antifa” has succeeded in stoking nationwide insurrectionary fervour on a scale unseen in decades. Given their opposition to Trump as the alleged fascist-in-chief, as well as their appropriation of the “Black Lives Matter” protest mantle, they’ve received an extraordinary amount of mainstream liberal legitimation.

Democratic Party operatives have even gone so far as to exalt “antifa” activists as the modern-day equivalents of US soldiers fighting in World War II — while apparently exhibiting no embarrassment for invoking this comparison.

Another clear beneficiary of the “fascism” panic, somewhat paradoxically, has been Biden. A supreme irony of the outsized role that “anti-fascism” has played in post-2016 US political discourse — as popularised by both liberals and leftists, who often claim to be at odds with each other but nonetheless overwhelmingly agree on the underlying “fascism” prognosis — is that it has ultimately limited the possibility of actual Left-wing policy reform.

Democratic presidential primary voters had been traumatised by the non-stop barrage of Trump-related hysteria churned out each and every day by profit-driven corporate media outlets, and laboured under the sincere belief that Trump’s America bears some bonafide relation to Weimar Germany. As such, a plurality were understandably uninterested in foundational reform to the Democratic Party.

That was bad news for socialist Bernie Sanders, who ended up losing handily in the 2020 primaries to a former Vice President whose entire campaign was predicated on little more than restoring the pre-2016 Democratic Party to power.

And in a way, you can’t particularly blame those Biden voters. Because if your main sources of information tell you for years on end that the reins of state have been seized by an out-and-out fascist, who is fuelling a siege of “Nazi” street agitators, whatever deficiencies the Democratic Party might have at the moment are of little or no concern. Now even Sanders himself has called for a “united front” against Trump ahead of the election, seeming to suggest that the precedent of Francisco Franco is historically apt. Wasn’t the whole problem with Franco that he couldn’t be voted out?

Never mind that Trump would have to be quite a feckless fascist to allow himself to be constantly maligned in the country’s major media, plotted against by his own administration underlings, and impeached. The decidedly unsexy reality is that Trump has been a fairly weak executive, at least relative to his predecessors in the postwar era.

But his radically unorthodox communications style belies any dispassionate assessment of this record, thus the fascism-mongering persists more-or-less unabated. And for all the warnings of a Reichstag Fire moment always supposedly being around the corner, the past six months of Covid and riots were a missed opportunity for any genuine fascist seeking to consolidate power. Trump appears largely content with issuing inflammatory tweets.

So as riots continue around the country, and corporate news networks describe post-protest scenes with raging infernos as “mostly peaceful”, the temptation can be to write this off as mere partisan side-taking. Certainly there’s an element of that — most journalists desperately don’t want to see Trump win in November.

But thanks to the prevailing “fascism” framework, their opposition to Trump isn’t just a matter of ordinary election-year preference. It’s imbued with existential, civilisation-altering significance. How could anyone in their right mind not do everything within their capacity to ensure the defeat of fascism? Once you accept the premise that fascism does in fact accurately describe the current state of American governance, all bets are off — journalistically and otherwise.

So even if the “anti-fascists” in the equation are burning down cities, they will still never exist on the same moral plane as the actual “fascists” whose champion occupies the White House. Hence, riots which result in the destruction of huge swaths of Kenosha, WI magically become a “mostly peaceful” affair according to CNN and the New York Times.

Yes, journalists also presumptively ascribe a certain virtue to any protests that occur with the imprimatur of “Black Lives Matter”. But racial disparities have been a fact of American life since the dawn of the republic. The unavoidable explanation for why they’ve taken on such frantic energy in the past several months is the alleged spectre of fascism, namely Trump. With a Democratic President, even one as vanilla as Biden, there will doubtless be future race-based controversies. But they won’t have the cosmic weight as those that occur when a “fascist” president also looms.

Adding to the growing list of ironies, Trump’s primary conception of the presidency has less been Fuhrer, than “Pundit-in-Chief”, whereby he proudly brandishes the role of world’s loudest media critic — with media criticism having been one of his life-long passions. Given that experience, Trump knows how to expertly pry at tensions in how pundit narratives get constructed, and the “peaceful protest” cliché provides all the material that could ever be desired in that respect. Kayleigh McEnany, in tweeting a photo of a recent Trump air hanger rally in Pennsylvania, described the attendees (only half-jokingly) as “peaceful protesters”.

