Month: April 2023

The busiest air routes in the world are all domestic flights. Yet, the frequent flyer nation of the United States can’t hold the candle to the high demand for air travel in Asia.

There, the busiest route has the capacity to transport more than three times as many people in a month than the busiest U.S. route.

Data published for the month of April by air travel analytics firm OAG shows that the route connecting Gimpo airport in the South Korean capital of Seoul and country’s Jeju island is the world’s busiest.

The “Hawaii of South Korea” is popular among domestic tourists.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Among the world’s and the U.S.’ most flown routes, tourism and entertainment destinations pop up repeatedly, while island locations also have a leg up.

This includes the world’s second-busiest route between Tokyo and Japan’s Northern island of Hokkaido, a year-round tourist destination.

In the U.S., the two most-flown routes connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas as well as two Hawaiian islands.

Some island routes have also popularized short flights as ground transportation is either not an option or is the more complicated, time-consuming and expensive choice. While the inter-Hawaiian route is the briefest in the ranking, the world’s busiest leg between Seoul and Jeju island is the third-shortest. The flight route linking the United States’ biggest cities across a distance of almost 2,500 miles is an outlier in that sense. As the most popular air routes over land are typically 400-700 miles long, the inclusion of the JFK-LAX route does highlight the extraordinary reliance the U.S. places on air travel to keep the country connected.

International flights are a more pricy and sometimes more complicated way to travel and therefore attract fewer passengers.

The busiest route this April is connecting Egyptian capital Cairo with Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, the gateway to Muslim pilgrimage place Mecca.

This month (which falls into Hajj season) almost 450,000 people will be flying on the route – still more than on the busiest U.S. journey.

Authored by John Mac Ghlionn via The Epoch Times,

Soon after Tucker Carlson left Fox News, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, more commonly known by her initials AOC, celebrated on social media, telling her followers that “deplatforming works.”

.@AOC on @TuckerCarlson: “Deplatforming works and it is important.” pic.twitter.com/AZZj0wd3S9

— Donna, Independent 🌺🗽🇺🇸⏳ (@TruthFreedomPe1) April 25, 2023

Deplatforming, the practice of preventing an individual with specific views from voicing those views, might work for her, but it’s a disaster for broader society, according to a new peer-reviewed study (pdf).

The research, carried out by four esteemed cyber experts, warns that deplatforming regularly backfires, because it creates a sense of deep-seated resentment, driving the disenchanted and disillusioned to seek out “alternative platforms where these discussions are less regulated and often more extreme.”

In this particular study, the researchers analyzed changes in social media usage following the “Great Deplatforming” of 2021. For the uninitiated, the “Great Deplatforming” occurred shortly after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Following the event, a number of major platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, banned thousands of accounts. Ostensibly, as the researchers note, this was done to “limit misinformation about voter fraud and suppress calls for violence.” However, other less regulated platforms like Parler and BitChute were quick to give the homeless a home. In this age of maximum choice, with no shortage of alternative social media platforms, deplatforming is an ineffective tool. It’s the equivalent of taking a soup spoon to a knife fight. You simply can’t make people with alternative points of view disappear. These people will almost always find new homes.

One of the authors of the study, Martin Innes, a professor of crime, intelligence, and security at Cardiff University, told me that “deplatforming can have complex effects and not always those that are intended, including boosting the popularity of the target.”

Furthermore, “deplatforming can actually increase the toxicity of discourse and make the problems worse on the platform that people migrate to.”

In truth, he added, deplatforming tends to just displace the problem, not actually solve it.

As Innes and his colleagues note in the paper, contrary to popular belief, deplatforming is not “an effective tool for reducing the impact of malign actors on the public.” In fact, they contend, “deplatforming is ineffective at improving the information space,” simply because “banned actors can migrate to less regulated platforms, potentially promoting even more radical ideas.”

These findings echo the findings of other research papers. In 2021, Innes was part of another study that examined the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of deplatforming. Innes and his co-author coined the term “minion accounts” to describe how, following a “de-platforming intervention,” a number of secondary accounts are established to “continue the mission.”

When it comes to the creation of “minion accounts,” Andrew Tate, a man I have discussed in great detail elsewhere, is a shining example of the ineffectiveness of deplatforming. When he was unceremoniously booted off the Holy Quadrinity—YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok—last year, a whole host of fake accounts, powered by real people and tireless bots, quickly popped up, helping to keep the Tate-fueled fire burning.

Those in charge would have us believe that deplatforming is for our own good, that it’s a tool designed to curb the spread of disinformation. However, one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Deplatforming is, first and foremost, a form of social control. It’s designed to amplify certain narratives and silence others, perhaps explaining why AOC, a controversial individual with a very strict set of beliefs, appears to be such a fan of the practice.

All of this brings us back to Tucker Carlson, a man who won’t (and can’t) be silenced. Carlson is, in many ways, bigger than Fox News. He’s a brand, a celebrity, a highly bankable star. One needn’t possess more than a few functioning neurons to know that Carlson is going to be OK. In fact, because of his ouster, he has never been in a stronger position. Carlson is more marketable now than ever before.

