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Elementary School Kids Taught That “Objectivity” & “Perfectionism” Are Racist Traits Of “White Supremacy”

Elementary School Kids Taught That “Objectivity” & “Perfectionism” Are Racist Traits Of “White Supremacy”

Tyler Durden

Thu, 10/08/2020 – 10:49

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Children at an elementary school in Virginia are being taught that traits such as “objectivity” and “perfectionism” are ‘racist’ characteristics of “white supremacy.”

Yes, really.

Author James Lindsay posted a screenshot of the lesson outline, which is apparently taken from a 2001 Dismantling Racism Workbook by authors Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones and is being taught to kids aged 6-11 at the Belvedere Elementary School in Virginia.

The “15 characteristics of white supremacy” include “perfectionism,” a “sense of urgency,” “individualism,” and “objectivity.”

By discouraging positive concepts such as these by associating them with white supremacy, teachers are actually harming the chances of non-white children from progressing in school.

In other words, far from being anti-racist, the teachings are actually racist.

“Ironically, this type of “anti-racism” indoctrination is alarmingly racist & ignorant,” commented Rita Panahi.

Other respondents pointed out that such teaching is hallmark of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is still being taught in U.S. schools despite being banned after an executive order by President Trump.

Others noted that such characteristics were not solely revered in white societies, and that people from other cultures “would be highly offended by hearing them described as “white supremacy.”

*  *  *

In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.

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Orthodox Jews Say They’re Being Targeted by New NYC Lockdowns

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A group of Orthodox Jewish men gathered Tuesday evening in Brooklyn, burning masks to protest the newest iteration of New York’s pandemic lockdown. Their anger is reasonable, because the newest lockdown—which disproportionately affects the city’s Jewish community and explicitly targets religious gatherings—is not. It is deeply stupid and unfair, exactly the sort of easily avoidable government overreach that makes even well-intended people doing their best to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 understandably skeptical of public health directives.

At issue is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “Cluster Action Initiative,” implemented at the request of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and announced several hours before the fire. The program identifies infection clusters—areas with positive test rates above 3 percent for seven consecutive days—and imposes a graduated system of restrictions until the rate drops.

In the strictest rule set, the “red zone,” schools along with businesses deemed nonessential are closed. In-person dining is banned. Houses of worship are limited to gatherings of 25 percent capacity or 10 people, whichever is smaller, with $15,000 fines for violations. In fact, as Cuomo said Tuesday in a line sure to appear in forthcoming First Amendment litigation, religious gatherings are the main target: “The new rules are most impactful on houses of worship,” he declared. “This virus is not coming from nonessential business.” (Then why, one wonders, are those businesses required to close?)

From there Cuomo pivoted to claiming the support of New York City’s Orthodox Jewish leaders, because in some of these neighborhoods, “houses of worship” basically means synagogues, and “private schools” means Hebrew schools and yeshivas. The lockdown arrived in the middle of Sukkot, a week-long holiday celebrated, as holidays generally are, with gatherings—including gatherings where a minimum of 11 people are needed to guarantee a required quorum.

Cuomo, who is not himself Jewish, tried to buttress his argument by citing Jewish teaching. “The Torah speaks about how certain religious obligations can be excused if you are going to save a life….That’s what this is,” he said. “I felt very good about my conversation with the Orthodox community.”

Suffice it to say the Orthodox community does not feel equally good. A group of rabbis said their conversation with the governor was “a one-way monologue” in which Cuomo never mentioned his strict assembly rule. A statement from four Jewish city council members slammed the “draconian” plan as “a scientifically and constitutionally questionable shutdown” enacted after a “duplicitous bait-and-switch.” Per their account, the governor obtained community buy-in by promising synagogues could operate at 50 percent capacity with no numerical cap. For a synagogue large enough to seat hundreds or thousands, that’s a guideline very far from the 10-person limit ultimately mandated. (And if 25 percent capacity is safe in a small building, it’s surely safe in a large building too.)

On its surface, the 3 percent positive rate is a religiously neutral condition. The reason Jewish communities are more likely to be affected, Cuomo and de Blasio can argue, is simply that they have a higher transmission rate, due to lax mask use and social distancing habits. That may be true, but neither the math nor the politics of this situation is that simple.

