Ninth Circuit Reinstates Defamation Lawsuit Over Claim that $750K Painting Was Fake

From Gerald Peters Gallery, Inc. v. Stremmel (nonprecedential), decided Friday by Circuit Judges Richard Paez and Johnnie Rawlinson and District Judge George Wu:

Gerald Peters Gallery, Inc. and Gerald Peters …  (collectively, “Appellants”) appeal from a summary judgment order and judgment entered against them in this defamation/business disparagement action, which they brought against Peter Stremmel …, Stremmel Galleries, Ltd., Mike Overby and Coeur D’Alene Art Auction of Nevada, L.L.C. (collectively, “Appellees”)….

This case involves the sale, by Appellants, of a painting titled “The Rain and the Sun,” represented to be by Frank Tenney Johnson (“Painting”), that was purchased by R. D. Hubbard (“Hubbard”). When a question arose as to the Painting’s authenticity, one of Hubbard’s associates sent images of the Painting to Stremmel, who in a series of emails made comments such as: (1) “Mike Overby and I” “are absolutely certain” “that [the Painting] is not in fact by Frank Tenney Johnson,” and (2) “I hope it wasn’t represented to Dee as an FTJ—and I really hope he didn’t pay a lot for it.” …

In granting the Appellees’ motion for summary judgment, the district court [concluded the e-mails didn’t contain] “a false and defamatory statement concerning the plaintiff” …. The district court erred, however, in determining that it would not have been “reasonable for Mr. Hubbard or his associates to understand Stremmel as intending to refer to [Appellants]” simply on the basis of the fact that Hubbard and his associates had not told Stremmel of the Appellants’ involvement in the sale of the Painting at the time of the initial comments. The alleged defamer’s intent—or lack thereof—in aiming at the particular plaintiff is not controlling (even if it is relevant), so long as the interpretation of the statement as referring to that plaintiff is “reasonable in light of all the circumstances.” In a defamation suit, it matters less “who was aimed at” than “who was hit.” …

[A] defamation claim [is viable] notwithstanding the defendant’s complete lack of knowledge of the identity of the plaintiff…. [And] there is evidence in the record that supports the conclusion that Stremmel knew there was a seller of the Painting at the time of his e-mails, even if he did not know the precise identity when he sent his first two e-mails. Because Nevada law did not require Stremmel to know the precise identity of the seller, whether his e-mails reasonably implicated Appellants was a question of fact for the jury and it was error for the district court to decide this issue as a question of law.

We also: 1) disagree with the district court’s conclusion that a jury could not conclude that certain of Stremmel’s statements implied “an assertion of objective fact under the circumstances”; 2) reject Appellees’ argument that an assertion that a painting is a fake is categorically not a communication that may be defamatory of a seller who has sold—and warranted—it as authentic; and 3) conclude that, whether or not Stremmel’s assertions might be understood as an opinion, a jury could easily find otherwise given the language used in his e-mails. These issues are not appropriate for summary judgment in this case.

On remand, the district court should be guided by the principles that “words do not exist in isolation” and “must be reviewed in their entirety and in context to determine whether they are susceptible of defamatory meaning.” Further, the district court must, in the first instance, determine—with the benefit of a more-complete evidentiary record than we have here—the scope of that “context” given the timing and form of the statements in question….

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Ukrainian MP Found Dead With Gunshot Wound To The Head

Ukrainian MP Found Dead With Gunshot Wound To The Head

Tyler Durden

Sat, 05/23/2020 – 20:30

Ukrainian MP Valery Davydenko of the Dovira faction was found dead in his office bathroom with a gunshot wound to the head, according to a post by MP Ilya Kiva on his Facebook page and confirmed by local media.

“His body with a gunshot wound has just been found in the office of an MP Valeriy Davydenko. The circumstances are being investigated,” he wrote.

According to the Ukrainian Truth news agency, a weapon was found near the body.

“The body of MP Valeriy Davydenko was found in the toilet in his own office with a fatal gunshot wound to the head. An investigative police group is working at the scene,” said Deputy Interior Minister Anton Herashchenko, who added “Police and prosecutors will check all possible versions of the tragedy.”

Davydenko was a defendant in several corruption cases – including the theft of funds from the country’s Agriculture Fund. In February, 2014, Davydenko and Borys Prykhodko – another MP from the Dovira faction, were accused of embezzling US$75 million while Prykhodko was the First Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine.

Following Davydenko’s death, ex-People’s Deputy Ihor Mosiychuk called for the immediate arrest of Prykhodko, who he called the “accomplice in the theft of the agrarian fund.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/36nxu3g Tyler Durden

Did Jack Dorsey Just Issue A ‘Mea Culpa’ To All Twitter-Banned “Conspiracy”-Peddlers?

Did Jack Dorsey Just Issue A ‘Mea Culpa’ To All Twitter-Banned “Conspiracy”-Peddlers?

Tyler Durden

Sat, 05/23/2020 – 20:00

Did Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey just, sheepishly, issue a ‘mea culpa’ to all those innocent (mostly conservative) voices he has silenced in the last few years who dared to question the “Russia, Russia, Russia” narrative, the “Biden did nothing wrong” stories, the “Comey is an American hero” facts, and, of course, the “COVID started in a wet market” orgy of lies.

In a tweet, the outspoken provider of safe-spaces, retweeted an essay by Charles Eisenstein entitled “The Conspiracy Myth” which appears to go against everything Twitter has done.

So, we ask in all seriousness, why did Dorsey – who has shown himself, via his actions, to be an enemy of any non-establishment-sanctioned narrative with his suspension and banning of any tweets or twitter-ers that dare to offer alternate views – retweet an essay that raises doubts about the over-arching threat of “conspiracy theories” to snowflakes, promotes the idea of exploring all sides of an argument before dismissing it, and most ironically, rails against “information suppression” and centralized decisions based on someone’s “trustworthiness”?

Read the essay for yourself (emphasis ours):

The Conspiracy Myth

The other day I was amused to read a critique of The Coronation in which the author was absolutely certain that I am a closet conspiracy theorist. He was so persuasive that I myself almost believed it.

What is a conspiracy theory anyway? Sometimes the term is deployed against anyone who questions authority, dissents from dominant paradigms, or thinks that hidden interests influence our leading institutions. As such, it is a way to quash dissent and bully those trying to stand up to abuses of power. One needn’t abandon critical thinking to believe that powerful institutions sometimes collude, conspire, cover up, and are corrupt. If that is what is meant by a conspiracy theory, obviously some of those theories are true. Does anyone remember Enron? Iran-Contra? COINTELPRO? Vioxx? Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?

During the time of Covid-19, another level of conspiracy theory has risen to prominence that goes way beyond specific stories of collusion and corruption to posit conspiracy as a core explanatory principle for how the world works. Fuelled by the authoritarian response to the pandemic (justifiable or not, lockdown, quarantine, surveillance and tracking, censorship of misinformation, suspension of freedom of assembly and other civil liberties, and so on are indeed authoritarian), this arch-conspiracy theory holds that an evil, power-hungry cabal of insiders deliberately created the pandemic or is at least ruthlessly exploiting it to frighten the public into accepting a totalitarian world government under permanent medical martial law, a New World Order (NWO). Furthermore, this evil group, this illuminati, pulls the strings of all major governments, corporations, the United Nations, the WHO, the CDC, the media, the intelligence services, the banks, and the NGOs. In other words, they say, everything we are told is a lie, and the world is in the grip of evil.

So what do I think about that theory? I think it is a myth. And what is a myth? A myth is not the same thing as a fantasy or a delusion. Myths are vehicles of truth, and that truth needn’t be literal. The classical Greek myths, for example, seem like mere amusements until one decodes them by associating each god with psychosocial forces. In this way, myths bring light to the shadows and reveal what has been repressed. They take a truth about the psyche or society and form it into a story. The truth of a myth does not depend on whether it is objectively verifiable. That is one reason why, in The Coronation, I said my purpose is neither to advocate nor to debunk the conspiracy narrative, but rather to look at what it illuminates. It is, after all, neither provable nor falsifiable.

What is true about the conspiracy myth? Underneath its literalism, it conveys important information that we ignore at great peril. 

First, it demonstrates the shocking extent of public alienation from institutions of authority. For all the political battles of the post-WWII era, there was at least a broad consensus on basic facts and on where facts could be found. The key institutions of knowledge production — science and journalism — enjoyed broad public trust. If the New York Times and CBS Evening News said that North Vietnam attacked the United States in the Gulf of Tonkin, most people believed it. If science said nuclear power and DDT were safe, most people believed that too. To some extent, that trust was well earned. Journalists sometimes defied the interests of the powerful, as with Seymour Hersh’s expose of the My Lai massacre, or Woodward & Bernstein’s reporting on Watergate. Science, in the vanguard of civilization’s onward march, had a reputation for the objective pursuit of knowledge in defiance of traditional religious authorities, as well as a reputation for lofty disdain for political and financial motives. 