Where will he go next? Rumble, perhaps. The remarkably popular online video platform service gives content makers a great degree of freedom. Russell Brand, one of the most popular public intellectuals in existence, is Rumble’s biggest asset. He currently boasts more than 1 million followers. Adding Carlson to its ever-expanding family would boost Rumble’s profile. It would also give Carlson a platform to continue preaching his rather unique gospel. The provocateur extraordinaire will be back. Watch this space.

Only 8% of the world’s population actually lives in a full, functioning democracy, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

Meanwhile, another 37% of people live in some type of “flawed democracy”, while 55% of the world does not live in democracy at all, based on the EIU’s latest Democracy Index Report.

As Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop and Joyce Mas detail below, events such as the war in Ukraine and restrictive, long-lasting COVID-19 measures, have caused numerous declines to country democracy scores in recent years. Since the source report first began tracking scores in 2006, the global average has fallen from 5.52 to 5.29.

The Methodology

The EIU measures democracy by assessing 60 indicators across five key categories:

1. Electoral process and pluralism
2. Political culture
3. Political participation
4. Functioning of government
5. Civil liberties

Each category has a rank of 0-10 based on how the indicators fared, and the overall democracy score is an average of each of the five categories. For example, here’s a look at the U.S.’ scoring out of 10 in each of the overall categories in 2022:

This score defines the U.S. as a flawed democracy and ranks it 30th overall in the world, down four spots from last year’s ranking.

“Flawed” in this case simply means there are problems, ranging from poor political culture to governance issues, but flawed democracies are still considered to have free and fair elections, as well as civil liberties.

The World’s Democracies by Region

Below we map out the state of democracy across various regions around the world.

The Americas

One of the best performers year-over-year was Chile, with its score increasing by nearly 0.3. The country moved out of the flawed democracy category last year, largely because of the shift towards constitutional reform alongside President Gabriel Boric moving towards the political center, reducing polarization.

Only three other countries in the Americas are also considered full democracies: Costa Rica, Canada, and Uruguay—the latter of which is #1 regionally.

On the flipside, some of the world’s worst performers year-over-year are located specifically in Latin America, namely: El Salvador and Haiti. Much of the low scores in the region are associated with high crime rates and corrupt governance.

Africa

The only full democracy in Africa is the small, island nation of Mauritius. Overall, Africa is one of the lowest scoring regions with only five of the continent’s 54 countries ranking as some type of democracy.

Tunisia’s score decreased significantly in 2022. President Kais Saied dismissed parliament early in the year and took control of the electoral council, slowly shifting towards centralized power. And although there were critics, many have since been arrested, downgrading them in the EIU’s eyes from a flawed democracy to a hybrid regime.

Europe

Spain and France regained status as full democracies in 2022, mainly improving in the civil liberties and functioning of government categories thanks to the easing of COVID-19 restrictions. However, both countries face political polarization; in Spain this is largely exemplified in the attitudes surrounding the Catalan separatist movement.

Some of the lowest scoring regimes in the region are in Russia and Belarus. Russia’s war in Ukraine has violated international law, as well as another country’s sovereignty, decimating its score by 0.96 in the index. Belarus has continually allied itself with Russia, allowing troops—and likely missiles—to enter Ukraine from its borders.

Oceania and East Asia

In this region, levels of democracy were severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hong Kong only removed restrictive policies like mask mandates in early 2023. In contrast, Thailand lifted these restrictions a year prior, providing more individual freedom, according to the report.

Malaysia’s fairly high score of 7.3 could face scrutiny, as the former Prime Minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, who was in office during COVID-19, is currently facing corruption charges for money laundering of COVID-19 stimulus package funds.

Central Asia and The Middle East

Finally, in the Middle East and Central Asia, there are no full democracies at all. The lowest scoring country globally is Afghanistan at only 0.32.

Israel, the only democracy of any kind of the region, actually moved down six spots in the global ranking from the year prior. Its lowest scoring category in 2022 was civil liberties. This year, the country is in the spotlight due to its judicial reforms proposed by the ruling nationalist party, and civil response has been strong. Mass protests continue around the country.

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Teachers from a California middle school are suing officials in their school district in federal court over policies that they say force them to conceal the transgender status of young students from parents.

The lawsuit happens to come after President Joe Biden’s remarks earlier this month in support of the nation’s teacher of the year angered parents by suggesting government knows best when it comes to the raising of children.

Biden quoted the teacher when he said, “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child.” The president then said, “Our nation’s children are all our children.”

The legal complaint (pdf) in the new case, Mirabelli v. Olson, was filed April 27 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. The teachers involved in the lawsuit are devout Christians.

The defendants are officials with the Escondido Union School District (EUSD), which is in San Diego County, and officials with the California State Board of Education.

The lawsuit was prompted by the K-8 school district’s recent policies affecting transgender or gender-diverse students.

The policies require teachers to assist in a student’s transgender “social transition” by accepting a child’s assertion of a transgender or gender-diverse identity and using during school hours any pronouns or a gender-specific name requested by a student.

At the same time, the policies also require teachers to revert to biological pronouns and legal names when speaking with parents in order to cover up information about a child’s purported gender identity from the child’s parents, according to the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit public interest law firm that filed the lawsuit.

“All of this is to be done without parent or guardian agreement or knowledge,” said Paul Jonna, Thomas More Society special counsel and a partner at LiMandri and Jonna.

