Month: April 2021

Bill Gates Criticized For Blocking The Equitable Distribution Of COVID Vaccines

Bill Gates Criticized For Blocking The Equitable Distribution Of COVID Vaccines

Nearly 1 billion COVID vaccination shots have been distributed around the world, but in more than 120 countries, not a single dose has been received, much less administered. And as we explained recently, one man is to overwhelmingly to blame for this sorry state of affairs: Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Thanks to his role as the world’s de facto public health czar, Gates has used his influence to ensure that the international vaccine rollout remains firmly under the control of drugmaking giants, and that the intellectual property undergirding vaccines remains a closely guarded secret, not a universally-applicable formula. As a coalition of poorer nations tries to fight back against this using the WTO, a freelance journalist named Alexander Zaitchik has harshly criticized Gates for failing to provide for the equitable distribution of vaccines.

Zaitchik said the software developer-turned-philanthropist has ignored all concerns about the supply of vaccines, essentially leaving the poorest nations to fend for themselves, even as he pours another $1.8 billion of his own money into the COVAX initiative, which seeks to provide vaccine supplies to more than 90 low-income nations.

“We missed a crucial year of being able to scale up and get the tech transfer where it should be to have global production at full capacity. And he’s basically said ‘trust me’, and it didn’t work,” Zaitchik said.

The journalist emphasized that at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, many health experts were calling for a collaborative approach, saying companies and countries should share experience in testing, treatment, and vaccines against the disease. This could have prevented a potential crisis of supply and access to vaccines. However, Zaitchik claims that the Gates-funded ACT-Accelerator had “outmatched and outmanoeuvred” supporters of this “open science” approach with the intention of

Ironically, the biggest critics of Gates’ methodology are at the WHO. For months, criticis about the unfair distribution of inoculations against the coronavirus. In February, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that more than three quarters of vaccinations had been carried out in just 10 high-income countries. “Around 130 countries, with 2.5 billion people, have yet to administer a single dose”, the WHO chief said.

At the end of March, Dr. Tedros warned that vaccine inequity was becoming “more grotesque every day” while calling for a fairer distribution of inoculations. He also warned that “countries that are now vaccinating younger, healthy people at low risk of disease are doing so at the cost of the lives of health workers, older people and other at-risk groups in other countries” – something that’s becoming increasingly egregious as unused COVID jabs pile up in some US states.

Incidentally, Bill Gates has himself complained about the issue of unfair distribution of inoculations and urged US legislators to allocate more money for the global response to the coronavirus.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/20/2021 – 20:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3ap4xqY Tyler Durden

Jurors Could Not Believe That a Reasonable Officer Would Have Done What Derek Chauvin Did


Derek-Chauvin-mug-shots-Newscom

“You can believe your own eyes,” prosecutor Steve Schleicher told jurors during his closing argument in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial yesterday. “This case is exactly what you thought when you saw it first, when you saw that video.”

Schleicher was referring to the horrifying bystander video showing Chauvin pinning George Floyd facedown to the pavement for nine and a half minutes, an incident that provoked nationwide protests against police brutality. The jury’s decision to convict Chauvin of all three murder and manslaughter charges against him after deliberating for 10 hours reflects not just the emotional impact of that video but also the logical force of the case the prosecution presented in two weeks of testimony.

While the defense repeatedly speculated about other factors that might have contributed to Floyd’s death, including his heart disease and his drug use, there was never any real doubt that he would have survived this encounter if Chauvin had handled it differently. Defense attorney Eric Nelson implicitly conceded as much when he argued, in a pretrial motion, that Floyd “may have survived” if Officers J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, who arrested Floyd for using a phony $20 bill to buy cigarettes, “had chosen to de-escalate instead of struggle.” That suggestion implied that the ensuing use of force killed Floyd.

Nelson’s lone medical witness, forensic pathologist David Packer, rejected the prosecution’s argument that Floyd  died from asphyxia, describing the cause as a “sudden cardiac arrhythmia.” Yet Fowler cited “the very stressful situation” created by the prolonged prone restraint as an important factor, which hardly let Chauvin off the hook.

The prosecution’s medical witnesses, including Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner Andrew Baker, all agreed that the use of force caused Floyd’s death. Chicago pulmonologist Andrew Tobin explained in detail how being pressed against the pavement by Chauvin’s knees and the other officers’ hands would have made it impossible for Floyd to breathe properly. Tobin was highly credible and unflappable, and his testimony reinforced the commonsensical supposition that a man who complains 27 times that he can’t breathe while being squeezed between three cops and the asphalt might actually be having trouble breathing.

Other expert witnesses explained why neither heart disease nor drug use were plausible explanations for Floyd’s death. And although Baker did not mention asphyxia in his autopsy report, on the stand he did not rule out the possibility that impeded breathing contributed to Floyd’s “cardiopulmonary arrest,” saying, “I would defer to a pulmonologist.”

To prove causation, the prosecution needed only to persuade the jury that Chauvin’s actions were “a substantial causal factor” in Floyd’s death. “The fact that other causes may have contributed to George Floyd’s death does not relieve the defendant of any criminal liability,” Schleicher noted. “He’s criminally liable for all of the consequences of his actions that naturally occur, including those consequences brought about by intervening causes.” The alternative to concluding that Chauvin killed Floyd was to believe that Floyd just happened to die from other, unrelated causes under Chauvin’s knee.

As for whether Chauvin’s use of force was justified, several supervisors (including the police chief) and use-of-force experts concluded that it was not. They said Chauvin’s conduct violated his training, department policy, and the Fourth Amendment.

Against that judgment, Nelson offered only the testimony of Barry Brodd, a former police officer who preposterously claimed that pinning Floyd to the pavement for nine and a half minutes did not even qualify as a use of force. Brodd also averred that “drug-influenced” suspects “don’t feel pain” and “may have superhuman strength”—an old canard with racist roots that police tend to drag out when they are accused of using excessive force.