Today, the broad consensus trust in science and journalism is in tatters. I know several highly educated people who believe the earth is flat. By dismissing flat-earthers and the tens of millions of adherents to less extreme alternative narratives (historical, medical, political, and scientific) as ignorant, we are mistaking symptom for cause. Their loss of trust is a clear symptom of a loss of trustworthiness. Our institutions of knowledge production have betrayed public trust repeatedly, as have our political institutions. Now, many people won’t believe them even when they tell the truth. This must be frustrating to the scrupulous doctor, scientist, or public official. To them, the problem looks like a public gone mad, a rising tide of anti-scientific irrationality that is endangering public health. The solution, from that perspective, would be to combat ignorance. It is almost as if ignorance is a virus (in fact, I have heard that phrase before) that must be controlled through the same kind of quarantine (for example, censorship) that we apply to the coronavirus. 

Ironically, another kind of ignorance pervades both these efforts: the ignorance of the terrain. What is the diseased tissue upon which the virus of ignorance gains purchase? The loss of trust in science, journalism, and government reflects their long corruption: their arrogance and elitism, their alliance with corporate interests, and their institutionalized suppression of dissent. The conspiracy myth embodies the realization of a profound disconnect between the public postures of our leaders and their true motivations and plans. It bespeaks a political culture that is opaque to the ordinary citizen, a world of secrecy, image, PR,  spin, optics, talking points, perception management, narrative management, and information warfare. No wonder people suspect that there is another reality operating behind the curtains. 

Second, the conspiracy myth gives narrative form to an authentic intuition that an inhuman power governs the world. What could that power be? The conspiracy myth locates that power in a group of malevolent human beings (who take commands, in some versions, from extraterrestrial or demonic entities). Therein lies a certain psychological comfort, because now there is someone to blame in a familiar us-versus-them narrative and victim-perpetrator-rescuer psychology. Alternatively, we could locate the “inhuman power” in systems or ideologies, not a group of conspirators. That is less psychologically rewarding, because we can no longer easily identify as good fighting evil; after all, we ourselves participate in these systems, which pervade our entire society. Systems like the debt-based money system, patriarchy, white supremacy, or capitalism cannot be removed by fighting their administrators. They create roles for evildoers to fill, but the evildoers are functionaries; puppets, not puppet masters. The basic intuition of conspiracy theories then is true: that those we think hold power are but puppets of the real power in the world. 

A couple weeks ago I was on a call with a person who had a high position in the Obama administration and who still runs in elite circles. He said, “There is no one driving the bus.” I was a little disappointed actually, because there is indeed part of me that wishes the problem were a bunch of dastardly conspirators. Why? Because then our world’s problems would be quite easy to solve, at least in principle. Just expose and eliminate those bad guys. That is the prevailing Hollywood formula for righting the world’s wrongs: a heroic champion confronts and defeats the bad guy, and everyone lives happily ever after. Hmm, that is the same basic formula as blaming ill health on germs and killing them with the arsenal of medicine, so that we can live safe healthy lives ever after, or killing the terrorists and walling out the immigrants and locking up the criminals, all again so that we can live safe healthy lives ever after. Stamped from the same template, conspiracy theories tap into an unconscious orthodoxy. They emanate from the same mythic pantheon as the social ills they protest. We might call that pantheon Separation, and one of its chief motifs is the war against the Other.

That is not to say there is no such thing as a germ — or a conspiracy. Watergate, COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, Merck’s drug Vioxx, Ford’s exploding Pinto coverup, Lockheed-Martin’s bribery campaign, Bayer’s knowing sale of HIV-contaminated blood, and the Enron scandal demonstrate that conspiracies involving powerful elites do happen. None of the above are myths though: a myth is something that explains the world; it is, mysteriously, bigger than itself. Thus, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory (which I will confess, doubtless at cost to my credibility, to accepting as literally true) is a portal to the mythic realm. 

The conspiracy myth I’m addressing here, though, is much larger than any of these specific examples: It is that the world as we know it is the result of a conspiracy, with the Illuminati or controllers as its evil gods. For believers, it becomes a totalizing discourse that casts every event into its terms. 

It is a myth with an illustrious pedigree, going back at least to the time of the first century Gnostics. Gnostics believe that an evil demiurge created the material world out of a preexisting divine essence. Creating the world in the image of his own distortion, he imagines himself to be its true god and ruler.

One needn’t believe in this literally, nor believe literally in a world-controlling evil cabal, to derive insight from this myth — insight into the arrogance of the powerful, for example, or into the nature of the distortion that colors the world of our experience. 

What is it that makes the vast majority of humanity comply with a system that drives Earth and humankind to ruin? What power has us in its grip? It isn’t just the conspiracy theorists who are captive to a mythology. Society at large is too. I call it the mythology of Separation: me separate from you, matter separate from spirit, human separate from nature. It holds us as discrete and separate selves in an objective universe of force and mass, atoms and void. Because we are (in this myth) separate from other people and from nature, we must dominate our competitors and master nature. Progress, therefore, consists in increasing our capacity to control the Other. The myth recounts human history as an ascent from one triumph to the next, from fire to domestication to industry to information technology, genetic engineering, and social science, promising a coming paradise of control. That same myth motivates the conquest and ruin of nature, organizing society to turn the entire planet into money — no conspiracy necessary.

The mythology of Separation is what generates what I named in The Coronation as a “civilizational tilt” toward control. The solution template is, facing any problem, to find something to control — to quarantine, to track, to imprison, to wall out, to dominate, or to kill. If control fails, more control will fix it. To achieve social and material paradise, control everything, track every movement, monitor every word, record every transaction. Then there can be no more crime, no more infection, no more disinformation. When the entire ruling class accepts this formula and this vision, they will act in natural concert to increase their control. It is all for the greater good. When the public accepts it too, they will not resist it. This is not a conspiracy, though it can certainly look like one. This is a third truth within the conspiracy myth. Events are indeed orchestrated in the direction of more and more control, only the orchestrating power is itself a zeitgeist, an ideology… a myth.

A Conspiracy with No Conspirators

Let us not dismiss the conspiracy myth as just a myth. Not only is it an important psychosocial diagnostic, but it reveals what is otherwise hard to see from the official mythology in which society’s main institutions, while flawed, are shepherding us ever-closer to a high tech paradise. That dominant myth blinds us to the data points the conspiracy theorists recruit for their narratives. These might include things like regulatory capture in the pharmaceutical industry, conflicts of interest within public health organizations, the dubious efficacy of masks, the far-lower-than-hyped death rates, totalitarian overreach, the questionable utility of lockdown, concerns about non-ionizing frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, the benefits of natural and holistic approaches to boosting immunity, bioterrain theory, the dangers of censorship in the name of “combatting disinformation,” and so forth. It would be nice if one could raise the numerous valid points and legitimate questions that alternative Covid narratives bring to light without being classed as a right-wing conspiracy theorist. 

The whole phrase “right-wing conspiracy theorist” is a bit odd, since traditionally it is the Left that has been most alert to the proclivity of the powerful to abuse their power. Traditionally, it is the Left that is suspicious of corporate interests, that urges us to “question authority,” and that has in fact been the main victim of government infiltration and surveillance.

Fifty years ago, if anyone said, “There is a secret program called COINTELPRO that is spying on civil rights groups and sowing division within them with poison pen letters and fabricated rumors,” that would have been a conspiracy theory by today’s standards.

The same, 25 years ago, with, “There is a secret program in which the CIA facilitates narcotics sales into American inner cities and uses the money to fund right-wing paramilitaries in Central America.”

The same with government infiltration of environmental groups and peace activists starting in the 1980s.

Or more recently, the infiltration of the Standing Rock movement.

Or the real estate industry’s decades-long conspiracy to redline neighborhoods to keep black people out.

Given this history, why all of a sudden is it the Left urging everyone to trust “the Man” — to trust the pronouncements of the pharmaceutical companies and pharma-funded organizations like the CDC and WHO? Why is skepticism towards these institutions labeled “right wing”? It isn’t as if only the privileged are “inconvenienced” by lockdown. It is devastating the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of the global precariat. The UN World Food Program is warning that by the end of the year, 260 million people will face starvation. Most are black and brown people in Africa and South Asia. One might argue that to restrict the debate to epidemiological questions of mortality is itself a privileged stance that erases the suffering of those who are most marginalized to begin with.

“Conspiracy theory” has become a term of political invective, used to disparage any view that diverges from mainstream beliefs. Basically, any critique of dominant institutions can be smeared as conspiracy theory. There is actually a perverse truth in this smear. For example, if you believe that glyphosate is actually dangerous to human and ecological health, then you also must, if you are logical, believe that Bayer/Monsanto is suppressing or ignoring that information, and you must also believe that the government, media, and scientific establishment are to some extent complicit in that suppression. Otherwise, why are we not seeing NYT headlines like, “Monsanto whistleblower reveals dangers of glyphosate”? 