“Schools routinely send notes home to parents about trivial matters, like missing homework, so it is unfathomable that Escondido Union School District has a policy that forces teachers to withhold from parents some of the most fundamental and basic information about their children,” Jonna said.

EUSD requires all elementary and middle school teachers to “unhesitatingly accept a child’s assertion of a transgender or gender diverse identity, and … [to] ‘begin to treat the student immediately’ according to their asserted gender identity,” according to the legal complaint.

“There is absolutely no room for discussion, polite disagreement, or even questioning whether the child is sincere or acting on a whim,” the complaint continues. “Once a child’s social transitioning has begun, EUSD elementary and middle school teachers must ensure that parents do not find out.”

“EUSD’s policies state that ‘revealing a student’s transgender status to individuals who do not have a legitimate need for the information, without the student’s consent’ is prohibited, and ‘parents or caretakers’ are, according to EUSD, individuals who ‘do not have a legitimate need for the information,’ irrespective of the age of the student or the specific facts of the situation.”

Read more here…

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

According to this week’s Commerce Department report, U.S. GDP increased at an annualized rate of 1.1 percent during Q1 2023.  The experts thought GDP would grow by 2 percent.  They were wrong.

By now, it’s very well possible GDP has already slipped into reverse.  We won’t know until the Commerce Department’s Q2 report is released in late July.  In the interim, there’s an important question to be asked:

Is a recession bullish or bearish for stocks?

Next week, following the federal open market committee (FOMC) meeting on May 2 and 3, it’s widely anticipated that the Federal Reserve will hike interest rates by 25 basis points.  This will take the federal funds rate to a range of 5.00 to 5.25 percent.

It is also anticipated that this will be the last rate hike of this rate hiking cycle.  That the Fed will then hold interest rates, before cutting them later this year to offset the recession.

Interest rate cuts are commonly recognized as being bullish for stocks and stimulative for the economy. 

Here at the Economic Prism, we have some reservations.

In short, we expect there will be a great stock market purge that will take the major indexes to unimaginable lows.  We also expect this will coincide with the slashing and burning of interest rates.  Here’s why…

The last time a Fed rate hike took the federal funds rate to 5.25 percent was June 29, 2006.  If you recall, the Fed then paused and held the federal funds rate at 5.25 percent for roughly 15 months.  Then on September 18, 2007, the Fed cut rates 50 basis points.

A lot happened beneath the surface over these 15 months when the federal funds rate was held at 5.25 percent.  Massive stressors were formed, as this rate was relatively higher than the preceding years.  In June 2003, for example, the federal funds rate touched 1.00 percent, and remained there until June of 2004.

Cheap Credit Spawns Bad Debt

When credit is cheap, opportunities to borrow and spend money are much more manageable.  When interest rates are ultra-low, consumers, businesses, and governments can make their cash flow pencil out for purchases that would otherwise be extravagant.

But when the federal funds rate is 5.25 percent, and credit markets are tighter, the cash flow comes up short.  Debts go unpaid and slip into arrears.  Defaults occur.

Yet the effects of cheap credit spawning bad debt takes time to filter its way through the economy.  Sectors that largely rely on financing to move products – such as real estate and automobiles – are generally hit first.  While demand for bricks of dry ramen noodles, which even with today’s inflation can still be bought with pocket change, remains even.

When the Fed brought the federal funds rate to 5.25 percent in June 2006, and then signaled a pause, there was a sense of relief.  Professional economists thought the worst of it had come and gone.  They believed the stress of higher interest rates had already been realized.

In fact, on May 17, 2007, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke gave a speech before the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, where he said:

“The subprime mess is grave but largely contained.  Given the fundamental factors in place that should support the demand for housing, we believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited.”   

Did he believe what he was saying?  Because at the precise moment he spoke these words the nation’s housing market was rotting just beneath his nose.  Did he not smell it?

Sowing the Seeds of Chaos

Apparently, Bernanke was missing his sense of smell.  Because when Bear Stearns blew up in March 2008, Bernanke was again quick to dismiss it.  On June 8, 2008, Bernanke, said:

“The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.”

At the same time, Bernanke was slashing the federal funds rate.  Bringing it from 5.25 percent in September 2007 to a range of 0.00 to 0.25 percent by December 2008.  Perhaps he thought this would buoy the economy and float stocks higher.

But then, on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers blew up and credit markets frosted over like the Alaskan tundra.  Three days later Bernanke, along with Hank “my squirt gun’s a bazooka” Paulson, went to Congress and demanded a mega-bailout of the financial system.

On September 18, 2008, at an emergency meeting in the Capitol, Bernanke told Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd: “If we don’t do this tomorrow, we won’t have an economy on Monday.”

Two months after firing off Paulson’s bazooka, Bernanke commenced QE1.  In doing so, he corrupted financial markets and the economy without end…and sowed the seeds of today’s financial and economic chaos.

Over this time, as the federal funds rate was being slashed and QE began flooding the financial markets with liquidity, the stock market didn’t go up.  Instead, it went down.

The S&P 500, for example, peaked out at about 1,586 in October 2007.  It then slowly slid down to about 1,200 in August 2008.  Over this time, investors thought they were buying the dip.  That the Fed had engineered a soft landing.  They were dead wrong.