While Brodd claimed that Floyd was “somewhat resisting” even after he was pinned to the ground, his definition of resistance was broad enough to encompass writhing in pain and struggling to breathe. And even by Brodd’s account, the resistance lasted for “a couple of minutes,” leaving unexplained the continued use of force during the next seven and a half minutes, when Floyd stopped talking and moving, became unresponsive, and seemed to lose consciousness.

Even after Floyd no longer had a detectable pulse, Chauvin kept kneeling on him. “How can you justify the continued use of force against this man when he has no pulse?” Schleicher wondered.

Chauvin chose not to take the stand, which would have given him an opportunity to answer that question but also would have exposed him to a potentially brutal cross-examination. Without hearing from Chauvin, the jurors were left with Nelson’s description of the factors that figured in Chauvin’s thinking, which amounted to little more than fears about what Floyd might have done to pose a threat, as opposed to what he actually did.

“The standard is not what should the officer have done in these circumstances,” Nelson said. “Officers are human beings capable of making mistakes in highly stressful situations.” But when those “mistakes” go beyond what a “reasonable officer” would do in similar circumstances, the use of force is unlawful. Try as he might, Nelson was unable to persuade the jury that a reasonable officer would have done what Chauvin did.

Chauvin’s actions easily fit the definition of second-degree manslaughter, which required showing that he caused Floyd’s death “by his culpable negligence, creating an unreasonable risk and consciously [taking] the chances of causing great bodily harm.” The maximum penalty for that count is 10 years in prison, but the presumptive sentence under Minnesota’s sentencing guidelines is four years.

To prove the second-degree murder charge, prosecutors had to show that Chauvin unintentionally killed Floyd while committing a felony—in this case, third-degree assault. The assault charge, in turn, required proving that Chauvin “intentionally applied unlawful force” and thereby inflicted “substantial bodily harm.”

The jurors could have rejected the assault charge, and therefore the felony murder charge, if they believed that Chauvin did not knowingly use unlawful force. But they clearly thought his conduct went beyond negligence, a conclusion supported by all the testimony that he failed to follow his training and blatantly flouted department policy. As Schleicher put it, “He knew better. He just didn’t do better.”

Minnesota law is unusual in not requiring that the underlying offense for felony murder be distinct from the conduct that caused the victim’s death. That questionable quirk allows prosecutors to charge an unintentionally lethal assault as murder rather than manslaughter, which dramatically increases the potential penalty. The maximum penalty for felony murder is 40 years, and the presumptive sentence is 150 months, or 12.5 years.

The presumptive sentence for third-degree murder is the same, although the maximum (25 years) is shorter. That count required proving that Chauvin killed Floyd by “perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.” A “depraved mind” means Chauvin showed “reckless and wanton unconcern and indifference.”

That seems like a pretty apt description, given the way Chauvin reacted to Floyd’s distress, concerned bystanders’ warnings that Floyd’s life was in danger because he was not getting enough oxygen, Lane’s suggestion that Floyd should be rolled onto his side, Lane’s observation that “he’s passing out,” and Kueng’s report that he could not find a pulse. None of that information persuaded Chauvin to lift his knee or to perform CPR. Instead he responded with what can only be described as callous indifference.

The third-degree murder charge is legally controversial. Some case law suggests it is appropriate only when a defendant’s dangerous conduct did not target any particular individual, as when someone blindly fires a gun into a crowd.

Contrary to that view, former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor, who fatally shot Justine Damond in 2017 after she called 911 to report a possible assault in the alley behind her house, was convicted of third-degree murder (as well as second-degree manslaughter) in 2019. In February, the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld Noor’s conviction, and last month it cited that decision when it ordered Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill to reconsider his dismissal of the third-degree murder charge against Chauvin. While the Minnesota Supreme Court declined to review the appeals court’s order in Chauvin’s case, it has agreed to hear Noor’s appeal.

Depending on the outcome of that case, Chauvin’s third-degree murder conviction may not stand. But that probably would not affect the length of Chauvin’s sentence, assuming the felony murder conviction holds up. Both offenses carry a presumptive 150-month sentence, which is what Noor received.

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The Bankers Are Coming! The Bankers Are Coming… For Your Bitcoin

The Bankers Are Coming! The Bankers Are Coming… For Your Bitcoin

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

One of the oldest arguments against Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, is the Central Banker Attack. Anyone who’s spent more than fifteen minutes inside the crypto-world will have heard this one.

That’s the argument where the person tacitly admits bitcoin isn’t a scam or vaporware but then says, “Well, if it gets too big, they’ll just make it illegal.” What’s most baffling to me is that this argument is mostly made by those who swear by their gold holdings while simultaneously swearing at the central bankers for ruining the world.

I get that it’s mostly a coping mechanism for watching crypto go ballistic while gold languishes under the control those same central bankers. And, in the past, I had a lot more sympathy for that perspective than I do now. Because today, at a total valuation around $2 trillion, we’ve arrived at that moment where the bankers and politicians are coming for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and they are coming hard.

Since last week’s Coinbase IPO Bitcoin has been under constant and persistent attack. Bitcoin pushed through its former peak at $61,800 and since then there have been massive, coordinated dumps to push the price back down.

That pushed Bitcoin back below it’s previous high and COIN’s tumble from an overpriced IPO didn’t help matters.

Then Turkey announced it would, like India, that it would ban the use of cryptocurrencies as payments on Friday.

At nearly the same time, however, China announced it was allowing Chinese banks to import up to 150 tonnes of gold for retail distribution for the first time since 2019. This led some to speculate about a ‘gold-backed yuan’ but I don’t think that at all.

This was simply another counter-move to the ones made against the cryptocurrency markets. Like the Archegos Capital tac nuke that is still creating aftershocks throughout the financial system, China’s announcement sent gold, which was firming but still very vulnerable to the downside, through near-term resistance to close the week above the magic $1760 level.

One has to realize just how important gold’s non-confirmation of bitcoin’s rally has been to undermine it in the eyes of major money managers. Gold is an asset the central banks control most of the supply of. Bitcoin is the opposite, an asset the central banks presumably control none of.

So, when casting your eye around the market landscape who are the people, other than the bitter gold-only bugs, most bearish about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? The ones who made/make their living off the U.S. dollar-based system.