Information suppression can happen without deliberate orchestration. Throughout history, hysterias, intellectual fads, and mass delusions have come and gone spontaneously. This is more mysterious than the easy conspiracy explanation admits. An unconscious coordination of action can look very much like a conspiracy, and the boundary between the two is blurry. Consider the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) fraud that served as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq. Maybe there were people in the Bush administration who knowingly used the phony “yellowcake” document to call for war; maybe they just wanted very much to believe the documents were genuine, or maybe they thought, “Well, this is questionable but Saddam must have WMD, and even if he doesn’t, he wants them, so the document is basically true…” People easily believe what serves their interests or fits their existing worldview. 

In a similar vein, the media needed little encouragement to start beating the war drums. They knew what to do already, without having to receive instructions. I don’t think very many journalists actually believed the WMD lie. They pretended to believe, because subconsciously, they knew that was the establishment narrative. That was what would get them recognized as serious journalists. That’s what would give them access to power. That is what would allow them to keep their jobs and advance their careers. But most of all, they pretended to believe because everyone else was pretending to believe. It is hard to go against the zeitgeist. 

The British scientist Rupert Sheldrake told me about a talk he gave to a group of scientists who were working on animal behaviour at a prestigious British University. He was talking about his research on dogs that know when their owners are coming home, and other telepathic phenomena in domestic animals. The talk was received with a kind of polite silence. But in the following tea break all six of the senior scientists who were present at the seminar came to him one by one, and when they were sure that no one else was listening told him they had had experiences of this kind with their own animals, or that they were convinced that telepathy is a real phenomenon, but that they could not talk to their colleagues about this because they were all so straight. When Sheldrake realised that all six had told him much the same thing, he said to them, “Why don’t you guys come out? You’d all have so much more fun!” He says that when he gives a talk at a scientific institution there are nearly always scientists who approach him afterwards telling him they’ve had personal experiences that convince them of the reality of psychic or spiritual phenomena but that they can’t discuss them with their colleagues for fear of being thought weird.

This is not a deliberate conspiracy to suppress psychic phenomena. Those six scientists didn’t convene beforehand and decide to suppress information they knew was real. They keep their opinions to themselves because of the norms of their subculture, the basic paradigms that delimit science, and the very real threat of damage to their careers. The persecution and calumny directed at Sheldrake himself demonstrates what happens to a scientist who is outspoken in his dissent from official scientific reality. So, we might still say that a conspiracy is afoot, but its perpetrator is a culture, a system, and a story. 

Is this, or a deliberate conspiratorial agenda, a more satisfying explanation for the seemingly inexorable trends (which by no means began with Covid) toward surveillance, tracking, distancing, germ phobia, obsession with safety, and the digitization and indoor-ization of entertainment, recreation, and sociality? If the perpetrator is indeed a cultural mythology and system, then conspiracy theories offer us a false target, a distraction. The remedy cannot be to expose and take down those who have foisted these trends upon us. Of course, there are many bad actors in our world, remorseless people committing heinous acts. But have they created the system and the mythology of Separation, or do they merely take advantage of it? Certainly such people should be stopped, but if that is all we do, and leave unchanged the conditions that breed them, we will fight an endless war. Just as in bioterrain theory germs are symptoms and exploiters of diseased tissue, so also are conspiratorial cabals symptoms and exploiters of a diseased society: a society poisoned by the mentality of war, fear, separation, and control. This deep ideology, the myth of separation, is beyond anyone’s power to invent. The Illuminati, if they exist, are not its authors; it is more true to say that the mythology is their author. We do not create our myths; they create us.

Which side are you on?

In the end, I still haven’t said whether I think the New World Order conspiracy myth is true or not. Well actually yes I have. I have said it is true as a myth, regardless of its correspondence to verifiable facts. But what about the facts? Come on, Charles, tell us, is there actually a conspiracy behind the Covid thing, or isn’t there? There must be an objective fact of the matter. Are chemtrails a thing? Was SARS-COV2 genetically engineered? Is microwave radiation from cellphone towers a factor? Are vaccines introducing viruses from animal cell cultures into people? Is Bill Gates masterminding a power grab in the form of medical martial law? Does a Luciferian elite rule the world? True or false? Yes or no? 

To this question I would respond with another: Given that I am not an expert on any of these matters, why do you want to know what I think? Could it be to place me on one side or another of an information war? Then you will know whether it is OK to enjoy this essay, share it, or have me on your podcast.  In an us-versus-them war mentality, the most important thing is to know which side someone is on, lest you render aid and comfort to the enemy. 

Aha — Charles must be on the other side. Because he has created a false equivalency between peer-reviewed, evidence-based, respectable scientific knowledge on the one hand, and unhinged conspiracy theories on the other. 

Aha — Charles must be on the other side. Because he has created a false equivalency between corporate-government-NWO propaganda on the one hand, and brave whistle-blowers and dissidents risking their careers for the truth on the other. 

Can you see how totalizing war mentality can be?

War mentality saturates our polarized society, which envisions progress as a consequence of victory — victory over a virus, over the ignorant, over the left, over the right, over the psychopathic elites, over Donald Trump, over white supremacy, over the liberal elites…. Each side uses the same formula, and that formula requires an enemy. So, obligingly, we divide ourselves up into us and them, exhausting 99% of our energies in a fruitless tug-of-war, never once suspecting that the true evil power might be the formula itself. 

This is not to propose that we somehow banish conflict from human affairs. It is to question a mythology — embraced by both sides — that conceives every problem in conflict’s terms. Struggle and conflict have their place, but other plotlines are possible. There are other pathways to healing and to justice. 

A Call for Humility

Have you ever noticed that events seem to organize themselves to validate the story you hold about the world? Selection bias and confirmation bias explain some of that, but I think something weirder is at work as well. When we enter into deep faith or deep paranoia, it seems as if that state attracts confirmatory events to it. Reality organizes itself to match our stories. In a sense, this IS a conspiracy, just not one perpetrated by humankind. That might be a third truth that the conspiracy myth harbors: the presence of an organizing intelligence behind the events of our lives. 

In no way does this imply the New Age nostrum that beliefs create reality. Rather, it is that reality and belief construct each other, coevolving as a coherent whole. The intimate, mysterious connection between myth and reality means that belief is never actually a slave to fact. We are facts’ sovereign — which is not to say their creator. To be their sovereign doesn’t mean to be their tyrant, disrespecting and over-ruling them. The wise monarch pays attention to an unruly subject, such as a fact that defies the narrative. Maybe it is simply a disturbed trouble-maker, like a simple lie, but maybe it signals disharmony in the kingdom. Maybe the kingdom is no longer legitimate. Maybe the myth is no longer true. It could well be that the vociferous attacks on Covid dissent, using the “conspiracy theory” smear, signal the infirmity of the orthodox paradigms they seek to uphold.

If so, that doesn’t mean the orthodox paradigms are all wrong either. To leap from one certainty to another skips the holy ground of uncertainty, of not knowing, of humility, into which genuinely new information can come. What unites the pundits of all persuasions is their certainty. Who is trustworthy? In the end, it is the person with the humility to recognize when he or she has been wrong. 

To those who categorically dismiss any information that seriously challenges conventional medicine, lockdown policies, vaccines, etc., I would ask, Do you need such high walls around your kingdom? Instead of banishing these unruly subjects, would it hurt to give them an audience?

Would it be so dangerous to perhaps tour another kingdom, guided not by your own loyal minister but by the most intelligent, welcoming partisans of the other side?

If you have no interest in spending the several hours it will take to absorb the following dissenting opinions, fine. I’d rather be in my garden too.

But if you are a partisan in these issues, what harm will it do to visit enemy territory? Normally partisans don’t do that. They rely on the reports of their own leaders about the enemy. If they know anything of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s or Judy Mikovitz’s views, it is through the lens of someone debunking them. So give a listen to Kennedy, or if you prefer MD’s only, to David KatzZach Bush, or Christiane Northrup

I would like to offer the same invitation to those who reject the conventional view.

Find the most scrupulous mainstream doctors and scientists you can, and dive into their world. Take the attitude of a respectful guest, not a hostile spy. If you do that, I guarantee you will encounter data points that challenge any narrative you came in with. The splendor of conventional virology, the wonders of chemistry that generations of scientists have discovered, the intelligence and sincerity of most of these scientists, and the genuine altruism of health care workers on the front line who have no political or financial conflict of interest in the face of grave risk to themselves, must be part of any satisfactory narrative.

