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Trump Never Briefed On Unvetted Russian Bounty Intel Because NSA “Strongly Dissented”  

Trump Never Briefed On Unvetted Russian Bounty Intel Because NSA “Strongly Dissented”  

Tyler Durden

Tue, 06/30/2020 – 19:05

On Tuesday, the same day that Joe Biden finally emerged to hold his first press conference in 89 days in order to lash out at what he called Trump’s “dereliction of duty” over the NY Times Russian bounties for Taliban militants to kill American troops in Afghanistan story, The Wall Street Journal issued this bombshell:

The National Security Agency strongly dissented from other intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia paid bounties for the killing of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, according to people familiar with the matter.

The disclosure of the dissent by the NSA, which specializes in electronic eavesdropping, comes as the White House has played down the revelations, saying that the information wasn’t verified and that intelligence officials didn’t agree on it.

NSA headquarters in Maryland, file image.

As we noted before, it appears a return this week to mainstream media’s prior years of near daily breathless Russiagate reporting, with “anonymous intelligence sources” issuing new leaks of unvetted raw intel to the press.

The WSJ points out that it was primarily the NSA’s firm dissent that kept the Russian bounties allegation out of the president’s daily briefing — which both further confirms the White House’s denials of the initial Friday Times reporting, as well as contradicts the NYT “revelation” itself. 

“Because of that [NSA dissent], President Trump was never personally briefed on the threat, the White House said, although a key lawmaker said the information apparently was included in written intelligence materials prepared for Mr. Trump,” WSJ underscores.

No details were given as to precisely how the NSA differed in its assessment of the Russian bounty allegations. For those keeping score, this marks the third major formal distancing from the substance of the NYT reporting by US intelligence agencies and intel community leadership.

Also recall this isn’t the first instance of significant NSA pushback concerning explosive charges aimed at Russia: 

On Saturday Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in a statement that he had “confirmed that neither the President nor the Vice President were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting.” 

CIA Director Gina Haspel also appeared to vindicate the White House’s assertion of lack of credible intelligence behind it in a Monday statement. Essentially the CIA director seemed to reference the danger of “cherry-picking” from lower level unvetted raw information.“When developing intelligence assessments, initial tactical reports often require additional collection and validation,” Haspel said.

“Leaks compromise and disrupt the critical interagency work to collect, assess, and ascribe culpability,” she added, strongly suggesting that indeed there was not enough to go on concerning the Russian bounty allegations for it to rise to the level of the commander-in-chief. In actually this was further a CIA condemnation of the “anonymous” leakers out of which the whole narrative was spun. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3gezUF3 Tyler Durden

Think The “Cancel” Mobs Can’t Get Any Worse? Think Again

Think The “Cancel” Mobs Can’t Get Any Worse? Think Again

Tyler Durden

Tue, 06/30/2020 – 18:45

Authored by Harlan Hill via RealClearPolitics.com,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

President Trump is doing exactly what an American president should do in a crisis like this. He is working to maintain law and order and prevent cowed local officials from allowing political violence to flare again. He issued an executive order to add to his legacy of reform and address legitimate concerns about law enforcement in this country. He also issued a separate executive order targeting the systemic bias in Silicon Valley’s censorship offices, which has allowed our social media platforms to become echo chambers for left-wing extremism and “cancel culture.”

The only thing that could make the situation worse at this moment would be handing the White House to a doddering and unprincipled establishment politician beholden to the “cancel culture” mob. Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden would immediately delegate de facto control over the vast justice, civil rights, and regulatory apparatus of the federal government to the loudest voices in his coalition: the woke activist class.

At this moment, there is a veritable army of lawyers and bureaucrats who have spent the last three and a half years subsisting on resentment and salivating at the prospect of regaining power. Things are bad enough now, but conditions will become much worse if the “cancel culture” born on social media is augmented with the force of law and given the full attention of Biden appointees imbued with the sweeping powers of the federal bureaucracy.

Dark forces have been unleashed in this country. Even now, we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If we don’t want to find out how much damage it can inflict on the ship of state, we must prevent those forces from taking control of the federal government.

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The Roberts Court Slowly Inters Justice Kennedy’s Ephemeral “Jurisprudence of Doubt”

Two years ago, Justice Kennedy announced that he would retire from the Supreme Court. One of my earliest thoughts was, “I will never have to edit another Kennedy opinion for the casebook!” My follow-up thought was, “How long will I have to keep the Kennedy opinions in the casebook, once they are overruled or whittled away.” The whittling away has already begun. The Roberts Court is slowly, but surely interring Justice Kennedy’s ephemeral “jurisprudence of doubt.” Blue June has already buried at least three precedents with Justice Kennedy in the majority: Boumediene v. Bush, Whole Woman’s Health, and Footnote 3 of Trinity Lutheran.