Between them and those that have a kind of monetary policy Stockholm Syndrome there’s still a massive number of people who just can’t or won’t get involved at this point. At a minimum, many pros are simply waiting for a real correction they can get behind to finally take the plunge.

But bull markets, real bull markets, are brutal to people who refuse to get on board and the longer it goes on the more strident in their opposition they become. Hence the constant sniping and backbiting by people who should know better amplifying the truly clueless takes on the situation.

Thanks to the Chinese on Friday a simultaneous wipeout of both gold and bitcoin was avoided with gold breaking out and bitcoin mostly holding serve, throwing no technically significant bearish signals into the weekly close.

Averting a weekly close above the March high helped set up what happened on Sunday early morning.

These attacks were honestly not terribly successful until a series of uncorroborated rumors of the SEC going after Bitcoin account holders for money laundering emerged on Twitter this weekend.

From Zerohedge on this:

Whereas this account traditionally blasts Reuters or Bloomberg headlines, in this case there was no such underlying report from either Reuters or Bloomberg, and Bloomberg even said that “several online reports attributed the plunge to speculation the U.S. Treasury may crack down on money laundering that’s carried out through digital assets.”

Furthermore, in comments just earlier this week, regulators refused to take a position on bitcoin either way, even as speculation of a crackdown against bitcoin by the US government is ever present – indeed, the rumor of a “crackdown” against money laundering has always been present, which is why said tweet merely poured gasoline on an already jittery market.

Then there were the blackouts in China which took a huge amount of hashing power offline for a few hours this weekend.

But, honestly, this kind of bearish price action into Sunday morning is normal. I do a report for my Patrons every Sunday morning and there is always shenanigans while I’m asleep Saturday night. I go to sleep and everything is fine and I wake up the next morning and bitcoin is off some amount. Sometimes it’s technically scary, like this week and sometimes it’s just sad.

Now, Zerohedge is right that the market should be jittery, certainly. Any asset that climbs 20x in a year is one that is very overbought. However, bitcoin’s unique problem for mean reversionists is it is just beginning to climb the broader adoption curve while it’s supply continues dwindling.

And that’s why these attacks had to happen this week. Another bull wave up would have done real damage to the credibility of the central banks right at the same time that China seemingly put in the floor beneath gold prices at around $1670.

Remember, it was last year where gold and bitcoin came off the Coronapocalypse in safe haven lockstep, both rallying hard into August. Bitcoin’s fundamental supply and demand mismatch and a spate of institutional adoption announcements touched off its rise in November to break out of the three-year consolidation at the quarterly level.

Gold, still being the plaything of the central banks continued its decline to this day. Even Friday’s technical breakout is only a short-term life preserver given that the longer-term charts are bearish. Gold has a lot of work to do to regain the market’s confidence.

And that makes bitcoin’s correction all that much more dangerous all around because the two assets moving down together now will only make those skeptical of bitcoin that much more cautious and respectful of the awesome power of the central banks.

The liquidations in bitcoin that began over the weekend continue today. The usual suspects will be out saying, “See! I told you so!” And I’m looking at my portfolio saying, “Told me what, that I’m only up 350% since the start of the year versus 400%?”

Cry me a frickin’ river.

Moments like this quite possibly become inflection points in a market’s history, no doubt about it. And it’s clear that there is a coordinated effort by those with power to manipulate events to their satisfaction. It’s completely expected. If they didn’t counterattack I would actually be less bullish on cryptos because I’d now be looking for the dead rat in the cupboard because something wouldn’t smell right.

That said, China confirmed my analysis of their Friday announcement on gold by today reversing their stance on cryptocurrencies after years of opposition to it.

Industry insiders called the comments “progressive” and are watching closely for any regulatory changes made by the People’s Bank of China.

“We regard Bitcoin and stablecoin as crypto assets … These are investment alternatives,” Li Bo, deputy governor of the PBOC, said on Sunday during a panel hosted by CNBC at the Boao Forum for Asia.

“They are not currency per se. And so the main role we see for crypto assets going forward, the main role is investment alternative” he added.

This confuses some people, but it honestly shouldn’t.

I’ve made the point in the past that if you really thought China was against bitcoin then how do you explain the amount of energy consumed by the Chinese electrical grid in mining it?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-by-country/

I’m no fan of central planning but really do you think something like this happens without the CCP knowing about it because they have a Hayekian pretense to knowledge?

Or do you think, maybe, just maybe, China is more than happy to allow this to go on knowing the bind it ultimately puts the Fed, the ECB and the SNB?

Do you really think that China doesn’t understand that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can become more of a near-term threat to the U.S.’s dominance of the global financial system than anything it does today or tomorrow with the digital yuan?

Even if that argument doesn’t persuade you, the idea that China wouldn’t nurture bitcoin as a weapon to use against an increasingly hostile and sanctions-happy U.S. as a kind of monetary shock troop brigade is terminally naïve.

Moreover, do you think China’s government didn’t just give out a stern warning to the miners there not to get too many ideas? If Jack Ma can get taken down a few pegs, so can AntPool. Moments like this only confirm for me that the bitcoin hashing power will become more democratized now that there are real investments in the U.S. on the line.

Expect hashing power to migrate away from China while at the same time more attempts made to bring the bitcoin supply more under control of authorities here in the West. The beauty of crypto, of course, is that spinning up another blockchain is easy, building trust over time is important and altcoins which one may consider shitcoins today may be the saviors of the entire industry tomorrow.

Highs are made when the supply of buyers is overwhelmed by the supply of sellers. Bottoms are the reverse of this, where sellers are overwhelmed by a flood of buyers. I find it fascinating that this knock down of bitcoin hasn’t done much to dampen the enthusiasm for other high-quality store-of-value style coins. Once bitcoin retreated from its new high we saw big breakouts in coins like DASH, Monero (XMR), Decred (DCR) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Heck, even a duds like Zcash (ZEC) and Bitcoin Gold (BTG) joined the party.