By September 2008, the S&P 500 was freefalling like common ravens descending upon fresh roadkill.  Taking it down to a bottom of 666 on March 6, 2009.  This amounted to a top to bottom decline of 58 percent.  It was brutal.  Yet it was also the buying opportunity of a lifetime.

What’s the point?

What the End of Fed Rate Hikes Means for Stocks

Here in the wooded mountains of East Tennessee the vegetated growth is so dense it shuts off the adjacent view.  Hollers, as they’re called in southern Appalachia, are undetectable.  And in an instant, things can go terribly wrong.

Take Dennis Martin, for instance.  On June 14, 1969, he wandered off a Smoky Mountain trail never to be seen again.  Approximately 1,400 search and rescue workers – including the National Guard, Green Berets, and Boy Scouts of America – walked narrow transects across a 56 square mile area.

All that was found were footprints leading to a stream, one shoe, and one sock.  Martin vanished with hardly a trace.

Where did he go?  Did a black bear eat him?

To this day, no one knows.  It’s an unsolved mystery. 

What to make of it…

As we’ve just documented, the Fed stopped hiking rates in June 2006.  The S&P 500 continued to inflate until October 2007.  The Fed then began cutting rates in September 2007.  The stock market didn’t bottom out until March 2009 – 18 months after rate cuts were first initiated.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” is a cliché that’s often attributed to Mark Twain.  We don’t know if he actually said it.  And we really don’t care.  The insight, however, is edifying.

The stresses that are plaguing financial markets and the economy in 2023 are certainly different than those of 2008. 

The world has dramatically changed over these 15 years.  But if you listen with a trained ear, there are similar rhymes.

Namely, there’s massive amounts of bad debt out there that relatively higher interest rates over the past 14 months have exposed.  The commercial real estate market is absolute toast.  Pension funds, having stretched for yield, are holding a bag of assets that’s backed by eroding collateral.  At the same time, the S&P 500 is still well overvalued relative to its historical mean.

By this, the likely end of the Fed’s rate hiking cycle next week does not mean we’re out of the woods.  Rather, it means we’re just entering the woods…

And, assuming the Fed starts cutting rates in October of this year, the S&P 500 may not reemerge from the woods until it bottoms out in April 2025.

*  *  *

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Last August, we were the first to show how Russia was bypassing Europe’s so-called commodities embargo: it was selling LNG to China which was then re-selling it to Europe at a substantial mark up. And while we also frequently reported that Russia was using a similar sanctions bypass for oil, this time using India instead of China, few were willing to confirm as much: after all, it would seem very shortsighted if European consumers were paying an extra surcharge to India, while Russia was not suffering any adverse consequences from Europe’s laughable “sanctions.”

Not any more: on Friday, Bloomberg reported that for all of Europe’s fire and brimstone about an embargo (which has gotten decidedly quieter in recent months), “Russian oil is still powering Europe just with the help of India.“

As we reported at the time, last December the EU barred almost any seaborne crude oil imports from Russia. It extended the prohibition to refined fuels two months later. However, the rules didn’t stop countries like India from snapping up cheap Russian crude, turning it into fuels like diesel, and shipping it back to Europe at a big markup: as shown in the chart below, just the Brent to Urals price differential, a byproduct of the Russian sanctions, is about $25/bbl, almost a third of the price of a barrel of crude. The markups on Russian product are even greater when dealing with refined products such as gasoline or diesel.

In fact, India has become so good at reselling Russian oil to the same Europeans who refuse to buy it directly from Moscow for a much lower price, that the Asian country is on track to become Europe’s largest supplier of refined fuels this month while simultaneously buying record amounts of Russian crude, according to data from analytics firm Kpler.

In other words, Europe is still buying Russian oil, keeping Putin’s military machine well-funded, but because of the virtue signaling exercise of buying Russian oil though a mediator, the transaction ends up costing Europeans billions more than if they simply had purchased the oil directly.

pic.twitter.com/exdke9mX0p

— Derek J. Grossman (@DerekJGrossman) April 29, 2023

“Russian oil is finding its way back into Europe despite all the sanctioning and India ramping up fuel exports to the west is a good example of it,” said Viktor Katona, lead crude analyst at the firm. “With India taking in so much Russian barrels, it’s inevitable.”

As Bloomberg notes, “the development is double-edged for the EU. On the one hand, the bloc needs alternative sources of diesel now that it has cut off direct flows from Russia, previously its top supplier. However, it ultimately boosts demand for Moscow’s barrels, and means extra freight costs.” In other words, Europe achieves none of its embargo goals (i.e., keeping Russian oil out of the market, preventing Putin from using oil to finance the war in Ukraine), while being hit with far higher energy prices.

It also means more competition for Europe’s oil refiners who can’t access cheap Russian crude, and comes amid wider market scrutiny about where the region’s diesel imports are coming from.

Repsol SA’s CEO Josu Jon Imaz said on Thursday that Russian diesel is entering Europe illegally and called on authorities to clamp down on the activity. He wasn’t talking about the trade via India but flows of diesel that originated in Russia… which of course is the same thing.

Hilariously, a preliminary inquiry into the matter by Spanish authorities didn’t find evidence that Russian diesel was entering the country, a government official said Friday, adding that a probe is ongoing. Of course, nobody in Europe wants to admit that they are indirectly funding Putin, so expect many more such “discoveries” as all other countries try to find if they are importing Russian oil only to find that everyone but them is using it.