Boumediene v. Bush

Boumediene suffered two major blows during Blue June. The first hit came in DHS v. Thuraissigiam (see here and here). Justice Alito’s majority required a very precise fit between history and the Petitioner’s claim.

Despite pages of rhetoric, the dissent is unable to cite a single pre-1789 habeas case in which a court ordered relief that was anything like what respondent seeks here.

Justice Kennedy’s 2008 majority opinion relied on history in a very fluid fashion. In dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that Boumediene “never demanded the kind of precise factual match with pre-1789 case law that today’s Court demands.” She’s right.

As I read Thuraissigiam, the Court has closed the door to any future expansion of the Suspension Clause jurisprudence, unless there is a close analogue to historical practice in 1789. Indeed, Mike Dorf finds an even greater limitation:

In both St. Cyr and Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court said that the Suspension Clause protects a right to habeas that is “at the absolute minimum” as expansive as the scope of habeas in 1789, leaving open the possibility of further expansion. Justice Alito’s opinion (1) finds that the scope in 1789 does not benefit Thuraissigiam and (2) does not go beyond that minimum.

The Court has now rejected any possible “evolving” notion of habeas. The Great Writ is solidified in amber.

Boumediene took another hit in a sleeper case of the term, Agency for Int’l Development v. Alliance for Open Society. Justice Kavanaugh’s nine-page decision resolved a really important constitutional question with very little fanfare. He wrote:

First, it is long settled as a matter of American constitutional law that foreign citizens outside U. S. territory do not possess rights under the U. S. Constitution. Plaintiffs do not dispute that fundamental principle. Tr. of Oral Arg. 58–59; see, e.g., Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U. S. 723, 770– 771 (2008); Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U. S. 507, 558–559 (2004) (Scalia, J., dissenting); United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S. 259, 265–275 (1990); Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763, 784 (1950); United States ex rel. Turner v. Williams, 194 U. S. 279, 292 (1904); U. S. Const., Preamble.

Justice Kavanaugh posed this precise question during oral argument:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH:  Good morning, counsel. I want to clarify, first, one thing from your colloquy with Justice Ginsburg. You agree, I assume, that unaffiliated foreign entities acting abroad have no constitutional rights under this Court’s precedents.

MR. BOWKER: We do, Your Honor.

This concession was unwise. And I also think it was wrong.

Justice Breyer’s dissent explains the Court has never actually reached this sweeping conclusion.

Even taken on its own terms, the majority’s blanket assertion about the extraterritorial reach of our Constitution does not reflect the current state of the law. The idea that foreign citizens abroad never have constitutional rights is not a “bedrock” legal principle. At most, one might say that they are unlikely to enjoy very often extraterritorial protection under the Constitution. Or one might say that the matter is undecided. But this Court has studiously avoided establishing an absolute rule that forecloses that protection in all circumstances.

Breyer explains that Boumediene, which Kavanaugh cited, rejects such a categorical rule.

Nor do the cases that the majority cites support an absolute rule. See ante, at 3. The exhaustive review of our precedents that we conducted in Boumediene v. Bush (2008), pointed to the opposite conclusion. In Boumediene, we rejected the Government’s argument that our decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager, (1950),”adopted a formalistic” test “for determining the reach” of constitutional protection to foreign citizens on foreign soil. This is to say, we rejected the position that the majority propounds today. Its “constricted reading” of Eisentrager and our other precedents is not the law. See Boumediene, 553 U. S., at 764.

The law, we confirmed in Boumediene, is that constitutional “questions of extraterritoriality turn on objective factors and practical concerns” present in a given case, “not formalism” of the sort the majority invokes today.

Well, with AMK in the middle, Boumediene rejected “formalism.” But now “formalism” is the law with JGR in the middle. And five votes endorse Justice Jackson’s observation from Eisenstrager.

Boumediene is basically a dead letter. Never overruled, but currently interred.

Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt

Whole Woman’s Health was decided in June 2016, shortly after Justice Scalia passed away. The vote was 5-3. Justice Breyer’s majority opinion expanded upon the framework from Planned Parenthood v. Casey: courts should balance two factors: (1) whether the law imposed an “undue burden” on abortion access and (2) whether the law provides an actual benefits. Of course, Justice Kennedy assigned that majority opinion to Justice Breyer. And Kennedy no doubt realized that Breyer was departing from Casey. But 2016 was a bizarre year. Justice Kennedy also reversed his own opinion on affirmative action from Fisher I to Fisher II, that conflicted with his vote in the Michigan affirmative action cases. In any event, 2016 was so four years ago.

In June Medical, Chief Justice Roberts vote to uphold the Louisiana abortion law–and only the Louisiana abortion law. His concurrence casts serious doubt on Whole Woman’s Health. Indeed, he seems to suggest that WWH departed from Casey. Yesterday, I noted:

Going forward, there are five votes to limit the Court’s abortion framework to consider a a law’s burdens, without weighing the law’s benefits.  The Chief has effectively overruled Whole Woman’s Health to the extent it departs from Casey. The Chief didn’t swing to the left; at most, he feinted left for this Blue June.