But once Turkey made its announcement and the SEC rumor hit the markets what really saw a move was the ultimate privacy coin, Pirate Chain (ARRR). It doesn’t take a 200+ IQ to figure that one out. Pirate Chain has been quietly building momentum all year and exploded in a 10x move that made even Dogecoin (DOGE) look tame. Moreover, there seems to be no slowing it down, because this isn’t a trade, it’s a defensive move.

Since ARRR doesn’t really trade on any major exchanges liquidity is non-existent and holders of it have no intention of letting go just because the central banks are coming. If the SEC is worried about money laundering with a fully transparent blockchain like bitcoin or ethereum, what will they do when the world wakes up to the complete anonymization of capital coins like ARRR and XMR are capable of delivering?

With the central banks and The Davos Crowd making their moves on the entire crypto-space it validates what I’ve been saying about the futility of their actions trying to maintain their power and control. They are putting a premium on anonymity and privacy in a world increasingly under surveillance. China’s statements and actions on bitcoin are putting a premium on wider, shallower mining and alternatives to blockchain security.

It may be time to light three lanterns in the window because the central banks are coming both by land and by sea but nothing worth having was ever gained by not fighting for it. We’ll soon find out who has the stones and the fortitude to stick it out to the end.

And if the crypto-revolution ultimately dies on the digital vine then there’s always gold right?

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/20/2021 – 20:05

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2QhvBkQ Tyler Durden

Jurors Could Not Believe That a Reasonable Officer Would Have Done What Derek Chauvin Did


Derek-Chauvin-mug-shots-Newscom

“You can believe your own eyes,” prosecutor Steve Schleicher told jurors during his closing argument in former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial yesterday. “This case is exactly what you thought when you saw it first, when you saw that video.”

Schleicher was referring to the horrifying bystander video showing Chauvin pinning George Floyd facedown to the pavement for nine and a half minutes, an incident that provoked nationwide protests against police brutality. The jury’s decision to convict Chauvin of all three murder and manslaughter charges against him after deliberating for 10 hours reflects not just the emotional impact of that video but also the logical force of the case the prosecution presented in two weeks of testimony.

While the defense repeatedly speculated about other factors that might have contributed to Floyd’s death, including his heart disease and his drug use, there was never any real doubt that he would have survived this encounter if Chauvin had handled it differently. Defense attorney Eric Nelson implicitly conceded as much when he argued, in a pretrial motion, that Floyd “may have survived” if Officers J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, who arrested Floyd for using a phony $20 bill to buy cigarettes, “had chosen to de-escalate instead of struggle.” That suggestion implied that the ensuing use of force killed Floyd.

Nelson’s lone medical witness, forensic pathologist David Packer, rejected the prosecution’s argument that Floyd  died from asphyxia, describing the cause as a “sudden cardiac arrhythmia.” Yet Fowler cited “the very stressful situation” created by the prolonged prone restraint as an important factor, which hardly let Chauvin off the hook.

The prosecution’s medical witnesses, including Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner Andrew Baker, all agreed that the use of force caused Floyd’s death. Chicago pulmonologist Andrew Tobin explained in detail how being pressed against the pavement by Chauvin’s knees and the other officers’ hands would have made it impossible for Floyd to breathe properly. Tobin was highly credible and unflappable, and his testimony reinforced the commonsensical supposition that a man who complains 27 times that he can’t breathe while being squeezed between three cops and the asphalt might actually be having trouble breathing.

Other expert witnesses explained why neither heart disease nor drug use were plausible explanations for Floyd’s death. And although Baker did not mention asphyxia in his autopsy report, on the stand he did not rule out the possibility that impeded breathing contributed to Floyd’s “cardiopulmonary arrest,” saying, “I would defer to a pulmonologist.”

To prove causation, the prosecution needed only to persuade the jury that Chauvin’s actions were “a substantial causal factor” in Floyd’s death. “The fact that other causes may have contributed to George Floyd’s death does not relieve the defendant of any criminal liability,” Schleicher noted. “He’s criminally liable for all of the consequences of his actions that naturally occur, including those consequences brought about by intervening causes.” The alternative to concluding that Chauvin killed Floyd was to believe that Floyd just happened to die from other, unrelated causes under Chauvin’s knee.

As for whether Chauvin’s use of force was justified, several supervisors (including the police chief) and use-of-force experts concluded that it was not. They said Chauvin’s conduct violated his training, department policy, and the Fourth Amendment.

Against that judgment, Nelson offered only the testimony of Barry Brodd, a former police officer who preposterously claimed that pinning Floyd to the pavement for nine and a half minutes did not even qualify as a use of force. Brodd also averred that “drug-influenced” suspects “don’t feel pain” and “may have superhuman strength”—an old canard with racist roots that police tend to drag out when they are accused of using excessive force.

While Brodd claimed that Floyd was “somewhat resisting” even after he was pinned to the ground, his definition of resistance was broad enough to encompass writhing in pain and struggling to breathe. And even by Brodd’s account, the resistance lasted for “a couple of minutes,” leaving unexplained the continued use of force during the next seven and a half minutes, when Floyd stopped talking and moving, became unresponsive, and seemed to lose consciousness.

Even after Floyd no longer had a detectable pulse, Chauvin kept kneeling on him. “How can you justify the continued use of force against this man when he has no pulse?” Schleicher wondered.

Chauvin chose not to take the stand, which would have given him an opportunity to answer that question but also would have exposed him to a potentially brutal cross-examination. Without hearing from Chauvin, the jurors were left with Nelson’s description of the factors that figured in Chauvin’s thinking, which amounted to little more than fears about what Floyd might have done to pose a threat, as opposed to what he actually did.

“The standard is not what should the officer have done in these circumstances,” Nelson said. “Officers are human beings capable of making mistakes in highly stressful situations.” But when those “mistakes” go beyond what a “reasonable officer” would do in similar circumstances, the use of force is unlawful. Try as he might, Nelson was unable to persuade the jury that a reasonable officer would have done what Chauvin did.

Chauvin’s actions easily fit the definition of second-degree manslaughter, which required showing that he caused Floyd’s death “by his culpable negligence, creating an unreasonable risk and consciously [taking] the chances of causing great bodily harm.” The maximum penalty for that count is 10 years in prison, but the presumptive sentence under Minnesota’s sentencing guidelines is four years.