Meanwhile, Europe’s refined fuel imports from India are set to surge above 360,000 barrels a day, edging just ahead of those of oil exporting titan Saudi Arabia, Kpler’s data show.

And the cherry on top: Russian crude oil arrivals to India are expected to surpass 2 million barrels a day in April, representing almost 44% of the nation’s overall oil imports, according to Kpler data. India then quickly re-exports the oil or processes it first into diesel and gasoline, and then sells it to European customers.

More than half of Russia’s seaborne oil shipments were to the European Union and Group of Seven nations before the bloc began to cut purchases in response to the nation’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

Finally, the question of what the point is of continued Russian “sanctions” remains, as the IIF’s Robin Brooks explains in the following twitter thread, which once again makes clear that western sanctions against Russia have been a catastrophic failure… perhaps as was intended all along.

Evaluation of our sanctions policy

1. Only 2 questions matter. First, have our sanctions meaningfully curtailed Russia’s ability to wage war? Second, are our sanctions a deterrent to countries that may wage war in the future? Unfortunately, the answer to both questions is: “No!”

2. Root problem is an infatuation with financial sanctions. These can be effective when used on current account deficit countries – Turkey in 2018 is an example – but they don’t work on current account surplus countries. This is a key point that cannot be emphasized enough.

3. Russia shows how our financial sanctions failed. We sanctioned some banks, including the central bank (red), but not all. This meant that all the cash from Russia’s current account surplus got routed through non-sanctioned Russian banks (blue). Putin still got all his cash…

4. So our financial sanctions did not prevent Putin getting all his cash in return for energy exports. All this cash just got routed through different banks than before. As a result, financial conditions in Russia eased back to pre-war levels, a big plus for Russia’s war economy.

5. We could have avoided this, but it would have required sanctioning ALL Russian banks. That’s the same as a trade embargo, since Putin no longer gets paid and stops exporting. This shows what’s needed to hurt c/a surplus countries: a trade embargo! Not financial sanctions…

6. Number one lesson from Russia is that our infatuation with financial sanctions must end. They don’t work on c/a surplus countries, unless we sanction all banks, in which case we’re just doing a trade embargo. We need to be doing trade embargos instead of financial sanctions…

7. Had we done a hard energy embargo on Russia, this would have come at a cost to the West, but Russia would have gone into financial crisis, making the war harder for Putin to fight. An embargo would have also scared other potentially hostile current account surplus countries.

8. It’s not too late. First, the West needs to end its focus on financial sanctions. Second, we need to start talking about hard trade-offs that are needed to confront c/a surplus countries. We need to stop giving them cash, which means we need to stop buying their stuff…

9. A footnote on the G7 oil price cap. The cap is recognition of the fact that Russia’s current account surplus needs to be cut. But – thanks to Greek shipping oligarchs – the cap was set at $60 and wasn’t binding. A mistake that can be fixed now by lowering the cap…

Authored by Stanley Ridgley via American Greatness,

Demand for Diversity Officers may have peaked and may even be on the wane.

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion hustle is running its course and may soon be out of steam, but it’s not too late to collect your share of the loot.

This means you shouldn’t delay applying for one of the lucrative positions carrying the generic title of “DEI Officer.” 

While the typical DEI position requires no expertise of any sort, it does require a collection of attitudes toward your fellow men and women, an ability to utter shameless platitudes and clichés, and embrace a clearly identifiable and primitive Manichean worldview grounded in paranoia.

If you aim to become a promising candidate for a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) position, either in the corporate world or in academia, you can easily discover if you have the necessary self-conscious virtue by taking this five-minute employment aptitude survey.

Answer “Yes” to the following statements if you agree, and add or subtract the points assigned for each question based on your Yes answer.

Then score yourself by comparing your results with those in the chart at the end. Good luck!

1) I am not appreciated for my many talents. +3

2) I am inherently suspicious of others. +3

3) I believe that America is the land of opportunity. -3

4) I believe that I have access to truths denied to others. +5

5) I believe that I must work hard for my reward. -3

6) I believe in a world that is divided into oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited and that these groups are easily identified by the color of their skin.  +5

7) I believe that I can work to give in-groups preferential treatment while simultaneously saying that there are no racial or gender preferences at our institution. +3

8) I believe that I should bring my “authentic self” to work, irrespective of any other considerations. +5

9) I believe, like Frederick Douglass, that in America, one can pull oneself up “by the bootstraps” to succeed. -7

10) If I fail in my job, I immediately search for the reason in causes external to me, such as the “system” or the “unearned advantages” available to other people. +7

11) If people question me and ask for evidence for what I say, I immediately attack them for their “resistance” to the truth that I offer in my story.  +5

12) I believe that “indigenous” forms of knowledge such as the “medicine wheel” and the “talking stick” should be incorporated into our scientific discourse. +7

13) I always list my pronouns in my email signature and social media profiles. +3

14) I recognize that today’s “Diversity” office resembles the Soviet Union’s old Political Commissariat, where political ideologues occupied positions to report on the political reliability of those who actually worked to accomplish the mission. -10    BONUS POINTS:  If you know this but believe it’s a good thing.  +15

15) Anyone who disagrees with the lofty goals of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” is guilty of “diversity resistance.”  +5