The reason she did this is because if one follows the recent patterns of media nomenclature, any and all “peaceful protesters” should be painstakingly accommodated, even if their gatherings produce widespread arson attacks or increase the Covid-19 infection rate. There is no impartial explanation for why the “peaceful protests” of this past summer deserved praise, adulation, and rousing defences from the standpoint of pandemic mitigation. Again, only does this make sense when inserted into the blinkered fascism vs. anti-fascism context.

One wonders if these protesters and rioters have ever paused to consider why it is that so many establishment media outlets are so consistently eager to advocate on their behalf, with the phrase “largely peaceful” having been stretched well past the point of absurdity. And one also wonders why so many powerful forces are so willing to join in affirming their “anti-fascism” worldview — up to and including, in his own way, Joe Biden. For all the talk about dismantling systems of oppression, those who actually wield power in 2020 America seem to view the “fascism vs. antifascism” dichotomy as awfully convenient to their own self-preserving interests.

Chinese and Russian media are highlighting what they’re reporting as multiple instances of a US spy plane changing its transponder code in order to disguise itself during operations near China.

The latest reported instance came Wednesday morning, involving a US Air Force RC-135S Cobra Ball out of Okinawa attempting to observe Chinese PLA missile tests being conducted in the Yellow Sea. 

It was a Chinese think tank called the South China Sea Probing Initiative (SCSPI), based at China’s Peking University, that first observed the strange behavior of a plane which  appeared on tracking radar as a “mysterious Malaysian plane” soon after an Air Force jet “went dark” by allegedly switching off its transponder.

The plane purporting via transponder to be Malaysian ended up flying for some six hours over the Yellow Sea before it returned to Okinawa, setting off red flags given Okinawa remains home to sprawling US military bases. 

>>>Suspected US Surveillance Plane in Disguise as a Malaysian Plane, Again
Around 3 am of Sep 9, USAF RC-135S (#AE01CE) took off from #Kadena for Northbound, and shortly it turned off the transponder.[1/2] pic.twitter.com/ya3jD4c21p

— SCS Probing Initiative (@SCS_PI) September 9, 2020

The SCSPI posted flight tracking data underscoring the “Malaysian plane’s” unusual flight pattern and alleged it was actually the Air Force surveillance aircraft in disguise.

The obective appeared to be “collecting data on ballistic missiles from PLA military exercises held in the Bohai Sea” – which extends from the Yellow Sea.

Later on the same route appeared a “Malaysian plane”(#752B29), which entered the #YellowSea, hovered over and over from 5 am to 11 am, which probably was the RC-135S in disguise, collecting data on ballistic missiles from #PLA‘s military exercises held in #BohaiSea.[2/2] pic.twitter.com/bjFfLeaO59

— SCS Probing Initiative (@SCS_PI) September 9, 2020

The alleged surveillance incident came the same day that Beijing formally charged that the United States is becoming the main “driver of militarization in the South China Sea.”

The communist-run country’s senior diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, said on Wednesday, “the United States is directly intervening in territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea due to its own political needs,” as presented by Reuters. 

Via AlMasdarNews.com,

The Assistant Speaker of the Iranian Parliament for International Affairs, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, warned that after the UAE’s normalization with Israel, any Israeli aggression against Iran would bring the UAE into the circle of response.

Abdollahian said in an interview with Al-Alam TV that the UAE “first endangered its own security, because where the Zionists set their feet, insecurity was the fruit of that, and in the second degree, they endanger the Persian Gulf’s security, and thirdly, they endanger their own security and fourthly, they endanger the security of their neighbors, including the Islamic Republic.”

Abdollahian continued, saying: “Since the UAE disclosed its normalization of its relations with the delusional Israeli entity, any apparent or hidden event that occurs at the hands of the Israeli intelligence services or their agents in the Islamic Republic or the region, the response that will come will not be directed at the Zionist entity only, but also, the UAE will be part of the response.”

“The Emiratis should not forget that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dealings with them in this issue included such an insult that he feels that the entire UAE is nothing but a Zionist settlement unveiled today, and this is an insult that Mohammed bin Zayed has given to the people,” Abdollahian stressed.

He explained that the biggest mistake the Emiratis make is that instead of “playing on their land, they are playing in the land of the Americans and the Zionists, as has happened recently.”

Abdollahian added that “the rulers of the Emirates have been hit by a severe political dizziness, and this may push them to make wrong decisions and commit strategic mistakes, and this issue would bring the UAE back, and if the UAE did not reconsider its relationship with the Zionist entity and its policies towards its neighbors and the region, then the Zionists who entered Emirates in the dress of peace will return the rulers of the Emirates decades back.”