To prove the second-degree murder charge, prosecutors had to show that Chauvin unintentionally killed Floyd while committing a felony—in this case, third-degree assault. The assault charge, in turn, required proving that Chauvin “intentionally applied unlawful force” and thereby inflicted “substantial bodily harm.”

The jurors could have rejected the assault charge, and therefore the felony murder charge, if they believed that Chauvin did not knowingly use unlawful force. But they clearly believed his conduct went beyond negligence, a conclusion supported by all the testimony that he failed to follow his training and blatantly flouted department policy. As Schleicher put it, “He knew better. He just didn’t do better.”

Minnesota law is unusual in not requiring that the underlying offense for felony murder be distinct from the conduct that caused the victim’s death. That questionable quirk allows prosecutors to charge an unintentionally lethal assault as murder rather than manslaughter, which dramatically increases the potential penalty. The maximum penalty for felony murder is 40 years, and the presumptive sentence is 150 months, or 12.5 years.

The presumptive sentence for third-degree murder is the same, although the maximum (25 years) is shorter. That count required proving that Chauvin killed Floyd by “perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.” A “depraved mind” means Chauvin showed “reckless and wanton unconcern and indifference.”

That seems like a pretty apt description, given the way Chauvin reacted to Floyd’s distress, concerned bystanders’ warnings that Floyd’s life was endanger because he was not getting enough oxygen, Lane’s suggestion that Floyd should be rolled onto his side, Lane’s observation that “he’s passing out,” and Kueng’s report that he could not find a pulse. None of that information persuaded Chauvin to lift his knee or to perform CPR. Instead he responded with what can only be described as callous indifference.

The third-degree murder charge is legally controversial. Some case law suggests it is appropriate only when a defendant’s dangerous conduct did not target any particular individual, as when someone blindly fires a gun into a crowd.

Contrary to that view, former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor, who fatally shot Justine Damond in 2017 after she called 911 to report a possible assault in the alley behind her house, was convicted of third-degree murder (as well as second-degree manslaughter) in 2019. In February, the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld Noor’s conviction, and last month it cited that decision when it ordered Hennepin County District Court Judge Peter Cahill to reconsider his dismissal of the third-degree murder charge against Chauvin. While the Minnesota Supreme Court declined to review the appeals court’s order in Chauvin’s case, it has agreed to hear Noor’s appeal.

Depending on the outcome of that case, Chauvin’s third-degree murder conviction may not stand. But that probably would not affect the length of Chauvin’s sentence, assuming the felony murder conviction holds up. Both offense carry a presumptive 150-month sentence, which is what Noor received.

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China’s Central Bank Researchers Urge Lifting Birth Limits To Keep Up With ‘Skilled Immigration-Fed’ US

China’s Central Bank Researchers Urge Lifting Birth Limits To Keep Up With ‘Skilled Immigration-Fed’ US

China is still desperately seeking to recover from its disastrous ‘one-child policy’ which was officially ended in 2015 and replaced by the current two-child policy, yet still by 2019 the country reached a decades low of 14.7 million births after years of observable stark decline, still significantly below what’s required to maintain the size of the current population and economy. 

With this aim in mind and amid the continued panic in terms of the need to replace the future workforce and compete with other industrialized nations, especially its superpower rival the United States, there are new calls in the country to “fully liberalize” its draconian birth-control policy, which remains reputed as the harshest in the world. 

A recently released paper published by the People’s Bank of China urges a drastic overhaul of the policy to actually encourage “three or more” children per household. It called for a total lifting of any restrictions in order to “fully liberalize and encourage childbirth” to reverse the current four-year straight decline in births nationwide. 

A key section of the 22-page document spells out: “In order to achieve the long-term goals in 2035, China should fully liberalize and encourage childbirth, and sweep off difficulties (women face) during pregnancy, childbirth, and kindergarten and school enrollment by all means (possible),” the four central bank researchers wrote in the English language abstract. 

In particular the authors, who noted they don’t necessarily represent the official views of the central bank, worry that the United States’ continued influx of “skilled immigration” combined with China’s accelerating rate of ageing population (and with a little over 70% of the total population in the labor workforce based on 2019 numbers, compared to a US rate of 65%) will leave China’s economy at a huge disadvantage: 

“For [China] to narrow the gap with the United States in the past four decades, it relied on cheap labor and huge numbers of people… What will we rely on in the next 30 years? This is worth our thoughts,” the study said.

“If there’s slight hesitation, (we) will miss the precious window of opportunity for birth policy to respond to the demographic transition, and repeat the mistake of developed countries.”

Charts via BBC/World Bank figures.

The study further comes after recent forecasts by the United Nations suggested that over the next thirty years China’s population is expected to decrease by over 30 million people; and simultaneously the US is expected to gain 50 million by 2050.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/20/2021 – 19:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3atjsQJ Tyler Durden

The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing

The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

It’s taken much longer than it should have but at last it seems to be happening: the lockdown paradigm is collapsing. The signs are all around us. 

The one-time hero of the lockdown, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, is now deeply unpopular and most voters want him to resign. Meanwhile, polls have started to favor Florida governor and lockdown opponent Ron DeSantis for influence over the GOP in the future. This remarkable flip in fortunes is due to the dawning realization that the lockdowns were a disastrous policy. DeSantis and fellow anti-lockdown governor Kristi Noem are the first to state the truth bluntly. Their honesty has won them both credibility.

Meanwhile, in Congressional hearings, Representative James Jordan (R-OH) demanded that Dr. Fauci account for why closed Michigan has worse disease prevalence than neighboring Wisconsin which has long been entirely open. Fauci pretended he couldn’t hear the question, couldn’t see the chart, and then didn’t understand. Finally he just sat there silent after having uttered a few banalities about enforcement differentials.

The lockdowners are now dealing with the huge problem of Texas. It has been fully open with no restrictions for 6 weeks. Cases and deaths fell dramatically in the same period. Fauci has no answer. Or compare closed California with open Florida: similar death rates. We have a full range of experiences in the US that allow comparisons between open and closed and disease outcomes. There is no relationship. 