16) I believe that a doctorate in education, sociology, or gender studies is every bit as important and impressive as a doctorate in physics. +3

17) When people respond to my charges of “racism” in a particular company or university, with bothersome requests for evidence, examples, or proof, I complain of being attacked, invalidated, and dehumanized rather than taking the opportunity to prove my point.  +5

18) I believe that “stories” and “narratives” are just as important and as convincing as knowledge grounded in logic, reason, and the scientific method. +7

19) As women are 50 percent more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees than men, this shows we need to do everything we can to support women in higher education. +3

20) I am familiar with the racialist statement “skinfolk aren’t always kinfolk,” and I look with suspicion at persons with whom I share the superficial characteristic of race but who disagree with me. +7

21) I routinely drop the word “systemic” into conversations. +3

22) I use the terms “white supremacy” and “white privilege” comfortably and un-ironically, without awareness that they are equivalent to scapegoat devil terms such as the bourgeoisie, or Kulaks, or International Jewry, or infidels to explain all the bad that happens. +5

23) I believe that the best method for advancing our knowledge and understanding of the physical world is logic, reason, and the type of inquiry we call the scientific method. -10

24) I believe that people like Ijeomo Oluo, Paulo Freire, Ibram Kendi, and Derald Wing Sue have important things to say about our society that get to the inner truth. +5

24) I don’t pay much attention to the fantasies, “stories,” and pseudoscience of Ijeomo Oluo, Paulo Freire, Ibram Kendi, and Derald Wing Sue. -7

25) I believe in something called “diversity science,” which substantiates the basic beneficial tenets of the diversity agenda. +5

26) I believe that “diversity science” is pseudo-scientific twaddle fabricated by off campus nonprofits and imported into universities and the corporate world. -10

27) The Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed inspires me to work for social justice, emancipation, and against oppression in all its forms.  +5

28) I know that Paulo Freire was a crypto-Maoist who borrowed almost all of his education theory from Mao Zedong’s murderous Cultural Revolution, which Freire greatly admired. -5 BONUS POINTS:  If you know this but believe it’s a good thing.  +15 .

29) I believe any disagreement with my worldview can be overcome with more “education.” +3

30) I divide society into “oppressors” and “oppressed,” “exploiters” and “exploited,” and I know that this is a primitive Manichean way of looking at society that resembles a medievalist world divided into “infidels” and “believers.”  +5 BONUS POINTS:  If you do this and believe it’s a good thing.  +5

31) I believe in “inclusion and belonging” as fervently as any member of Reverend Moon’s Unification Church believes in “peace and unity.” +3

32) I believe that I have attained “critical consciousness” and that those who disagree with my ideology are afflicted with “false consciousness” and must be taught to embrace a new belief system. +5

33) I believe that “critical consciousness” and “false consciousness” constitute a tautological contrivance that updates Karl Marx’s notion of “class consciousness” for race and gender sensibilities. -5  BONUS POINTS: I recognize that critical consciousness is the latest play on Plato’s cave allegory from his Republic of the 4th century B.C. -5  DOUBLE-BONUS POINTS:  If you know the foregoing and believe they are good things. +15 I don’t know who Plato is. +10

34) I believe that the poetry of Audre Lorde is profound, particularly her “master’s tools” line. +2

35) I recognize that Audre Lorde’s “master’s tools” line is pedestrian. -7

36) “Inclusion and belonging” sounds too close to a cult slogan for me to feel comfortable with it. -7

37) I believe that I should be called “Doctor” just like Jill Biden because I wrote a 120-page “dissertation” for my Ed.D. that explores my feelings about the education program I just completed, and which required zero research.  +7

38) I am thrilled—thrilled—that “I finally get to use my master’s degree” in educational leadership to bring people to critical consciousness.  +3

 *  *  *

Good candidate? You make the call!

+40 and above: Welcome aboard, commissar!  Get ready to Do the Work!

+39-30: Not the perfect package but you’re ready to share authentic stories, struggle against “supremacy,” and do some dismantling!

+29-20: A few more weeks of amplifying “marginalized voices” should bolster your score

+19-10: You’re not committed enough—time for a “difficult dialogue” and a “courageous conversation,” capped off with a “Brave Space”

+9-0: Hands behind your back—your struggle session is through that door.

-1 and below: Racist!

Moscow is furious after on Saturday Polish police reportedly raided a Russian school attached to the Russian embassy in Warsaw and took it over. School staff were then given hours to pack up their things and vacate the building, according to RIA Novosti, following local authorities bursting into the grounds using a crow bar.

Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Lukasz Jasina said the state was enforcing a court ruling over the building building which says it was “illegally leased by the Russian embassy for years.” Thus Poland is asserting that the building and school isn’t protected under diplomatic status, which Moscow disputes.

Russia’s foreign ministry blasted the “hostile actions” of Polish authorities which are a “blatant violation” of official Russian diplomatic property.

“Such an impudent step by Warsaw, which goes beyond the framework of civilized interstate communication, will not remain without our harsh reaction and consequences for the Polish authorities and Poland’s interests in Russia,” the ministry stated.

“We view these new hostile actions of the Polish authorities as a flagrant violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and an attempt against Russian diplomatic real estate in Poland,” it continued.