After two months of obsessively searching for one, I have not yet found a satisfactory narrative that can account for every data point. That doesn’t mean to take no action because after all, knowledge is never certain. But in the whirlwind of competing narratives and the disjoint mythologies beneath them, we can look for action that makes sense no matter which side is right. We can look for truths that the smoke and clamor of the battle obscures. We can question assumptions both sides take for granted, and ask questions neither side is asking. Not identified with either side, we can gather knowledge from both.

Generalizing to society, by bringing in all the voices, including the marginalized ones, we can build a broader social consensus and begin to heal the polarization that is rending and paralyzing our society.

*  *  *

Is this a new mission statement for Twitter 2.0 – allow adults to be adults, erase the nanny-statism, and offer the world a platform to exchange ideas freely?

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2A8hYMk Tyler Durden

Elite US Marine Unit Conducts Live-Fire Drills In Persian Gulf “Message To Iran”

Elite US Marine Unit Conducts Live-Fire Drills In Persian Gulf “Message To Iran”

Tyler Durden

Sat, 05/23/2020 – 19:30

Days ago we took note of Secretary of State Pompeo’s somewhat rare epic ‘regime change tweet tirade’ which included no less than nine fiery statements coming in minutes aimed at ‘rogue regimes’ Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

Though some pundits have noted the administration is looking for a “distraction” and way out of the nation’s corona-crisis, perhaps eager to claim an easy ‘victory’ prior to November on the foreign policy front, it does look as if things in both the Persian Gulf and even Caribbean (where 5 Iranian fuel tankers are inbound to deliver gasoline to Maduro’s Venezuela) are heating up and set for violent showdown. 

Amid an exchange of heightening threats and counter-threats between Tehran and Washington, Fox News reports that an elite US Marine unit is conducting ongoing ‘live-fire’ drills in the Persian Gulf. This is a clear “message to Iran” reports Fox’s Lucas Tomlinson.

US Marines in live-fire drills in Persian Gulf, via FOX.

“In a message to Iran, U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship does some target practice in Persian Gulf with the USS Bataan Amphibious Ready Group and embarked 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit,” Thomlinson writes, also publishing rare photos of the late night operation. 

He further describes: “The live-fire training began on same day U.S. military warned Iran to keep back 100 meters from its warships after harassment by small gunboats from Islamic Revolutionary Guard last month.”

US Marines in live-fire drills in Persian Gulf, via FOX.

Days ago, on May 19, the US Navy issued an alert which Reuters described as “aimed squarely at Iran”.

It warned that all ships in the gulf must stay at least 100 meters away from U.S. warships or risk being “interpreted as a threat and subject to lawful defensive measures.”

Armed vessels approaching within 100 meters of a U.S. naval vessel may be interpreted as a threat,” the official maritime alert said.

Reuters noted further, “The Pentagon has stated that Trump’s threat was meant to underscore the Navy’s right to self-defense.”

This was after multiple filmed incidents involving Iranian naval ‘fast-boats’ in high-risk maneuvers near American ships, aimed at harassing the US presence. 

Via Task & Purpose: “The US is using AC-130 gunships to blow targets out of the water in a clear message to Iran.”

As we’ve underscored before, a number of indicators suggest we are in for another hot ‘tanker war’ summer in the Gulf, akin to last year’s tit-for-tat escalation.

But this time around the potential for a major conflict is even more likely, given the US killing of IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in January, which has significantly raised the stakes.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/36skdGo Tyler Durden

Master Of Puppets: Bitcoin Cuts The Strings

Master Of Puppets: Bitcoin Cuts The Strings

Tyler Durden

Sat, 05/23/2020 – 19:00

Authored by J.D.Salbego via CoinTelegraph.com,

The centralized financial system has compromised itself several times during the last two decades alone, and now it’s time for a serious change!

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

Did you notice the song that Christian Bale’s character was jamming out to in his office when his partner came in to pull the money in The Big Short? Well, it happens to be my favorite metal band of all time: Metallica. And that song is called “Master of Puppets.” It’s almost ironic that as I was writing this article on the real truth behind what’s currently happening with the collapse of our financial and economic markets and calling it “Master of Puppets” — well, this movie scene popped in my mind. 

Yes, The Big Short is about the big 2008 financial crisis caused mainly by none other than the United States Federal Reserve. Spoiler alert! This will be one of the last times you read about any type of “correlation” here in this article.

Master of Puppets is Metallica’s third album, released in 1986, and it is probably the greatest metal album of all time. I still listen to it almost weekly. It’s great for working out or getting pumped up before a business meeting.

Anyways, back to the master. The curtain has been removed and the truth revealed: money is created out of thin air, and the banks and Wall Street are bathing in it.

To be very clear, there was a major and historical financial crisis by orders of magnitude already about to explode, and the COVID-19 pandemic just brought the economy to its knees a tiny bit quicker.

At a crucial intersection of events in time that couldn’t have been more bluntly shoved in your face, 16 million people in the U.S. lost their jobs (and it’s almost 36.5 million now.) And like a drunk driver recklessly running a red light at an intersection, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had the highest gains since 1938. All while the Fed was printing 4 trillion U.S. dollars out of thin air.

Where’s the correlation? Whoever can find it will prove reincarnation exists, as they must be J. P. Morgan himself, reincarnated in the flesh — only 100 years even more crafty and conniving. And the government and the Federal Reserve say Bitcoin (BTC) is backed by thin air?

Our economy and the Federal Reserve is built on sticks (debt), and remember what happened to that little piggy that didn’t use bricks? Let’s hope the strings become severed from the puppet master and like a bungee cord slap back into its face with the inertia and momentum of more than 150 years of control, lies and manipulation.

The amount of truth that’s starting to become available and acknowledged by the general public about our governments and financial institutions is alarming, and hopefully this will be a stepping point into a new paradigm or, what I like to say, a “new world order.”

The Fed and the government’s economic strategy is just putting an already used Band-Aid (quantitative easing and debt monetization) on a gunshot wound. It’s not fixing the real problem. And for obvious reasons.

The U.S. has for years substantially spent trillions of dollars more than it brings in. To date, the debt owed by the federal government is over $25 trillion. Even more unfathomable to see, with some very complicated calculations, is that it’s looking like an estimated, or near, amount of $100 trillion will need to be printed (out of thin air), or what the Fed likes to call “increase the monetary base,” in order to bail out and keep institutions afloat.

This would then create the ripple effect of causing global economies to reach hyperinflation such as has been never seen before. That’s called a lose-lose (or no-win) situation caused by none other than our government, the banking system, Wall Street and their combined mismanagement of our economies.

Understanding economics and monetary policies can be complicated for many, even myself, but it’s not complicated enough where I will not speak up and just sit here as the blind sheep being led by the wolf in sheep’s clothing to my bitter end.

To clarify, as it’s important: Bitcoin will never be a replacement for a nation’s central bank currency or new digital currency that’s in development now. It’s more the digital gold of the 21st century and onward.

But most importantly, and much like the U.S. fighting for its freedom and control from an unfair controlling centralized system such as England, it was the first to step in thousands of years of oppression to launch a revolution.

Like Joan of Arc or Che Guevara, who became martyrs for the better of society, Bitcoin itself has taken the beating from its first inception — including being declared a national security issue — but it was so powerful in igniting a revolution that it withstood all the hardships and persecution that the governments and central banks cast upon it. So, what it serves to be is the Medal of Honor for this new paradigm shift of the people’s money, leading the future of money with a more transparent, fair and peer-to-peer monetary system.

The more we talk about this, the more people may eventually get it — I hope. The general public should really try to understand this. It’s all credits and debts and leveraged positions and margins.

Remember that incredible luncheon scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where Matthew McConaughey’s super Wall Street broker character educates a young and hungry rookie broker, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, breaking down how the real system works? Matthew McConaughey, with a straight face and twist of sarcasm, says, “Fugayzi, fugazi. It’s a wazzy, it’s a woozy. It’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not f—— real.”

Just so you know: This system doesn’t just apply to brokering trades on the stock market. It applies to all the banking, monetary and financial systems around the world. 

Fairy dust old money is just a hierarchically controlled propaganda belief system.

Blockchain-based new money is the P2P, fair and transparent people’s-money.

That’s exactly right. Thank you, Martin Scorsese and your screenwriters, for this brilliantly creative scene. Yet it’s fair to say that this part of the scene was definitely outshined by the more memorable “rookie numbers” part.

But as history has continuously proven to us, unfortunately, much of the population takes comfort in the machine (the “master”), no matter the consequences. As some say, “Ignorance is bliss.” 

Maybe they were so caught up in the genius writing and humor from Scorsese and these two brilliant actors that they missed it. I know I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

So, as the banker artistically creates his leveraged position out of thin air, like abstract images flow out of the tip of Dali’s paintbrush — or Scorsese’s brain to film — I ask you: Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art?

Finally, the cat is out of the bag, though unfortunately only hindsight is 20/20, and time will tell what changes actually occur after this mess. Hopefully it’s different this time. 