For reasons unknown, Roberts considers the Casey plurality (three votes) a valid precedent, but the WWH majority (five votes) is not a valid precedent. In any event, Justice Kennedy’s 2017 vote on abortion will be interred. But his 1992 vote on abortion is now, apparently, settled law. Go figure.

Trinity Lutheran v. Comer—Footnote 3

The vote in Trinity Lutheran was deceiving. On its face, the Court split by a 7-2 vote. But the majority was fractured. Justice Breyer only concurred in judgment. Chief Justice Roberts, and Justice Kennedy, Alito, and Kagan joined the majority opinion in full. And Justices Thomas and Gorusch joined the majority opinion, except for Footnote 3. Footnote 3 stated:

This case involves express discrimination based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing. We do not address religious uses of funding or other forms of discrimination.

In other words, Trinity Lutheran only concerned a case in which the state denies funding to the church because of its status as a house of worship. The case did not involve a denial of funding to the church because it would use money for “religious uses.” For example, instead of using funds to purchase tire scraps for the playground, the church could purchase funds to purchase books for religious instruction.

In a partial concurrence, Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Thomas, wrote that this distinction is flimsy.

First, the Court leaves open the possibility a useful distinction might be drawn between laws that discriminate on the basis of religious status and religious use. Respectfully, I harbor doubts about the stability of such a line.

In any event, the bulk of Trinity Lutheran was precedent, but Footnote 3 was not; it only garnered four votes. And could be disregarded just as quickly. Fast-forward to today, with Espinoza. Chief Justice Roberts wrote a majority opinion that was joined in full.

The Chief flagged the status/use distinction from Trinity Lutheran:

Some Members of the Court, moreover, have questioned whether there is a meaningful distinction between discrimination based on use or conduct and that based on status. See Trinity Lutheran, (GORSUCH, J., joined by THOMAS, J., concurring in part). We acknowledge the point but need not examine it here. It is enough in this case to conclude that strict scrutiny applies under Trinity Lutheran because Montana’s no-aid provision discriminates based on religious status.

Later, Roberts suggested that he was not tied to Footnote 3.

A plurality declined to address discrimination with respect to “religious uses of funding or other forms of discrimination.” Trinity Lutheran at n. 3. The plurality saw no need to consider such concerns because Missouri had expressly discriminated “based on religious identity,” which was enough to invalidate the state policy without addressing how government funds were used.

The key word is “plurality.” Not a majority. It seems that the Chief added Footnote 3 in Trinity Lutheran to assuage Justices Kagan and/or Kennedy. For the Chief, FN 3 was just another move in a game of 87-dimensional chess. He sacrificed a pawn to set up the Espinoza checkmate. Now, three years later, he no longer needs Justice Kennedy’s vote, and will not need to secure Justice Kagan’s on this case.

Trinity, and now Espinoza, also move away from the Rehnquist-Court era decision, Locke v. Davey. Michael Moreland observes that “Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote a narrow, almost case-specific holding (a characteristic Rehnquistian move)” in that case.

Justice Breyer seems miffed that the Court has abandoned the “play in the joints” line from Locke:

Although the majority refers in passing to the “play in the joints” between that which the Establishment Clause forbids and that which the Free Exercise Clause requires, its holding leaves that doctrine a shadow of its former self.

He’s right. There is no longer any need to appease Anthony Kennedy or Sandra Day O’Connor.

Going forward, I presumptively treat any 5-4 decision with Kennedy in the majority as persuasive, at best.

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UCLA Academic Freedom Committee Statement Related to the Gordon Klein Controversy

Just posted by the UCLA Academic Senate Committee on Academic Freedom, about the controversy discussed here on June 10:

Statement of the Academic Freedom Committee

June 30, 2020

In response to a recent controversy surrounding an e-mail reply to a student by Gordon Klein (a Lecturer in Accounting at the Anderson School), the UCLA Senate Committee on Academic Freedom underlines all instructors’ freedom (protected by APM-010) to express their views on grading policy as they determine to be appropriate.

Some people may well disagree with Prof. Klein’s views, and think that he should have responded differently to a student’s request that the grading structure be changed to “exercise compassion and leniency with Black students in our major.” But instructors are entitled and empowered to say “no” to such requests;[1] and, just as students have every right to express their views on such matters to faculty and to others, instructors are entitled to explain their views in turn to students. When any of us ask people to do things, especially based on a moral or political argument about current events, those people are entitled to respond with their own moral or political views.