Or you could look to Taiwan, which had no stringencies governing its 23.5 million people. Deaths from Covid-19 thus far: 11. Sweden, which stayed open, performed better than most of Europe. 

The problem is that the presence or absence of lockdowns in the face of the virus seem completely uncorrelated with any disease trajectory. AIER has assembled 33 case studies from all over the world showing this to be true. 

Why should any of this matter? Because the “scientists” who recommended lockdowns had posited very precisely and pointedly that they had found the way to control the virus and minimized negative outcomes. We know for sure that the lockdowns imposed astonishing collateral damage. What we do not see is any relationship between lockdowns and disease outcomes. 

This is devastating because the scientists who pushed lockdowns had made specific and falsifiable predictions. This was probably their biggest mistake. In doing so, they set up a test of their theory. Their theory failed. This is the sort of moment that causes a collapse of a scientific paradigm, as explained by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). 

A good example of a similar situation might be the Soviet economy under Nikita Khrushchev. He came to power with a promise that he would make the Russia economy under communism perform better than the United States. That was the essence of his famous promise “We will bury you.” He meant that Russia would outproduce America. 

It did not happen. He failed and the theory he pushed failed alongside. And thus began the slow coming apart of communist theory and practice. Khrushchev had already repudiated the Stalinist terror state but never had any intention of presiding over the slow demise of the entire Soviet experiment in central planning. By setting up a test that could falsify his promise, he doomed an entire system to intellectual repudiation and eventual collapse. 

The theory and practice of lockdownism could be going the same way. 

In Kuhn’s reconstruction of the history of science, he argued that progress in science occurs not in a linear fashion but rather episodically as new orthodoxies emerge, get codified, and then collapse under the weight of too many anomalies. 

The pattern goes like this. There is normal science driven by puzzle solving and experimentation. When a theory seems to capture most known information, a new orthodoxy emerges – a paradigm. Over time, too much new information seems to contradict what the theory would predict or explain. Thus emerges the crisis and collapse of the paradigm. We enter into a pre-paradigmatic era as the cycle starts all over again. 

As best anyone can tell, the idea of locking down when faced with a new virus emerged in the US and the UK around 2005-2006. It started with a small group of fanatics who dissented from traditional public health. They posited that they could manage a virus by dictating people’s behavior: how closely they stood next to each other, where they travelled, what events they attended, where they sat and for how long. They pushed the idea of closures and restrictions, which they branded “nonpharmaceutical interventions” through “targeted layered containment.” What they proposed was medieval in practice but with a veneer of computer science and epidemiology. 

When the idea was first floated, it was greeted with ferocious opposition. Over time, the lockdown paradigm made progress, with funding from the Gates Foundation and more recruits from within academia and public health bureaucracies. There were journals and conferences. Guidelines at the national level started to warm to the idea of school and business closures and a more broad invocation of the quarantine power. It took 10 years but eventually the heresy became a quasi-orthodoxy. They occupied enough positions of power that they were able to try out their theory on a new pathogen that emerged 15 years after the idea of lockdown had been first floated, while traditional epidemiology came to be marginalized, gradually at first and then all at once. 

Kuhn explains how a new orthodoxy gradually replaces the old one:

When, in the development of a natural science, an individual or group first produces a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation’s practitioners, the older schools gradually disappear. In part their disappearance is caused by their members’ conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work. The new paradigm implies a new and more rigid definition of the field. Those unwilling or unable accommodate their work to it must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group. 

That’s a good description of how lockdown ideology triumphed. There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there concerning why the lockdowns happened. Many of them contain grains of truth. But we don’t need to take recourse to them to understand why it happened. It happened because the people who believed in them became dominant in the world of ideas, or at least prominent enough to override and banish traditional principles of public health. The lockdowns were driven primarily by lockdown ideology. The adherents to this strange new ideology grew to the point where they were able to push their agenda ahead of time-tested principles.

It is a blessing of this ideology that it came with a built-in promise. They would achieve better disease outcomes than traditional public health practices, so they said. This promise will eventually be their undoing, for one simple reason: they have not worked. Kuhn writes that in the history of science, this is prelude to crisis due to “the persistent failure of the puzzles of normal science to come out as they should. Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones.” Further: “The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived.”

Kuhn’s theory of scientific progress fits rather well with the rise and fall of lockdownism. They had a theory that converted many people away from traditional principles. That theory came with a test. The theory has failed the test – that much is becoming more obvious by the day. 

The silence of Fauci in Congressional hearings is telling. His willingness only to be interviewed by fawning mainstream media TV anchors is as well. Many of the other lockdowners that were public and preening one year ago have fallen silent, sending ever fewer tweets and content that is ever more surreptitious rather than certain. The crisis for the fake science of lockdownism may not be upon us now but it is coming. 

Kuhn speaks of the post-crisis period of science as a time for a new paradigm to emerge, first nascently and then becoming canonical over time. What will replace lockdown ideology? We can hope it will be the realization that the old principles of public health served us well, as did the legal and moral principles of human rights and restrictions on the powers of government.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/20/2021 – 19:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3sHzqgE Tyler Durden

68-Year Old President Of Chad Killed In Frontline Clashes With Rebels

68-Year Old President Of Chad Killed In Frontline Clashes With Rebels

In a headline that almost defies belief given it’s the 21st century, the president of the north-central African country of Chad has died from wounds sustained on frontlines while battling rebels seeking to oust his government. 

The national armed forces announced Tuesday that Chad’s President Idriss Déby Itno, who had only on Monday been elected to a sixth term, “died while protecting the country” and as he was “commanding an army unit during hostilities against the rebels in the north of the country,” according to AFP. He was pronounced dead from his injuries at a hospital. 

Chadian President Idriss Deby, via EPA

The 68-year-old leader has been in office since 1990, and under his rule Chad had been considered a key strategic ally in the historically war-racked central African region. Though widely acknowledged as a dictator, European countries like former colonial power France considered he and his military crucial in rooting out jihadists from the region.