As says the famous “possible quote” of Henry Ford (most people don’t know the real facts behind that quote) that was paraphrased by congressperson Charles Binderup on March 19, 1937, in the House of Representatives:

“It is perhaps well enough that the people of the nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

Want to know how the banking system really works? Here it goes:

You don’t deposit cash at a bank. You actually just lend it to the bank, and when you go to draw on that account, you are just creating a transaction inputted on a digital ledger. You are not actually drawing out your original money. The banks then charge you fees to actually lend them money as well in the form of monthly account fees, overdraft fees and all the other small print fees that sneak in.

When the bank deposits money in your account in the form of a credit — for instance, if you buy a house — it’s not an actual credit, it’s really a debt that it repackages and calls a mortgage by leveraging its position and creating a profit margin for the services of lending you part of your own money back that you originally gave it, as well as all its other customers’ money. There is only one form of real money in this transaction, and that is the money that you originally gave the bank. It’s basically holding a lien over you and on your new house with the money you and its other customers let it borrow, which it turned around and let you borrow again and charged fees on it. All it did was “artistically” create a leveraged position and profit margin by creating a credit and debt out of thin air.

The stark reality is that there really is no money. This centralized system is just conjured up credit, debt and margin entries on a centralized ledger that’s agreed upon (consensus) by a centralized group of participants.

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

Bankruptcy Tsunami Begins: Thousands Of Default Notices Are “Flying Out The Door”

Bankruptcy Tsunami Begins: Thousands Of Default Notices Are “Flying Out The Door”

Tyler Durden

Sat, 05/23/2020 – 18:30

Two weeks ago, when showing the uncanny correlation between defaults and the unemployment rates, we predicted that the number of Chapter 11 filings that is about to flood the US will be nothing short of biblical.

All that was missing was a catalyst… and according to Bloomberg that catalyst arrived in the past week or so, as retail landlords have been sending out thousands of default notices to tenants, who in turn have experienced a collapse in foot traffic, sales and cash flow due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and are simply unable to pay their debt obligations.

According to Bloomberg, restaurants, department stores, apparel merchants and specialty chains have been receiving notices from landlords – some of whom have gone as long as three months without receiving rent.

“The default letters from landlords are flying out the door,” said Andy Graiser, co-president of commercial real estate company, A&G Real Estate Partners. “It’s creating a real fear in the marketplace.”

Pressure from default notices and follow-up actions like locking up stores or terminating leases was cited in the bankruptcies of Modell’s Sporting Goods and Stage Stores Inc. Many chains stopped paying rent after the pandemic shuttered most U.S. stores, gambling that they could hold on to some cash before landlords demanded payment.

The stakes are enormous, and landlords are suffering, too. An estimated $7.4 billion in rent for April hasn’t been paid, or about 45% of what’s owed, according to a recent analysis by CoStar Group, which also found that just a quarter of of expected rent payments have been received by landlords.

“If the landlords don’t put a pause on their actions, you’re going to see more bankruptcies.”

The question then becomes who will bail out the landlords, and whether their creditors will be just as generous in accepting forbearance.

That said, receipt of a default notice don’t necessarily mean a retailers will get booted anytime soon, especially since there is nobody waiting in line for the real estate: some landlords are merely sending letters to preserve their legal rights while discussing the situation with tenants, and to assure their spot as a prepetition creditor once the default tsunami begins in earnest.

One such company, Simon Property Group Inc., says it’s in active negotiations with merchants at its malls, and has been taking their tenants’ financial status into account. “The bottom line is, we do have a contract and we do expect to get paid,” said CEO David Simon during the company’s May 11 earnings call.

“The landlords do have the legal contract,” said Green Street Advisors senior analyst, Vince Tibone. “However, from a practicality standpoint, a lot of these retailers are on the brink of bankruptcy and simply cannot pay right now.”

However, as noted above, landlords are of course still stuck with their own bills – including bank debts which they’re expected to pay. On Thursday we reported that US malls are in a crisis which started in January as vacancies hit a record high.

And earlier Friday we reported that US retailers have accounted for the bulk of defaults over the past two months, as they were forced to temporarily close stores in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Retailers Neiman Marcus Group, J.Crew and J.C. Penney have already filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this month in the United States. But the real bankruptcy wave was just waiting for the unspoken covid-related grace period to end, and for the default notices to start flying.

The letters began arriving in March and early April, “but the rate of such notices picked up materially in late April and early May,” Stage Stores said. Some landlords began locking the company out “and threatened to evict the debtors and dispose of the in-store inventory.” The company also said that “responding to and managing these default notices and related litigation outside of Chapter 11 would have been a monumentally difficult task.”

“It’s not like there’s a lot of investors out there looking to buy retailers in a Chapter 11,” said Grasier, adding “Landlords and retailers need to really come together and realize that this a shared pain.”

Some landlords get it, according to Tom Mullaney, managing director of restructuring at real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle. Retailers he represents are getting default letters that are understanding and sympathetic; other landlords strike a more combative tone.

What’s more interesting is the action, or lack of it, by the landlords afterward, Mullaney said. “In a lot of cases, the letters that are being sent aren’t being followed up on,” he said – the landlords are simply preserving their legal rights. Maybe they just don’t have the fund to retain lawyers?

Others, meanwhile, are just taking the law into their own hands: some property owners have run out of patience and have locked out Mullaney’s clients. “The environment is getting pretty testy and emotional on both sides of the table,” he said. “The only thing worse than being a retailer right now is being a retail landlord.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2A8biOg Tyler Durden

Questions Over Chinese Influence Emerge After Biden Charitable Organizations Refuse To Disclose Funding

Questions Over Chinese Influence Emerge After Biden Charitable Organizations Refuse To Disclose Funding

Tyler Durden

Sat, 05/23/2020 – 18:00

Following his departure from the Obama administration in 2017, former Vice President Joe Biden established three charitable organizations; the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware, and the Biden Cancer Initiative.

And as the Washington Free Beacon notes, many of Biden’s nonprofits have become landing spots for his former – and potentially future – White House aides.

The Penn Biden Center, which had a “soft opening” in March 2017 and officially opened its doors in February 2018, has served as a national security council-in-waiting for Biden, employing his top White House foreign policy advisers Colin Kahl, Michael Carpenter, and Jeffrey Prescott. –Free Beacon

Yet, when asked about their sources of funding, the Biden entities have been anything but transparent. For example, when the Free Beacon asked a Biden Center spokesman about its funding, they said it was “a question for my colleagues at main university.” Penn spokesman Stephen MacCarthy simply blew off multiple requests for comment, as did the Biden campaign.

The Biden Cancer initiative, which had $2.1 million in assets in 2018 before suspending operations last year, similarly declined to provide a list of donors.

And the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware has also refused requests for transparency by the Free Beacon.

What we do know, however, is that the University of Pennsylvania received a 300% increase in donations since the Biden Center’s soft opening – from $31 million in 2016 to $100 million last year, according to records from the Department of Education. The largest contributor? China – which contributed $61 million in gifts and contracts between March 2017 and the end of last year. In the preceding four years – before the Biden Center opened, Penn took in just $19 million from China.

The donations included a $502,750 “monetary gift” in October 2017 from the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, a Chinese government agency that helps administer the regime’s “Thousand Talents Plan.” Federal prosecutors claim the program is linked to Chinese espionage operations at American universities and have prosecuted academics for hiding their involvement in it. Other contributors included China’s Zhejiang University, the China Merchants Bank, and the China Everbright Group, a state-owned investment group, according to federal records. –Free Beacon

Is this why Joe Biden has been soft on China?

Or was Biden downplaying China due to the $1.5 billion private equity deal his son Hunter inked in 2013, weeks after the two Bidens flew to China on Air Force Two?

Back to the lecture at hand, many of the Chinese contributions to the University of Pennsylvania were listed as coming from “anonymous” donors – which experts have called an “easy tactic” which allows the Chinese to penetrate the US education system.

“Anonymous giving to universities is an easy tactic the Chinese Communist Party can use to further its pernicious influence in American universities,” said Indo-Pacific studies fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, Michael Sobolik.

Between March 2017 and the end of 2019, Penn received $21 million from China spread across 23 anonymous gifts. In the preceding four years, the university had just five donations from China totaling under $5 million.

“Policymakers should investigate this vulnerability further and take necessary steps to close the loophole,” said Sobolik. “If universities and professors are lax in their reporting, the Department of Education, and when appropriate the Department of Justice, should hold them accountable.”

Government watchdog group, The National Legal and Policy Center, filed a complaint with the Department of Education on Wednesday requesting an investigation into Penn’s anonymous Chinese funding, according to the Beacon, which received a copy.