The process of evaluating the situation is proceeding at the Anderson School, and our committee has no direct role in that process. Our concern instead is that any public announcement that an instructor is being placed on administrative leave for what appears to be a particular statement—whether the statement happened in class, in an e-mail responding to a student, on social media, or wherever else—creates a chilling effect for other instructors, especially untenured ones. It is the committee’s role to try to prevent such chilling effects.

An academic institution like UCLA must remain a place for the expression of a wide diversity of views and interpretations. It should also be a site of vigorous debate—including by students, by faculty, and by others—so that those exposed to or participating in these discussions have the opportunity to hear a range of opinions as they formulate their own views.

[1] See, e.g., Academic Senate Memo on Spring 2020 Final Exams, which reaffirms that instructors have “the flexibility to change their method of final assessments” so long as the final grade “reflect[s] the student’s achievement in the course” and is “based upon adequate evaluation of the achievement,” but does not require instructors to make any particular changes.

Disclosure: I am one of the several members of the Committee.

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WaPo Does Damage Control After “Far More Damaging” Biden-Ukraine Tapes Disclosed

WaPo Does Damage Control After “Far More Damaging” Biden-Ukraine Tapes Disclosed

Tyler Durden

Tue, 06/30/2020 – 18:25

The Washington Post is trying to get ahead of what Rudy Giuliani says are “far more damaging” tapes of 2016 phone calls between former Vice President Joe Biden and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which are set for release over the summer by a former Ukrainian diplomat.

To review, Biden conditioned a $1 billion US loan guarantee on the firing of Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, who was leading a wide-ranging investigation into Burisma – a Ukrainian energy company which hired Hunter Biden to sit on its board.

In May, Ukrainian MP Andrii Derkach released recordings of Biden and Poroshenko which explicitly detail the quid-pro-quo arrangement to fire the prosecutor, Victor Shokin (which Biden already admitted to).

Biden’s campaign says the tapes are part of a ‘conspiracy theory to smear him’ – while Poroshenko claims they are fabricated.

In one of the May tapes, Poroshenko reports back with “positive news” that Shokin – “despite of the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges” – had been fired.

Last week, more recordings of Biden and Poroshenko were published to the YouTube channel, “NABU Leaks,” where the two can be heard discussing ongoing efforts by the United States to help Ukraine with various matters.

And according to a Tuesday report in the Washington Post, more tapes are coming.

Both Giuliani and Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman who served as his fixer in Ukraine, confirmed that they sought tapes of Biden last year. Giuliani said he received assistance in his pursuit from a source within the State Department, who he claimed pointed him to the dates of certain conversations between Biden and Poroshenko by accessing an official U.S. government archive.

Giuliani told The Washington Post that he did not know the recently released recordings were coming before they were posted online last month. But in a recent interview with OAN, the former New York mayor claimed to be aware of other tapes that were “far more damaging,” saying, “I would hope that those tapes are put out also.” –Washington Post

The Post calls the clips “heavily edited” and paints Derkach, the Ukrainian MP, as essentially a proxy for Vladimir Putin. They also suggest that “the efforts to promote the recordings in Ukraine and the United States — and pledges by other Trump allies to release more in the coming months — suggest a new push by foreign forces to sway American voters in the run-up to the 2020 election,” and claim that the NABU leaks “further illustrate Trump’s willingness to benefit from foreign intervention in U.S. elections,” despite offering no evidence that Trump is involved in the leaks.

Well-worn playbooks aside, the Biden campaign had this to say of the audio clips:

“All the president’s men, both within our country and outside of it, have been constantly trafficking in objectively false, malicious conspiracy theories targeting Joe Biden since before he even entered the race. And their efforts have invariably fallen apart — because the American people know Joe Biden, his character, and his values.”

Derkach, meanwhile, said of the attempts to smear him as a Russian operative “There is not a single confirmed or reliable fact of my illegal activity or wrongful connections.”

More damage control by WaPo:

The hunt by the president’s allies for the Biden tapes and their subsequent release have echoes of the 2016 campaign, when Trump publicly asked Russia to find emails of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Trump later said the comment was a joke, even as GOP operatives mounted a serious but unsuccessful operation to obtain her emails from hackers claiming to have them.

Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers were ultimately released through WikiLeaks, as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III detailed in his report. The sequence of events sparked a nearly two-year investigation, multiple congressional inquiries and federal charges against 12 Russian military intelligence officers. –Washington Post

 And here it is:

U.S. intelligence officials have warned that Russia could reprise its efforts to influence the race for the White House again this year.

And they keep going with the Russia angle, to the surprise of nobody:

Michael Carpenter, a Biden foreign policy adviser and former senior Defense Department official, called the tape snippets that Derkach is releasing “a KGB-style disinformation operation tied to pro-Russian forces in Ukraine whose chief aim is to make deceptive noise in the U.S. election campaign to advance the interests of their oligarchic backers, the Kremlin, and the faltering Trump campaign.”