AFP reports the following details of his death: “The army said Deby had been commanding his forces at the weekend as they fought rebels who had launched a major incursion into the north of the oil-producing country on election day.”

Deby “has just breathed his last breath defending the sovereign nation on the battlefield,” army spokesman General Azem Bermandoa Agouna announced on state television, which reportedly sent much of the population into a panic as schools, public buildings, and the country’s borders were shut “until further notice” on fears of instability.

Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno and French President Emmanuel Macron in France. Getty Images

And BBC added further details: “He had gone to the front line, several hundred kilometres north of the capital N’Djamena, at the weekend to visit troops battling rebels belonging to a group calling itself Fact (the Front for Change and Concord in Chad).”

Here’s more background from AFP: 

Deby, often called “marshal” due to his military rank, had ruled Chad with an iron fist since taking power on the back of a coup in 1990.

He was nonetheless a key ally in the West’s anti-jihadist campaign in the troubled Sahel region, particularly due to Chad’s ability to supply weaponry and soldiers.

Déby son, 37-year-old four star general Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, will take over leadership of the country and army for the next 18 months during a ‘transition period’ during which time parliament will be suspended.

Mahamat Idriss Déby is now vowing “free and democratic” elections following the mourning period and lengthy transition period.

Recent history in the region of course suggests that the son will probably hold onto power for decades to come. There’s already widespread fears the country is poised to descend into instability and violence.

Idriss Déby Itno previously addressing the United Nations, via Reuters.

We should note that this instance of Deby’s perishing during a battle constitutes the only time in the 21st century that a head of state has died while leading his forces into military combat — something we can imagine is probably never going to happen again in this century, apparently providing a lone exception to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s take on all modern heads of state (especially in the West) as warmongers who are themselves not warriors…

“Historically, all warlords and warmongers were warriors themselves, and, with a few curious exceptions, societies were run by risk takers, not risk transferors,” Taleb wrote in his Skin in the Game.

“They took risks – more risks than ordinary citizens. Julian the Apostate, the hero of many, died on the battlefield fighting in the never-ending war on the Persian frontier. One of predecessors, Valerian, after he was captured was said to have been used as a human footstool by the Persian Shahpur when mounting his horse. Less than a third of Roman emperors died in their bed – and one can argue that, had they lived longer, they would have fallen prey to either a coup or a battlefield.”

Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/20/2021 – 19:05

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3enHePv Tyler Durden

Farmers Warn That The Megadrought In The Western US Threatens To Cause Devastating Crop Failures In 2021

Farmers Warn That The Megadrought In The Western US Threatens To Cause Devastating Crop Failures In 2021

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Throughout U.S. history, there have always been droughts in the western half of the country from time to time, but what we are dealing with now is truly alarming.  Scientists tell us that a multi-year “megadrought” has developed in the southwestern portion of the country, and this is the worst year of that “megadrought” so far by a wide margin.  If conditions do not radically improve soon, we are going to have a major agricultural disaster on our hands.  Some farmers have already decided not to plant crops at all this year, but many others have decided to plant anyway knowing that if enough rain doesn’t come their crops will certainly fail.

As I have discussed previously, the epicenter of this “megadrought” is the Four Corners region in the Southwest, but this drought is so immense it is even causing immense nightmares for farmers as far away as North Dakota.

In fact, the first few months of this year were the driest that North Dakota has seen in 126 years…

The period of January to March 2021 was the driest in 126 years for North Dakota. Farmers are starting to make difficult decisions on planting and culling herds as the governor of the state declared a statewide drought disaster on April 8. Soil moistures across the state, particularly in western portions of North Dakota, are lacking sufficient moisture to sustain normal crop development growth. The first eight days of April 2021 offered little help as hot, summer-like temperatures, gusty winds, and low humidity across the state accelerated drying conditions.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, well over half the state is now experiencing “severe drought”.

Perhaps you don’t care about what is happening in North Dakota, but you should, because much of the wheat that we use for pasta and flour comes from that region…

Things are dry and dusty in the Upper Midwest, the Northern Plains states and the Prairie provinces of Canada.

This region, spanning states such as North Dakota and provinces such as Manitoba, is the most important one for spring wheat, the higher-gluten variety that’s used for pasta or mixed with other wheat for all-purpose flour. And that crop is at significant risk, because conditions in the region are pretty dire this year.

In a previous article I discussed the dramatic rise in food prices that we have been witnessing lately, and now drought fears are pushing futures prices for spring wheat quite a bit higher…

The US Drought Monitor shows around 70 percent of North Dakota in “extreme drought” conditions, with most of the rest in the slightly less scary “severe drought” rating. As a result, the futures prices of both spring wheat and canola are at their highest in years, with traders expecting a lower harvest this year.

Despite all of our advanced technology, farmers can’t grow crops if it doesn’t rain, and a farmer in Texas named Blake Fennell says that his farm has not had any significant rain in almost two years…

The West Texas farmer says his area hasn’t seen significant rain fall in nearly two years.

“We’ve still got to give that crop every chance we think we can get, but at the same time, we also can’t waste a lot of money on a crop that we don’t think we’re going to have going into it,” he says.

What a nightmare.

Right now, nearly the entire state of Texas is in some level of drought, and we haven’t even gotten to the summer months yet.

To call this a “plague” would be a major understatement.  On the border of Oregon and California, farmers just learned that water levels are so low that they will only get “a tiny fraction of the water they need” in 2021…

Hundreds of farmers who rely on a massive irrigation project that spans the Oregon-California border learned Wednesday they will get a tiny fraction of the water they need amid the worst drought in decades, as federal regulators attempt to balance the needs of agriculture against federally threatened and endangered fish species that are central to the heritage of several tribes.

Oregon’s governor said the prolonged drought in the region has the “full attention of our offices,” and she is working with congressional delegates, the White House and federal agencies to find relief for those affected.

Do you think that you could run a successful farm under such conditions?

Elsewhere in California, water allocation reductions of up to 95 percent are forcing many farmers to make some exceedingly heartbreaking decisions…

Drought conditions are already forcing Valley farmers to make difficult decisions when it comes to their crops as many are facing severe water restrictions.