“Joe Biden’s affiliation with the Penn Biden Center further raises concerns of foreign influence not unlike those raised when the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars in donations while Hillary Clinton was running for president,” reads the complaint, which asks the DoE to “refer the matter to the Department of Justice for civil enforcement in federal court, and seek recoupment of all costs to the U.S. government for investigating and enforcing the reporting and disclosure laws of China monetary gifts and contracts.”

The anonymous contributions could also run afoul of federal law that requires universities to disclose the source of any foreign donation or contract over $250,000, according to the NLPC.

“The reporting and disclosure violations of gifts from China to U of Penn and its Penn Biden Center are both numerous and flagrant,” said Paul Kamenar, counsel for NLPC. “The Department of Justice should take swift enforcement action in federal court and recoup all costs getting them to comply with the law.”

The NLPC said in its letter the University of Pennsylvania and the Penn Biden Center were “particularly vulnerable to China government influences due to the large amounts of China donations and contracts” at the school.

Penn’s investment in the Penn Biden Center has been significant: a luxe D.C. office directly across from the U.S. Capitol Building in addition to employment for Biden’s longtime foreign policy aides; highly promoted conferences featuring Biden conversing with foreign leaders; and a total of $900,000 in payments to the former vice president, according to his tax records. –Free Beacon

The website for the Biden Center – which is part of the University of Pennsylvania’s “Penn Global” department – features photos of Biden meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping and other world leaders. It handles the university’s foreign research and outreach programs, which have become increasingly focused on China in recent years, according to the report.

According to the Penn Global website, the university has “over 20 international partnerships with Chinese institutions” and has conducted “over 350 research projects and instructional activities in China.”

In 2015, a $10 million research-matching funding program was launched. The China Research and Engagement fund was designed to fund Penn medical research in China – which has included studies to improve the country’s pork production – as well as aeronautical engineering projects to help China reach its national aviation goals.

You don’t say?

 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3cZ29pV Tyler Durden

Some Tentative Suggestions for Safely Restarting In-Person Teaching at Universities

Universities around the country are pondering the question of whether and how to resume in-person teaching during the upcoming fall 2020 semester. In-person instruction has major advantages over the online version many of us have experienced this spring. But it would be foolish and irresponsible to ignore the risks of spreading Covid-19. I don’t have anything approaching a comprehensive solution to this dilemma. But in this post, I offer some tentative suggestions for how in-person teaching can be restarted, while minimizing risk, while also avoiding creating an unbearable dystopian on-campus environment.

I readily acknowledge two important caveats to these suggestions. First, I am not an epidemiologist, and it is possible that new epidemiological evidence will invalidate some or even all of these ideas. Second, different institutions have different needs; ideas that may work well for some schools may be non-starters for others. My goal here is not to present a comprehensive one-size-fits-all plan that works for every institution, but rather to offer suggestions that a variety of schools could potentially consider. It may turn out that individual schools can adopt some of these ideas, but not others.

The proposals I offer rely on three key ideas. First, the advantages of in-person education are far greater for some types of classes than for others. Second, there are ways to protect faculty and students who face especially high risks without moving to a fully on-line model for the classes they teach or take. Third, discussions of the risk of in-person classes tend to implicitly assume an unrealistic baseline in which students will completely or almost completely avoid risk if they stay off-campus.

I. Exploiting Variation in the Relative Advantages of In-Person Teaching

For reasons I describe here, in-person teaching has important advantages over online instruction. Among other things, in-person teaching makes it easier for faculty to make eye contact and otherwise gauge the reactions of students, and to make sure that the latter are “getting” what the instructor is saying. Being in class also makes it easier for students to stay focused and effectively interact with each other.

I base these conclusions not only on my (admittedly limited) experience this semester, but also on years of prior experience teaching law students and undergraduates at several schools in the United States, and also at universities in Argentina and China. That experience includes a number of online classes and lectures, as well as many in-person ones. Still, these conclusions would be worth little if they were just my idiosyncratic views, based on perhaps unrepresentative experiences. However, recent surveys of students indicate that they too overwhelmingly prefer in-person instruction, and believe it makes it easier for them to learn.

I have not seen a good coronavirus-era survey of faculty members on this subject. But a 2018 survey found that large majorities are skeptical that online instruction can be as effective as the in-person kind. For example, “[e]ighty percent of instructors said digital courses were less effective than face-to-face classes in their ability to reach ‘at-risk’ students, and 65 percent said the same about ‘rigorously engag[ing] students in course material and ability to maintain academic integrity (60 percent).”

But these differences do not affect all courses equally. In particular, for reasons I summarized in my earlier post on this subject, the advantages of in-person courses over online ones are much less significant for small courses with, say, 15 students or fewer, than for large ones. In a small class, it’s far easier for the professor to keep track of all the students online, make eye contact with them, and ensure everyone is focused and able to participate. It’s also easier for students to interact with each other.

Thus, schools can potentially keep smaller classes online, while reserving limited classroom space for bigger ones. This may seem like the exact opposite of what might be useful for maintaining social distance. Obviously it is easier for a small group to do so than big one. But by moving smaller classes online, schools can free up a lot of classroom space that would otherwise be used for them. That in turn can allow them to split up larger courses between two rooms.

The professor can be in one room, along with however many students can fit in there with while maintaining social distancing. The remaining students can be in the second room. They can watch the professor (and other students) on a large TV monitor set up at the front. The professor can in turn see the students in the second room on a monitor set up in her room.

The obvious objection to this setup is that it risks replicating the flaws of online teaching. But initial appearances are deceptive. The professor’s attention in this scenario is divided in only two directions: the room she is in and the one she can see only through the monitor. That’s far easier to manage than having to look at (and scroll through) several dozen different faces on Zoom or Webex. Moreover, the students in both rooms can benefit from easier interaction with their classmates in the same room, which can also make it easier to stay focused. Furthermore, the classrooms  won’t have the distractions that often make it hard to focus on classes at home.

Moreover, students can rotate between the two classrooms, so that those who are in the monitor room on Day 1 of class can be in the professor’s room on Day 2, and vice versa. That enables everyone to get regular in-person time with the professor—including, where needed,—time to talk before or after class, so long as everyone stays the requisite six feet from each other.

Structuring classes in this way can also minimize some of the dystopian constraints imagined by co-blogger Josh Blackman, among others. For example, social distancing in classes will be easier if they can be split between two rooms. Similarly, there will be no need for students to constantly disinfect the spaces they use, or to worry much about “touch points.” With many fewer students on campus at any given time, disinfection can be done by specialized staff between classes (my understanding is that this in fact what many schools already plan to do).  The ability to distance in class and disinfect between classes will also reduce the need for constant tests and temperature checks, though it probably cannot eliminate such tests and checks entirely.

I would add that experts seem to be coming around to the view that touching surfaces actually poses relatively little threat of infection. If this solidifies into a consensus, it would further reduce the touch point/disinfection problem (though again not completely eliminate it).

The distinction between small classes and large ones on which this idea is based is not universally valid. Some small classes may require in-person interaction (e.g.—science classes that require students to do lab experiments). Some large classes may be exceptions to the generalizations made above. But it can be useful as a general rule.

II. Protecting High-Risk Faculty and Students.

By now, everyone who follows these issues knows that Covid 19 poses far greater risks to some categories of people than others. In particular, it is far more dangerous for those over 60 years old,  and people with certain types of preexisting health conditions. This creates a difficult dilemma for universities, since many faculty are over sixty, and there are others on campus (both faculty and students) who have health conditions that make them unusually vulnerable.

The obvious solution for such cases is to confine them to purely online instruction. But there may be other options that preserve some of the benefits of the in-person version. For example, high-risk faculty can potentially teach from home, but the students in their class can be gathered in a single room at the university (or two rooms, if need be), as described above. That makes it easier for the professor to see and keep track of all the students at once. The students, in turn can see the professor on a monitor in their room, and can also interact directly with each other.

I have used this method several times over the years to give talks at schools I could not, for various reasons, visit for an in-person presentation. It does not give me as good a feel for the audience as traditional in-person teaching. But it is vastly preferable to trying to keep track of several dozen different boxes at once on Webex or Zoom. I also find that students in such settings are more attentive and better-focused than when everyone is sitting at home using Zoom.

I do not have a comparably simple solution for high-risk students. If the rest of the class is held in person, they might have to “attend” online, which will necessarily put them at a disadvantage. But if, as seems likely, such cases are relatively rare (as students are generally a young and healthy group), it will be easier to give them the individualized assistance they may need, than if everyone is online, and support resources are spread thin, as they certainly were at many institutions this spring.

III. Mitigating the Dangers Posed by Dorms

The above suggestions address the potential risks posed by teaching in-person classes. But at many schools, dorm life may pose a much greater threat. Students in dorms often live close together, and share bathroom facilities, for example. This is not a major issue for law schools (like the one where I teach) and other graduate programs, as most law students and grad students live off-campus anyway. But it is an obvious problem for undergrads.