The report also names non Russians (who might be secret Russians) who could be behind the tapes, including former Ukrainian Diplomat Andrii Telizhenko, and Ukrainian gas tycoon and former lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko.

According to Telizhenko “This summer there will be more release of conversations, with full transcripts,” adding “I’m going to release everything all together when the time is right.”

Can we say “deadman’s switch?”

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Daily Briefing – June 30, 2020

Daily Briefing – June 30, 2020


Tyler Durden

Tue, 06/30/2020 – 18:10

Managing editor Ed Harrison joins Dave Floyd, founder of Aspen Trading Group, to discuss how to evaluate markets from a technical perspective. Believing that it’s important to “follow the tape” and trade what an investor sees, Floyd shares where he believes bonds and the S&P are headed and how both technical and fundamental analysis inform each other in a market rocked by COVID-19. Harrison and Floyd also touch on distortions of market signals, volatility, currencies, and silver. In the intro, Nick Correa discusses the potential impact of the Payroll Protection Program on small businesses and how the spread of the virus in the US further hurts their chances of making it through the pandemic.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31uP6cS Tyler Durden

The Real Pandemic Was A Nursing Home Problem

The Real Pandemic Was A Nursing Home Problem

Tyler Durden

Tue, 06/30/2020 – 18:05

Authored by Peter Earle via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Over the last week, many governors have reinstituted coronavirus policy implementations which had been in various phases of cessation. Why? This is because of an alleged “spike” in new COVID-19 infections. Other states have abbreviated their phased lifting of lockdowns. This is despite the fact that current US deaths from COVID-19 are now 90% off their peak. 

Washington State is considering criminalizing the refusal to wear a mask. New York State governor Andrew Cuomo has imposed new out-of-state visitor bans (with the comment that “in addition to law enforcement, [he] … expect[s] individuals such as hotel clerks … to question travelers from select states”). Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s comments that if he were to win the presidency, a federal mask mandate may follow. The Speaker of the House quickly voiced her support for that measure.

These and other developments suggest that rather than approaching the end of the government-created crisis, we may be at the threshold of a new beginning. That the recent rise in infections is mostly an artifact of massively expanded testing capabilities seems to occur to no one in the government or media. Equally unnoticed is that the apparently much wider spread of COVID-19 infections, many of which show middling symptoms or are treated as annoyances, should result in a decrease of concern: it appears that many times the number of people estimated early on have been infected by the novel coronavirus to little or no consequence. 

And further still, that some of the spike is accountable to the civil unrest in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The prevalence of new COVID-19 infections among mostly Gen-Zs and Millennials (beside their prevalence in jobs that require COVID testing, such as in the fast food and service industries) undoubtedly had much to do with the disingenuity of political officials who ordered them to stay home, out of work and away from social occasions, yet responded with deafening silence as protests, demonstrations, and rioting broke out. 

Note the recent data trend in California:

Or in Minnesota:

As other statistics regarding the toll of the novel coronavirus outbreak firm up, certain patterns are beginning to come into focus.

With increasing certainty we can say that locked down states have seen four times the death toll of those which did not. The effectiveness of masking is, as well, being revealed as suspect, as is social distancing in the absence of testing and contact tracing (the efficacy of the latter of which is additionally questionable). 

A more important revelation of the ongoing deluge of data has been either missed (or ignored) by the press. At AIER, we noted the stunning death rates in long-term care facilities back in the third week of May. 

Just a few days ago, the New York Times reported that 54,000 deaths due to COVID-19 — 43% of all deaths in the United States — occurred in nursing home residents and workers:

In 24 states, the number of residents and workers who have died accounts for either half or more than half of all deaths from the virus. Infected people linked to nursing homes also die at a higher rate than the general population. The median case fatality rate – the number or deaths divided by the number of cases – at facilities with reliable data is 17 percent, significantly higher than the 5 percent fatality rate nationwide. 

New York State was only one of several states, though, which enacted orders increasing the virus death tolls. 

States that issued orders similar to Cuomo’s recorded comparably grim outcomes. Michigan lost 5% of roughly 38,000 nursing home residents to COVID-19 since the outbreak began. New Jersey lost 12% of its more than 43,000 residents. In Florida, where such transfers were barred, just 1.6% of 73,000 nursing home residents died of the virus. California, after initially moving toward a policy like New York’s, quickly revised it. So far, it has lost 2% of its 103,000 nursing home residents.

And keep in mind that this 43% average is massively dragged down because five states had zero deaths in nursing homes while other states had as many of 80% of their deaths in nursing homes. 