“Official Warsaw has been violating the law for many years: international legislation, bilateral agreements, domestic legislation. Behaves defiantly and unlawfully. What can be described in one word – provocation,” the ministry said, vowing a severe response.

Employees of the school at the Russian embassy in Poland, which was raided and seized by Polish police today, packing their things to the tune of “Farewell of Slavianka” pic.twitter.com/sjCD0KGGqL

— Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) April 29, 2023

But Polish foreign ministry spokesman Lukasz Jasina retorted that Warsaw authorities are fully within their rights and are enforcing Polish law.

“Our opinion, which has been confirmed by the courts, is that this property belongs to the Polish state and was taken by Russia illegally,” he said.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

Billed as the most in-depth interview yet, the New York Times published a very long piece that contains some rather startling admissions, claims, and defenses from Anthony Fauci, the face of lockdowns and shot mandates.

The author and interviewer is David Wallace-Wells, who before (and now after) Covid specialized in writing about climate change, invokes every predictable trope.

So there was a sense in which this interview was a lovefest between the two.

Still it netted some interesting results.

Here are my top-ten picks of Fauci quotes.

1. Fauci: “Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries.”

This seems promising but one quickly realizes that there is an axiom among the people responsible for lockdowns. They were completely correct in their thinking. The problem was not enough centralization, prior planning, or resources.

Also there was too much disinformation and non-compliance, leading to a low vaccine uptake compared with other countries. The vaccines are the miracle and the greatest achievement of the pandemic, a point on which they admit no argument.

This is also the conclusion of a thing called The Covid Crisis Group (funded mostly by the Charles Koch and Rockefeller Foundations) which has released the new book Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report. There is no PDF. You have to buy it. The lead author is the well-known fixer Philip Zelikow, who wrote the 9-11 Commission report.

Included among the team is none other than Carter Mecher, who bears more responsibility for school closings than anyone else. Also there is Rajeev Venkayya, the one-time Bush administration official who is widely credited with having invented the very concept of lockdowns.

It’s their story and they are sticking to it.

2. Fauci on vaccine mandates: “Man, I think, almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this? And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive. And you have that smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country.”

If you didn’t think you needed the vaccine or didn’t trust it, Fauci proclaims that you are responsible for divisiveness and anti-science feeling. The “independent streak” is called freedom, which for him is the real problem. The lesson for next time? Hard to know. Maybe he thinks the mandates should have been enforced with more energy.

3. Fauci on the economics of the lockdowns: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint.

It was for other people to make broader assessments — people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health. Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something.”

There we go with the great divide between public health and real life, as if one does not impact the other. Public health cared not for economics — the science of human cooperation — and, sadly, the economists were too often unschooled on public health. The compartmentalization of speciality fields played into the haphazard totalitarianism we experienced.

But there’s more — a lot more. Read on to see Fauci’s other important quotes, and what they really mean.

4. Fauci on why he is not responsible for anything: “when people say, ‘Fauci shut down the economy’ — it wasn’t Fauci. The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.”

He was merely deferring to a giant bureaucracy where no one takes responsibility either!

5. Fauci on how they should have locked down earlier: “We were not fully appreciative of the fact that we were dealing with a highly, highly transmissible virus that was clearly spread by ways that were unprecedented and unexperienced by us. And so it fooled us in the beginning and confused us about the need for masks and the need for ventilation and the need for inhibition of social interaction.” Should they have shut down in February 2020? “We should have, probably, if we knew what we know now.”

Inexperienced in a textbook respiratory virus? It’s because they thought it was a bioweapon that could be handled like AIDS. Masks were the condoms. Lockdowns were the behavioral changes. Minimizing of cases was the metric of success. On every point, they were wrong.

Plus they didn’t even learn from the AIDS experience. It wasn’t the vaccines that cooled the crisis. It was the therapeutics innovated in clinical experience. Instead, Fauci shut down all efforts at early treatment to wait for the vaccines. Having done it earlier would have been even worse!

6. Fauci on the effectiveness of masking: “From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work. But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don’t know.”

He doesn’t know. At least he admits it. And yet the CDC is still suing for the legal right to impose masking on the whole population whoever it wants.

7. Fauci on not understanding the virus: “Herd immunity is based on two premises: one, that the virus doesn’t change, and two, that when you get infected or vaccinated, the durability of protection is measured in decades, if not a lifetime. With SARS-CoV-2, we thought protection against infection was going to be measured in a long period of time. And we found out — wait a minute, protection against infection, and against severe disease, is measured in months, not decades. No. 2, the virus that you got infected with in January 2020 is very different from the virus that you’re going to get infected with in 2021 and 2022.”

To be clear, nothing about herd immunity requires lifetime immunity and it certainly is not premised on unchanging virus. Indeed, it is astonishing that he claims they had no idea the virus would mutate.

It’s an established reality that such widespread and mostly non-deadly pathogens like this mutate, which is precisely why they cannot be eradicated through vaccination. Why must anyone have to explain virus basics to Fauci of all people?

8. Fauci on the huge age gradient of medically significant risk: “Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes. But somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. Like 85% of the hospitalizations are there.”

In fact, their solution was to shut down the whole of society for a virus that was mostly if not entirely a danger to the aged and sick. And to justify that, they absolutely did obscure the risk gradient, which is why most everyone was running around like their hair was on fire. The attempt was precisely to create population fear and panic, as Fauci said many times in private.