I do not have any simple solution for this issue. But one possible suggestion is for schools to give housing vouchers to some of their students, which could take the form of reductions in tuition large enough to cover the difference in cost between paying for a dorm room and paying for off-campus housing. There could perhaps be an extra payment to compensate for the social and other disadvantages some may experience from having to live off-campus. In this way, the dorm population can be reduced enough to bring the risk of dorm life down enough to make it comparable to that posed by “normal” living arrangements.

The voucher/payment system could also help sort students such that those who value dorm life least would be most likely to accept the voucher, while those who like it the most would have an opportunity to continue to live on-campus.

Obviously, this voucher system could be costly for schools, especially those located in areas where rent is high. For some, the cost might be prohibitive. But the cost should be weighed against the likely loss of revenue from students who choose not to attend, select a rival institution, or defer a year because of their strong distaste for online-only instruction.

IV. Using Realistic Baselines for Assessing Risk

Discussions of the potential dangers of in-person teaching often implicitly assume that students would face little or no risk of infection if only we stick to online instruction. In that event, the students would stay home and rarely if ever go out, except when absolutely necessary. Thus, any risk of infection created by in-person teaching would be a net increase in overall risk.

This assumption strikes me as implausible. Young people faced with another entire semester of isolation from campus and their classmates are unlikely to stay home alone indefinitely. Many will understandably begin to go stir-crazy, and otherwise feel starved of social contact. As a result, they are likely to begin to go out and take some risks. Those risks could easily be as great or greater than those they would face on campus, where the system described above can facilitate social distancing, while still enabling considerable interaction.

Those who object to in-person teaching on the grounds that students can’t be trusted to obey social distancing rules on campus should ask themselves how those students are likely to behave if forced to stay away from campus entirely. The latter scenario could easily turn out to be more dangerous than the former.

Some of those students forced to live at home during the semester may end up living together with elderly or otherwise vulnerable relatives. That is particularly likely for lower-income students, who are more likely to live in crowded conditions. If these students begin to take risks and go out, that could put those relatives at risk, as well—potentially far more so than if the students instead live on-campus or in housing funded by the voucher system described above.

It could still turn out that in-person instruction poses much greater risk than keeping students off-campus. But the issue must be assessed using a realistic baseline, geared to the actual likely behavior of young people forced to stay away from campus.

As Josh Blackman points out, the issues addressed here could turn out to be moot if government officials order another strict lockdown during the semester. But it is far from certain that will occur. Although the issue remains contested, there is now considerable evidence that severe lockdowns do not create benefits anywhere near great enough to justify their enormous costs. That—combined with the already perilous state of the economy—might make officials reluctant to reimpose them. Hopefully, also, by the fall, many jurisdictions will have in place less draconian methods of managing outbreaks, such as more effective testing and contact tracing.

Like many other industries, higher education will face difficult choices so long as the Coronavirus continues to be a serious threat. But, given the severe limitations of online teaching, we should at least consider options for resuming in-person instruction, particularly for those courses that can benefit from it the most.

The suggestions I offer will not “solve” all the problems universities face, or even come close to it. But I hope they can at least be useful contributions to the ongoing discussion of these issues.

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Some Tentative Suggestions for Safely Restarting In-Person Teaching at Universities

Universities around the country are pondering the question of whether and how to resume in-person teaching during the upcoming fall 2020 semester. In-person instruction has major advantages over the online version many of us have experienced this spring. But it would be foolish and irresponsible to ignore the risks of spreading Covid-19. I don’t have anything approaching a comprehensive solution to this dilemma. But in this post, I offer some tentative suggestions for how in-person teaching can be restarted, while minimizing risk, while also avoiding creating an unbearable dystopian on-campus environment.

I readily acknowledge two important caveats to these suggestions. First, I am not an epidemiologist, and it is possible that new epidemiological evidence will invalidate some or even all of these ideas. Second, different institutions have different needs; ideas that may work well for some schools may be non-starters for others. My goal here is not to present a comprehensive one-size-fits-all plan that works for every institution, but rather to offer suggestions that a variety of schools could potentially consider. It may turn out that individual schools can adopt some of these ideas, but not others.

The proposals I offer rely on three key ideas. First, the advantages of in-person education are far greater for some types of classes than for others. Second, there are ways to protect faculty and students who face especially high risks without moving to a fully on-line model for the classes they teach or take. Third, discussions of the risk of in-person classes tend to implicitly assume an unrealistic baseline in which students will completely or almost completely avoid risk if they stay off-campus.

I. Exploiting Variation in the Relative Advantages of In-Person Teaching

For reasons I describe here, in-person teaching has important advantages over online instruction. Among other things, in-person teaching makes it easier for faculty to make eye contact and otherwise gauge the reactions of students, and to make sure that the latter are “getting” what the instructor is saying. Being in class also makes it easier for students to stay focused and effectively interact with each other.

I base these conclusions not only on my (admittedly limited) experience this semester, but also on years of prior experience teaching law students and undergraduates at several schools in the United States, and also at universities in Argentina and China. That experience includes a number of online classes and lectures, as well as many in-person ones. Still, these conclusions would be worth little if they were just my idiosyncratic views, based on perhaps unrepresentative experiences. However, recent surveys of students indicate that they too overwhelmingly prefer in-person instruction, and believe it makes it easier for them to learn.

I have not seen a good coronavirus-era survey of faculty members on this subject. But a 2018 survey found that large majorities are skeptical that online instruction can be as effective as the in-person kind. For example, “[e]ighty percent of instructors said digital courses were less effective than face-to-face classes in their ability to reach ‘at-risk’ students, and 65 percent said the same about ‘rigorously engag[ing] students in course material and ability to maintain academic integrity (60 percent).”

But these differences do not affect all courses equally. In particular, for reasons I summarized in my earlier post on this subject, the advantages of in-person courses over online ones are much less significant for small courses with, say, 15 students or fewer, than for large ones. In a small class, it’s far easier for the professor to keep track of all the students online, make eye contact with them, and ensure everyone is focused and able to participate. It’s also easier for students to interact with each other.

Thus, schools can potentially keep smaller classes online, while reserving limited classroom space for bigger ones. This may seem like the exact opposite of what might be useful for maintaining social distance. Obviously it is easier for a small group to do so than big one. But by moving smaller classes online, schools can free up a lot of classroom space that would otherwise be used for them. That in turn can allow them to split up larger courses between two rooms.

The professor can be in one room, along with however many students can fit in there with while maintaining social distancing. The remaining students can be in the second room. They can watch the professor (and other students) on a large TV monitor set up at the front. The professor can in turn see the students in the second room on a monitor set up in her room.

The obvious objection to this setup is that it risks replicating the flaws of online teaching. But initial appearances are deceptive. The professor’s attention in this scenario is divided in only two directions: the room she is in and the one she can see only through the monitor. That’s far easier to manage than having to look at (and scroll through) several dozen different faces on Zoom or Webex. Moreover, the students in both rooms can benefit from easier interaction with their classmates in the same room, which can also make it easier to stay focused. Furthermore, the classrooms  won’t have the distractions that often make it hard to focus on classes at home.

Moreover, students can rotate between the two classrooms, so that those who are in the monitor room on Day 1 of class can be in the professor’s room on Day 2, and vice versa. That enables everyone to get regular in-person time with the professor—including, where needed,—time to talk before or after class, so long as everyone stays the requisite six feet from each other.

Structuring classes in this way can also minimize some of the dystopian constraints imagined by co-blogger Josh Blackman, among others. For example, social distancing in classes will be easier if they can be split between two rooms. Similarly, there will be no need for students to constantly disinfect the spaces they use, or to worry much about “touch points.” With many fewer students on campus at any given time, disinfection can be done by specialized staff between classes (my understanding is that this in fact what many schools already plan to do).  The ability to distance in class and disinfect between classes will also reduce the need for constant tests and temperature checks, though it probably cannot eliminate such tests and checks entirely.

I would add that experts seem to be coming around to the view that touching surfaces actually poses relatively little threat of infection. If this solidifies into a consensus, it would further reduce the touch point/disinfection problem (though again not completely eliminate it).

The distinction between small classes and large ones on which this idea is based is not universally valid. Some small classes may require in-person interaction (e.g.—science classes that require students to do lab experiments). Some large classes may be exceptions to the generalizations made above. But it can be useful as a general rule.

II. Protecting High-Risk Faculty and Students.

By now, everyone who follows these issues knows that Covid 19 poses far greater risks to some categories of people than others. In particular, it is far more dangerous for those over 60 years old,  and people with certain types of preexisting health conditions. This creates a difficult dilemma for universities, since many faculty are over sixty, and there are others on campus (both faculty and students) who have health conditions that make them unusually vulnerable.