Source: NYT

This development is magnified in its awfulness upon close inspection of the document which informed the lockdown policies. The second-to-last paragraph in the original 2006 Nature article — the blueprint for the lockdowns, entitled “Strategies for Mitigating an Influenza Pandemic” reads,

Lack of data prevent us from reliably modeling transmission in the important context of residential institutions (for example, care homes, prisons) and health care settings; detailed planning for use of antivirals, vaccines, and infection control measures in such settings are needed, however. We do not present projections of the likely impact of personal protective measures (for example, face masks) on transmission, again due to a lack of data on effectiveness. 

The apparent omission of considerations regarding individuals in long-term care facilities by epidemiologists and policymakers, and the consequently disproportionate number of total fatalities among that same population, provides context for a series of hasty, surreptitious actions by politicians to duck accountability (and harvest more power). 

It thus becomes increasingly clear that despite driving the U.S. economy into an artificial depression, destroying tens of thousands of businesses and the lives of millions of citizens, and elevating rates of domestic violence, divorce, substance abuse, and suicide, US government policies failed to protect the most vulnerable segment of the population: individuals in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. 

And furthermore, that despite 14 years between the publication of the “Strategies” paper and its real-world implementation, apparently no research was conducted that would have extended its conclusions to those particularly at-risk populations.

This, of course, is a vastly more fundamental issue than the inability of even the most complex computational methods to incorporate and account for social science phenomena. The susceptibility of the elderly and institutionalized, and in particular those with pre-existing conditions, was a ubiquitous consideration of virtually all medical protocols. Yet somehow between the 1970s and today, human knowledge regarding disease prevention and control — a product of informal institutions and cultural mores — was lost or forgotten; and into the vacuum swept the rigidities of top-down edicts informed by scientism: technocrats wielding agent-based models. 

Americans expect government agencies to lie and their prognoses and diagnoses to fail. Policy failures are vastly more common than successes, and successes — where they may be found — are always and everywhere a veritable font of unintended consequences. 

Far from producing better responses, models and simulations used as detailed outlines (rather than for high-level, mostly abstract insights) amplify, rather than attenuate, the failures of central planning. The model-driven response to the coronavirus pandemic, which now includes directly sacrificing the most vulnerable segment of the population to the virus, is only the latest. And it joins a growing heap of episodes which include the Fed’s response to the late 1920s financial boom and more recently the destruction of Iraq over WMDs that scarcely existed and the botched emergency response to Hurricane Katrina. 

Why do we continue to listen?

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

New HK Law Includes Penalties Of Life In Prison & ‘Closed’ Trials To Protect “State Secrets”

New HK Law Includes Penalties Of Life In Prison & ‘Closed’ Trials To Protect “State Secrets”

Tyler Durden

Tue, 06/30/2020 – 17:45

Despite Beijing officials’ denials, it’s been fiercely debated in the past days and weeks to what degree the now officially passed new controversial law for Hong Kong that would allow authorities to crack down on pro-democracy protesters and “foreign forces” who attempt to destabilize the semi-autonomous region can be applied retroactively.

Hours ago the law was finally published, though an official English translation has been slow to emerge:

Expected to take effect immediately, starting Wednesday, some crimes could be published with a maximum lifetime jail sentence.

And there’s no independent review, instead an incredibly opaque process where “closed” trials can take place on the basis of “national security”. Axios points out in its initial review of the text:

It includes sweeping definitions of crimes and penalties that gives the government broad power to limit people’s political freedom, while explicitly denying any kind of independent oversight of the law or how it is carried out.

Currently the US, Britain, and European countries are pouring through it, readying a reaction. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Tuesday that the law’s contents will determine Britain’s next step.

“Despite the urging of the international community, Beijing has chosen not to step back from imposing this legislation,” Raab said in a statement. “China has ignored its international obligations regarding Hong Kong. This is a grave step, which is deeply troubling. We urgently need to see the full legislation, and will use that to determine whether there has been a breach of the Joint Declaration and what further action the UK will take.”

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, via Reuters.

As expected, the sweeping legislation is ambiguous enough on the ‘foreign interference’ angle that it leaves Beijing as the ultimate interpreter in terms of the law’s application.

It’s further still ambiguous on the question of its having a retroactive effect. 

* * *

Here are some of the brief early highlights as translated and paraphrased by Hong Kong politics specialist Kris Cheng:

  • max life imprisonment
  • anyone convicted cannot run for public office (or be disqualified) without mentioning for how long
  • cases involving national secrets will not have open trials
  • uncertain if have retroacting effect – no bail for suspects
  • suspects may hire lawyers, but it may be possible after first interrogation
  • chief executive selects judges, judges can be disqualified if they made remarks endangering national security
  • cases can be heard behind closed doors to protect national secrets
  • Beijing has jurisdiction for cases when foreign forces were interfering, when Hong Kong gov cannot effectively implement the law, when China faces substantial national security threats
  • The law applies to foreigners committing the said crimes outside Hong Kong

East Asia analyst Tom Fowdy also noted the law is designed to have a chilling effect on the kind of mass protests and unrest seen over much of the past year:

And more paraphrased snippets via Axios:

  • Leading a terrorist organization carries a minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life in prison, but it’s unclear what sorts of organizations that designation will apply to.
  • There is concern in Hong Kong that the prohibition of “terrorist activity” will be applied broadly and arbitrarily. The law does get specific in some instances, with “destroying a vehicle” cited as possible terrorist activity.
  • The law requires Hong Kong to carry out “national security education” — a particularly controversial element given local resistance to propaganda in schools.
  • The law also requires Hong Kong’s police to establish a national security division, and states that it may hire “specialists and technicians from outside the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” — meaning mainland China.