9. Fauci on whether the NIH funded the lab that leaked the virus. “ Now you’re saying things that are a little bit troublesome to me. That I need to go to bed tonight worrying that N.I.H.-funded research was responsible for pandemic origins…. Well, I sleep fine. I sleep fine. And remember, this work was done in order to be able to help prepare us for the next outbreak. This work was not conceived by me as I was having my omelet in the morning. It is a grant that was put before peer review of independent scientists whose main role is to try to get data to protect the health and safety of the American public and the world. And it was judged that this type of research was important.”

Once again, if the NIH had anything to do with funding the research that led to the virus, he is not responsible for that either. It was those pesky independent scientists. He has again thrown colleagues under the bus.

10. Fauci on gain-of-function research: “Some want to pass a law: All gain-of-function should be stopped. But if all gain-of-function stops, you will have no vaccines for flu. You will have no vaccines for any of the other diseases, because all of that manipulates a virus or a pathogen to gain a certain function to be able to make a vaccine.”

That’s a very hard claim. I asked ChatGPT about that and it quickly spat out the following:

“No, the flu vaccine does not require gain-of-function research. The development of flu vaccines typically involves studying the behavior of the virus and its strains, identifying the most common strains and predicting which one will be most prevalent in the upcoming season. The vaccine is then developed using inactivated or attenuated versions of the virus, which do not require gain-of-function research. Gain-of-function research, which involves genetically modifying viruses to make them more infectious or deadly, is sometimes used for studying the flu virus, but it is not required for the creation of flu vaccines.”

If not for the flu vaccine, what is gain-of-function’s purpose? The creation of bioweapons and vaccines to confound them? The track record of this looks awful.

Fauci and his friends keep trying to close the book on the Covid epoch. They have settled on the messaging and are doing everything possible to tie it all up in a bow in hopes that everyone will move on. The mainstream media wants to move on too. Everyone guilty for the wreckage wants to do the same, particularly the elites in every sector that pushed for and celebrated the mass violation of human rights.

They are wrong. The book is not closed and will not be until we get honest answers.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is demanding that the FBI investigate the exploitation of thousands of unaccompanied alien children (IUAC) who may have been brought into the United States via child smuggling operations.

According to data from US Customs and Border Protection, approximately 345,000 minors have crossed into the United States unaccompanied since President Joe Biden took office, while a report from the NY Times suggests that the Department of Health and Human Services has lost contact with 85,000 of these minors.

“The Biden Administration is morally responsible for their fate. The President lifted Title 42 restrictions on unaccompanied children in early 2021,” wrote Hawley in a Friday letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Reporting reveals that HHS loosened vetting processes for sponsors and retaliated against whistleblowers who raised these concerns. As a result, thousands of children have been handed over to modern-day slave traders.“

Hawley also threw Biden under the bus, noting that under his watch, lost minors are often forced into factory work under harsh conditions, denied food and education, suffer sexual violence, and fear for their lives.

“In a country that claims to value the rule of law and the protection of children, this is unconscionable,” Hawley added.

During a Senate Finance Committee hearing in late March, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra denied knowledge of the 85,000 figure.

“I have never heard that number of 85,000, I don’t know where it comes from and … so I would say it doesn’t sound at all to be realistic, and what we do is we try and follow up as best we can with these kids,” he said, adding “Congress has given us certain authorities. Our authorities end when we have found a suitable sponsor to place that child with. We try and do some follow-up, but neither the child or the sponsor is actually obligated to follow up with us.”

In addition to urging the FBI to mount a “full-scale” effort to locate the missing children and bring to justice the criminals who are holding them in modern-day slavery, Hawley also demanded a probe into HHS and the Department of Homeland Security.

“The FBI must also investigate HHS and the Department of Homeland Security for their role in facilitating the exploitation of these children, in violation of the law,” Hawley wrote.

“The pervasive maltreatment of migrant children plainly violates both the Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibits the abuse of underage workers, and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which designates human trafficking offenses as federal crimes,” Hawley wrote.

Hawley demanded a “full report” from the FBI priority by May 25. –Epoch Times

On Wednesday, an HHS whistleblower told officials that unaccompanied children have been “suffering in the shadows” of the US immigration system for almost a decade.

“I have to confess I knew nothing about their suffering until 2021 when I volunteered to help the Biden administration with the crisis at the southern border as part of operation Artemis,” said Tara Lee Rodas, who appeared as a witness at “The Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children” hearing held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement.

Rodas said she was deployed to help HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) reunite UACs with adult sponsors in the United States.

“I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes. Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with recruiting in home country, smuggling to the U.S. border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to a sponsor—some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of transnational criminal organizations, some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income.”

In some cases, Rodas says she witnessed adult sponsors who were allowed to take in “10, 20, 30 and 40 children” without any concerns from HHS.

“I saw sponsors trying to simultaneously sponsor children from multiple ORR sites at one time. I saw sponsors using multiple addresses to obtain sponsorships of children, and I saw numerous cases of children in debt bondage—and the child knew they had to stay with the sponsor until the debt was paid,” she said.

The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) wrote to Becerra and demanded answers.

“I am deeply concerned regarding the recent reports that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has mishandled unaccompanied migrant children by placing them with unvetted sponsors, leading to their exploitation and forced labor,” she wrote.