The obvious solution for such cases is to confine them to purely online instruction. But there may be other options that preserve some of the benefits of the in-person version. For example, high-risk faculty can potentially teach from home, but the students in their class can be gathered in a single room at the university (or two rooms, if need be), as described above. That makes it easier for the professor to see and keep track of all the students at once. The students, in turn can see the professor on a monitor in their room, and can also interact directly with each other.

I have used this method several times over the years to give talks at schools I could not, for various reasons, visit for an in-person presentation. It does not give me as good a feel for the audience as traditional in-person teaching. But it is vastly preferable to trying to keep track of several dozen different boxes at once on Webex or Zoom. I also find that students in such settings are more attentive and better-focused than when everyone is sitting at home using Zoom.

I do not have a comparably simple solution for high-risk students. If the rest of the class is held in person, they might have to “attend” online, which will necessarily put them at a disadvantage. But if, as seems likely, such cases are relatively rare (as students are generally a young and healthy group), it will be easier to give them the individualized assistance they may need, than if everyone is online, and support resources are spread thin, as they certainly were at many institutions this spring.

III. Mitigating the Dangers Posed by Dorms

The above suggestions address the potential risks posed by teaching in-person classes. But at many schools, dorm life may pose a much greater threat. Students in dorms often live close together, and share bathroom facilities, for example. This is not a major issue for law schools (like the one where I teach) and other graduate programs, as most law students and grad students live off-campus anyway. But it is an obvious problem for undergrads.

I do not have any simple solution for this issue. But one possible suggestion is for schools to give housing vouchers to some of their students, which could take the form of reductions in tuition large enough to cover the difference in cost between paying for a dorm room and paying for off-campus housing. There could perhaps be an extra payment to compensate for the social and other disadvantages some may experience from having to live off-campus. In this way, the dorm population can be reduced enough to bring the risk of dorm life down enough to make it comparable to that posed by “normal” living arrangements.

The voucher/payment system could also help sort students such that those who value dorm life least would be most likely to accept the voucher, while those who like it the most would have an opportunity to continue to live on-campus.

Obviously, this voucher system could be costly for schools, especially those located in areas where rent is high. For some, the cost might be prohibitive. But the cost should be weighed against the likely loss of revenue from students who choose not to attend, select a rival institution, or defer a year because of their strong distaste for online-only instruction.

IV. Using Realistic Baselines for Assessing Risk

Discussions of the potential dangers of in-person teaching often implicitly assume that students would face little or no risk of infection if only we stick to online instruction. In that event, the students would stay home and rarely if ever go out, except when absolutely necessary. Thus, any risk of infection created by in-person teaching would be a net increase in overall risk.

This assumption strikes me as implausible. Young people faced with another entire semester of isolation from campus and their classmates are unlikely to stay home alone indefinitely. Many will understandably begin to go stir-crazy, and otherwise feel starved of social contact. As a result, they are likely to begin to go out and take some risks. Those risks could easily be as great or greater than those they would face on campus, where the system described above can facilitate social distancing, while still enabling considerable interaction.

Those who object to in-person teaching on the grounds that students can’t be trusted to obey social distancing rules on campus should ask themselves how those students are likely to behave if forced to stay away from campus entirely. The latter scenario could easily turn out to be more dangerous than the former.

Some of those students forced to live at home during the semester may end up living together with elderly or otherwise vulnerable relatives. That is particularly likely for lower-income students, who are more likely to live in crowded conditions. If these students begin to take risks and go out, that could put those relatives at risk, as well—potentially far more so than if the students instead live on-campus or in housing funded by the voucher system described above.

It could still turn out that in-person instruction poses much greater risk than keeping students off-campus. But the issue must be assessed using a realistic baseline, geared to the actual likely behavior of young people forced to stay away from campus.

As Josh Blackman points out, the issues addressed here could turn out to be moot if government officials order another strict lockdown during the semester. But it is far from certain that will occur. Although the issue remains contested, there is now considerable evidence that severe lockdowns do not create benefits anywhere near great enough to justify their enormous costs. That—combined with the already perilous state of the economy—might make officials reluctant to reimpose them. Hopefully, also, by the fall, many jurisdictions will have in place less draconian methods of managing outbreaks, such as more effective testing and contact tracing.

Like many other industries, higher education will face difficult choices so long as the Coronavirus continues to be a serious threat. But, given the severe limitations of online teaching, we should at least consider options for resuming in-person instruction, particularly for those courses that can benefit from it the most.

The suggestions I offer will not “solve” all the problems universities face, or even come close to it. But I hope they can at least be useful contributions to the ongoing discussion of these issues.

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Silicon Valley Tech Giants Caught Providing Services To Blacklisted Chinese Security Firms

Silicon Valley Tech Giants Caught Providing Services To Blacklisted Chinese Security Firms

Tyler Durden

Sat, 05/23/2020 – 17:30

Remember when ex-Google Chairman Eric Schmidt appeared on CNBC earlier this month for an interview with Andrew Ross “the Sork” Sorkin – an interview that swiftly devolved in Schmidt chiding the Trump Administration for its impudence while defending the longstanding ties between the Chinese Communist Party leadership and Silicon Valley’s elite and warning about the purportedly extraordinarily high costs of ‘economic decoupling’.

Because the downside about decoupling, Schmidt said, is that if China turns elsewhere for ag products and other products, “they’re not coming back” (this as China continues the charade of upholding the trade deal because President Xi needs an excuse to buy US agricultural products without looking weak)

The former Google chairman’s comments on China begin around the 13-minute mark.

In a report that reads like an Intel community plant, largely since it dropped just hours after the US announced plans to add 30+ Chinese firms to a blacklist over their involvement with China’s state security apparatus, CNBC claimed early Saturday morning that Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon have all been caught providing tech services to several companies that were added to a US blacklist last year by President Trump over allegations that they helped Beijing build the security apparatus use to imprison 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang.

Top10VPN, a site that reviews virtual private network (VPN) services and researches topics on privacy, said in a report that it had identified U.S. technology giants that provide “essential web services that power these companies’ websites.”

CNBC reached out to the U.S. firms named in the report as providing such services to the blacklisted Chinese surveillance companies. None were immediately available for comment.

In October, some of China’s most valuable surveillance artificial intelligence firms were put on the U.S. Entity List, a move designed to restrict their access to American technology. That is the same blacklist that Huawei sits on.

Washington alleged that “these entities have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups” in China’s Xinjiang region.

The territory has made headlines for its detention and “re-education” camps that reportedly hold an estimated 1.5 million Muslims, many of them for violating what Amnesty International describes as a “highly restrictive and discriminatory” law that China says is designed to combat extremism.

Even more bizarre, the US companies provided mostly basic services like website and email hosting, raising questions about why these Chinese firms even needed these American partners in the first place.

According to Top10VPN, some of the services provided by U.S. tech firms include hosting the surveillance firms’ website and emails to authentication methods.

The head of research at the cybersecurity firm that leaked the report to CNBC said that by providing these “essential” services, the US firms helped their Chinese customers develop “highly invasive surveillance products”…kind of like most free-to-use products released by Google and Facebook?

“Through providing essential web services to these controversial companies, U.S. firms are playing a part in the proliferation of highly invasive surveillance products that have the potential to undermine human rights around the world,” Simon Migliano, head of research at Top10VPN, said in the report.

Aside from the big names mentioned above, a number of other smaller US firms were named. Top10VPN said it compiled its report via a combination of techniques including analyzing traffic between certain sites for these Chinese companies.

Top10VPN said it identified that U.S. firms were involved using a combination of public tools, examining source code of websites and analyzing traffic to those sites.

The company alleged that Amazon and Google are providing web services for Dahua Technology and Hikvision, two Chinese blacklisted companies. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s services are reportedly being used by SenseTime and Megvii, two of China’s most valuable artificial intelligence start-ups.

A number of other U.S. technology companies were named, including website authentication and encryption companies Digicert, Lets Encrypt, Entrust and GeoTrust. Domain name hosting firm GoDaddy was on the list as well as cybersecurity company Symantec, which is now known as NortonLifeLock. Stackpath, which works on the delivery of internet content, was also named.

Twitter and Facebook were also named as providing content delivery network services to Hikvision.

CNBC has reached out to all the American firms that were named to request for comment on the report. Symantec declined to comment, and CNBC did not hear back from the rest of the companies.

China’s surveillance firms have been caught up in the tensions between the world’s two largest economies. The administration of President Donald Trump has carried out a campaign against Chinese firms, with Huawei being the most high profile target, that aims to cut off their access to American technology.

But Top10VPN’s Migliano claimed the company’s report shows a relationship still remains between the U.S. and China’s firms.

“Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to decouple the American and Chinese technology sectors, the continued presence of American companies in more discreet settings shows that cooperation between the two remains,” Migliano said.

This is just one more thing to keep in mind next time you see an executive from a big tech firm criticizing President Trump while defending China and the WHO.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/36q9j3Z Tyler Durden