Ultimately, it’s clearly a huge blow to Hong Kong independence activists: 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2BV5RDg Tyler Durden

Marsha P. Johnson Probably Didn’t Start Stonewall, and Might Not Have Been Trans. Does It Matter?

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Head over to Google today and you’ll see one of its famous doodle sketches in the form of Marsha P. Johnson, the LGBT rights activist, with her signature flower crown, gender-bending ensemble, and wide smile.

In recent years, Johnson has been credited as a “trans woman of color” who started the Stonewall Riots and thus, in some sense, the LGBT rights movement. While it’s undeniable that she was a charismatic central figure in that story, it’s far from clear that she was one of the main instigators at Stonewall. Even more fraught: It’s far from clear she was trans. 

On one level, it doesn’t really matter. She was an inspiring person who fought for civil rights despite huge obstacles in her way, and that’s enough to celebrate. But being on the right side of history—as so many activists in the intersectional social justice space believe they are—doesn’t give you license to rewrite it. In the end, the facts matter, even when they are slightly less convenient for your narrative.

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, New York City police officers descended on the Stonewall Inn to conduct what had become their typical, humiliating, and brutal raids on gay establishments. Patrons weren’t having it. Several days of riots followed.

In popular culture, the Stonewall Riots are widely viewed as pivotal. But there’s also a mythic air to the protests. Folkloric tellings and retellings change with each passing year: Who spearheaded the charge against authority? Who threw that fateful first brick? Or was it a shot glass?

The answers to those questions largely remain unanswered, but in recent years one narrative has taken hold. The claim that it was “trans women of color“—especially Johnson—who led the uprising has been repeated uncritically by politicians, pundits, and in the national media. 

But it isn’t difficult to figure out that the Stonewall riots did not begin with Johnson. For one thing, Johnson said so herself. “I was uptown and I didn’t get downtown until about two o’clock. When I got downtown, the place was already on fire, and there was a raid already,” she told historian Eric Marcus in 1987. “The riots had already started.”

Yet in recent years, an alternate narrative has shifted from urban legend to indisputable fact. Johnson was “one of three individuals” who first “incited pushback against police,” writes Rolling Stone. “It started when Marsha P. Johnson cried ‘I got my civil rights!’ and threw a shot glass into a mirror,” says a Forbes contributor, whose piece was selected and promoted as an Editors’ Pick.

“Transgender women of color led the uprising at the Stonewall Inn 51 years ago on Sunday,” The New York Times claimed, though the paper later ghost-edited that line and appended a correction. 

What’s more, there’s no evidence Johnson used the term transgender for herself. Though it’s true that the term was not nearly as widespread as it is today, it wasn’t unheard of. And Johnson—who used both “he” and “she” pronouns, and wore both male and female clothing—identified as a drag queen, as well as “gay” and as a “transvestite.” To conflate those identities with transgenderism trivializes and misappropriates the unique struggles those communities face.

Intersectionality—while built around the well-intentioned idea that we should be vigilant and caring toward society’s most vulnerable—can end up encouraging activists to prioritize identity at the expense of the truth. Saying your movement was started by a “transgender woman of color” checks a lot of boxes and confers the proper legitimacy on your cause.

Exactly how Johnson identified shouldn’t really be the main focus, though present-day activists have placed undue emphasis on it. Johnson was a determined activist for the cause and a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front. 

We could all stand to learn from Johnson, whose chosen middle initial—”P”—stood for “Pay it no mind,” a common response she’d give those who’d inquire about her gender. She begged not to be put into a box. Today’s activists have done the opposite.

On a broader level, such retroactive reimagining of history makes it hard to actually learn from the past. “Stonewall Inn was not a very hospitable place to those who were then referred to as transsexuals or transvestites,” says James Kirchick, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “A lot of gay bars were segregated in that way, and a lot of gay bars were racially segregated, maybe not officially or legally, but unofficially certainly.” Those like Johnson, then, were often rejected by the community they wanted to join. Members of that same community have now co-opted and reimagined Johnson for their own purposes.

Put differently, you could say Johnson was likely one step ahead of her peers. But that was because she understood what it was like not to have a seat at the table, much less to be at the head of it. “In some ways,” writes journalist Andrew Sullivan at New York, “it was the rebellion of those with much more to lose that marked a shift in consciousness.” 