“There’s districts throughout California that have experienced up to 95% reductions in water,” says Fresno County Farm Bureau CEO Ryan Jacobsen.

U.S. food production will be down in 2021, but if sufficient rain starts falling in the western U.S. we could still see a miracle.

But if enough rain does not fall, we are going to see epic crop failures.

Meanwhile, it is being projected that the drought will cause the water level in Lake Mead to soon fall to the lowest level ever recorded…

Wracked by drought, climate change and overuse, a key reservoir on the Colorado River could sink to historically low levels later this year, new US government projections show, potentially triggering significant water cutbacks in some states as early as next year.

The projections released by the US Bureau of Reclamation show that Lake Mead — the largest reservoir in the country and a vital water supply to millions across the Southwest — could fall later this year to its lowest levels since it was filled in the 1930s.

If you live anywhere in the western half of the country, you should brace yourself for severe water restrictions.

And all of us need to brace ourselves for much higher prices at the grocery store.

For decades, the western half of the country was blessed with unusually high levels of rainfall, but that wasn’t going to last forever.

Now Dust Bowl conditions have returned, and farmers, ranchers and local authorities are starting to panic.

As this megadrought continues to intensify, life is going to dramatically change in the western half of the nation, and that is going to deeply affect all of us.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 04/20/2021 – 18:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3n4DtCg Tyler Durden

Unpublished Sixth Circuit Decision Comments on U.S. Immigration Policy

It is not every day one reads an appellate opinion that cites polling data off the internet to criticize the laws the court is obligated to enforce. Today, in Lopez-Soto v. Garland, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit did just that. More broadly, the opinion by Senior Judge Martha Daughtrey includes an unusually aggressive critique of U.S. immigration policy, which may explain why the opinion was unpublished.

Judge Daughtrey’s opinion begins:

In an era in which it is difficult to find any issue upon which a large percentage of Americans agree, few people would dispute that our nation’s immigration system is broken and is need of a structural overhaul. Admittedly, a not insignificant number of Americans believe that any change to our immigration statutes should result in shutting our borders to almost all individuals, or at least to all potential immigrants who are not blond-haired and blue-eyed. A June 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found, however, that approximately 74% of people surveyed felt that our immigration laws should be amended to provide legal status to the approximately 650,000 individuals now in the United States who were brought illegally to this country as children. See pewresearch.org/facttank/2020/06/17/americans-broadly-support-legal-status-for-immigrants-brought-to-the-u-sillegally-as-children/ (last visited Apr. 2, 2021). That same study further found that approximately 75% of the surveyed individuals supported a pathway to legal status for the approximately 10.5 million other immigrants who now reside in the United States without recognized legal status. Id.

Until the immigration system is reformed, however, individuals like petitioner Imelda Lopez-Soto—who has resided in this country for 21 consecutive years, who has remained employed and paid her federal income taxes when required, who has committed no crimes other than driving on a revoked license, and who has given birth to and raised two admittedly outstanding young boys who are United States citizens—remains subject to removal to a country from which she fled for greater opportunity and for a chance to participate in the so-called American Dream. She now petitions this court for review of a decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) that denied her requests for withholding of removal, protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT), and cancellation of removal. Constrained by precedent and by our immigration laws as they now exist, we must deny her petition.

Judge Karen Moore joined the opinion.

Judge Amul Thapar was also on the panel. He wrote separately, noting he concurred in the result. His brief opinion reads:

I have my doubts about the wisdom of courts opining on hot-button political issues or the motives of citizens who hold one position or another in those debates. And as someone who is neither blond-haired nor blue-eyed and who has benefited directly from the kindness of the American people, I believe that the American Dream is alive and well for persons of all stripes.

Thus, I respectfully concur only in the judgment.

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Unpublished Sixth Circuit Decision Comments on U.S. Immigration Policy

It is not every day one reads an appellate opinion that cites polling data off the internet to criticize the laws the court is obligated to enforce. Today, in Lopez-Soto v. Garland, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit did just that. More broadly, the opinion by Senior Judge Martha Daughtrey includes an unusually aggressive critique of U.S. immigration policy, which may explain why the opinion was unpublished.

Judge Daughtrey’s opinion begins:

In an era in which it is difficult to find any issue upon which a large percentage of Americans agree, few people would dispute that our nation’s immigration system is broken and is need of a structural overhaul. Admittedly, a not insignificant number of Americans believe that any change to our immigration statutes should result in shutting our borders to almost all individuals, or at least to all potential immigrants who are not blond-haired and blue-eyed. A June 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found, however, that approximately 74% of people surveyed felt that our immigration laws should be amended to provide legal status to the approximately 650,000 individuals now in the United States who were brought illegally to this country as children. See pewresearch.org/facttank/2020/06/17/americans-broadly-support-legal-status-for-immigrants-brought-to-the-u-sillegally-as-children/ (last visited Apr. 2, 2021). That same study further found that approximately 75% of the surveyed individuals supported a pathway to legal status for the approximately 10.5 million other immigrants who now reside in the United States without recognized legal status. Id.

Until the immigration system is reformed, however, individuals like petitioner Imelda Lopez-Soto—who has resided in this country for 21 consecutive years, who has remained employed and paid her federal income taxes when required, who has committed no crimes other than driving on a revoked license, and who has given birth to and raised two admittedly outstanding young boys who are United States citizens—remains subject to removal to a country from which she fled for greater opportunity and for a chance to participate in the so-called American Dream. She now petitions this court for review of a decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) that denied her requests for withholding of removal, protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT), and cancellation of removal. Constrained by precedent and by our immigration laws as they now exist, we must deny her petition.

Judge Karen Moore joined the opinion.

Judge Amul Thapar was also on the panel. He wrote separately, noting he concurred in the result. His brief opinion reads:

I have my doubts about the wisdom of courts opining on hot-button political issues or the motives of citizens who hold one position or another in those debates. And as someone who is neither blond-haired nor blue-eyed and who has benefited directly from the kindness of the American people, I believe that the American Dream is alive and well for persons of all stripes.

Thus, I respectfully concur only in the judgment.

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