Perhaps ironically, the left has often led the charge against attempts to change history and decried the effects of such revisionism. When it comes to the debate around Confederate monuments, for instance, many left-leaning folks have rightly resisted false portrayals surrounding the circumstances in which those statues were erected. To rewrite the Civil War narrative, they say, is to erase a savage history of human suffering, one that we’re still trying to learn from today. 

It’s for that same reason that Johnson’s history—her actual history, to the extent that we can know it—should be told truthfully, and in full.

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Stock Market Suspiciously Healthy. The Federal Reserve Does All It Can to Keep Economic Reality From Setting In.

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Despite 33 states with over 10 percent unemployment rates, gross domestic product quarterly dives of over 50 percent, and a resurgence of COVID-19 infection numbers making both those conditions seem unlikely to turn around soon, the stock market as a whole remains strangely healthy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is actually up over 1,500 points since mid-March when the coronavirus shutdowns began in earnest (though still down more than twice that number of points from the optimistic beginning of 2020).

While ultimately the only sure reason why the stock market does what it does is “the people buying and selling stocks make decisions that lead to those prices,” one very likely reason those making such decisions seem to think staying in and even buying more is a good idea right now is a concerted government effort to socialize the risk inherent in buying stocks across the economy.

The establishment market-watchers at The Wall Street Journal spelled out this thesis yesterday: “Expectations that the U.S. Federal Reserve will keep injecting liquidity into the market have helped fuel rebounds each time fallout from the coronavirus pandemic have sparked selloffs,” with one analyst insisting that because of Fed policy, “There’s a safety net under the bond market and the equity market.”

This judgment that government policy wants to get stock buyers and sellers to ignore grim economic reality via what amounts in part to special favors to big corporations is widespread. One of the reasons why is the Federal Reserve’s eager buying up of corporate debt this year.

CNN reports some of the implications of that:

In a note to clients Monday, Goldman Sachs said the Fed’s announcement that it would buy corporate bonds in the primary and secondary markets was enough to quickly provide relief. “The mere presence of the backstops helped to restore the flow of private credit,” chief economist Jan Hatzius said.

Lip service to the idea that these policies create problems for those not getting the help is given, as CNN notes. (“There are fears that an ongoing commitment to corporate bond purchases could create a so-called ‘moral hazard,’ encouraging companies to borrow more from less-selective lenders on the expectation that Fed intervention would limit risks.”) But such considerations almost never stop the government from doing what it can to help out Big Money.

Hussein Sayed, chief market strategist at FXTM, was warning his clients this week, CNN reported, that “monetary policy stimulus which explains most of the recovery in asset prices from the March lows will become less effective going forward if it doesn’t translate into a rebound in economic activity and better prospects for corporate earnings.”

The Washington Post reminds us that the “central bank has said it launched the corporate debt program to support the markets,” although it’s “unclear what the implications of its actions will be” as “the Treasury Department has devoted $75 billion to the Fed’s two corporate credit facilities as part of a pot of money allocated by the Cares Act….The Fed has bought almost $429 million in individual bonds,” buying them both directly from the company and from investors or funds that already owned previously issued bonds.

Aaron Klein, policy director of the Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution, is quoted in the Post asking: “Why is the solution buying Apple, Microsoft and Comcast debt? Or eBay or Google?…Is the problem in America that the holders of Apple stock need more help? Is the problem that investors in Google debt are likely to suffer catastrophic and unexpected losses from the covid shutdown?”

As Politico reported regarding this latest round of Federal Reserve corporate debt buying, “most of the debt has to be considered investment-grade by credit ratings services, meaning it carries minimal risk to investors. But otherwise eligible firms that have been downgraded a notch to junk status since late March will still be included in the program.” Even if no actual straight-up losses to the government (read: all of us) arise from such debt buying, their very existence distorts where investment and growth goes, to the advantage of big business’ being temporarily propped up.

As James Dorn of the Cato Institute further explained:

The promise of supporting corporate bond prices and making loans to highly leveraged companies undermines corrective market forces: real markets are supplanted by pseudo markets in which the central bank will be subsidizing distressed companies and politicizing the allocation of capital. Initially private investors may purchase more corporate debt, but if corporations use that credit to pay off existing debt, and do not invest in productive capital, losses may continue. Private investors then will have an incentive to offload their holdings to the SPV [the Fed’s “special purpose vehicle” for such debt buys], effectively socializing those losses.  Those who value private, free markets recognize that the Fed’s promise to revitalize corporate debt markets is, in reality, a step toward market socialism.

The Federal Reserve has since the 2008-09 economic crisis become more and more a holder of financial assets of all sorts, a change whose risks are detailed in this 2014 Reason feature, “How the Fed Got Huge,” by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.

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