New York City’s positive rate peaked at nearly 70 percent in early April, at which point fewer than 8,000 people were tested per day. Now the city’s daily testing average is over 30,000, and the city-wide positive rate is under 2 percent, as it has been for months, though the city has moved into the fourth phase of its reopening plan (which allows religious gatherings at 50 percent capacity outside cluster neighborhoods). The clusters have positive rates between 3 and 7 percent. That’s worse than the rest of the city, but still dramatically better than the spring surge, when lockdown was implemented to “flatten the curve” and prevent hospital overload. The city’s COVID-19 hospitalizations hit 12,000 in the spring; now the total is under 400, clusters included. There is no comparable overload risk.

Moreover, it’s not as if these neighborhoods are impermeably isolated from the rest of the city. Residents work, shop, study, and worship outside lockdown boundaries. “Nonessential” stores just past the edge of the red zones will do a lively (perhaps crowded!) business while their competitors a few blocks away are compelled to close.

But education and worship can’t work around Cuomo’s edict so easily. And these rules come after months of discord. There was de Blasio’s unfortunate April tweet singling out “the Jewish community” for holding large gatherings, and his dismissal of a question from a reporter for an ultra-Orthodox outlet about why large protests were permitted while small religious gatherings weren’t. Just this Monday, Cuomo’s office used a 14-year-old photo of a rabbi’s packed funeral to illustrate the governor’s remarks about COVID-19. Even before the cluster plan, the “community [felt] they’re being singled out and there’s some element of anti-Semitism,” Jewish Voice publisher David Ben Hooren said Monday. “Tensions are running high.”

Those tensions are bad for public health. They may make people less likely to get tested if they have relatively mild symptoms. The Forward reports that this may already be happening: Much as the drug war deters people from seeking addiction treatment for fear of legal consequences, people are scared their positive test results will give the government a reason to shut down their schools and houses of worship.

A policy that amounts to punishing positive tests will produce fewer positives, but not necessarily fewer infections. It might well make the pandemic worse, as untested, infected people go about their normal business and public anger over unreasonable restrictions grows into public rejection of practices, such as mask use, that actually help. That face mask fire may be a portent of unintended consequences to come.

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Mnuchin Reportedly Floated Idea Of Restarting Stimulus Talks

Mnuchin Reportedly Floated Idea Of Restarting Stimulus Talks

Tyler Durden

Thu, 10/08/2020 – 10:37

With US stocks on yet another tear Thursday morning as the market has become enamored with the misperception that no stimulus now means 2x the stimulus after the election (an election the outcome of which is still very much uncertain), Politico reports that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has floated the idea of restarting stimulus talks with Nancy Pelosi, despite the growing number of obstacles to getting a deal done.

Mnuchin reportedly told Pelosi that he would need to convince President Trump first.

In other news, two GOP senators have released a statement arguing against the targeted bailouts for airlines and other industries that are being discussed as an alternative to an omnibus stimulus bill sought by the Dems.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3nxpO6s Tyler Durden

Don’t ignore the world world we’re living in. Plan for it.

One of the unique benefits of living in Puerto Rico is that it’s usually not too difficult to talk people into coming down here.

It must be something about the beaches and warm, sunny weather… because whenever there’s a face-to-face meeting that needs to take place, people often tell me, “I’ll come down and see you in Puerto Rico.”

It suits me just fine. And that’s why one of my attorneys flew down here yesterday morning.

He’s one of my key advisors, and we usually do a strategy session every six months or so; he’ll fly down here and we’ll sit together for a few days thinking about the world and planning for the future.

I command a fairly extensive portfolio of thriving private companies. So in this session we’ve been talking a lot about what the business environment for those companies could look like over the next few years, including policy and regulatory changes, tax changes, etc.

It’s definitely a strange time to be in business. And we expect it could become a LOT more bizarre.

Politicians want to close businesses down to save people from a virus… but then give everyone free money to remain open.

Then, when the businesses that survive finally do open, peaceful protesters come to torch your place to the ground if you don’t bend the knee and say the right words.

Free speech is definitely an endangered species; even aside from peaceful protesters and the Twitter mob (who have been ruthless in getting innocent people fired or boycotting productive businesses), we now have to contend with tech companies as well.

If you dare utter a word that might possibly suggest a different view than the morally bankrupt World Health Organization, then poof, Google and Facebook will erase any trace of your heresy, no matter how substantial its scientific merit.

Meanwhile, state governments across the Land of the Free continue passing laws requiring private companies to put people on their boards who conform to rigid criteria regarding gender, race, and sexual orientation.

This is violation of one of the basic principles of capitalism: private property rights. It’s the shareholders, i.e. the people who actually own the business, who are supposed be able to choose their company directors.

It’s incredibly naive and insulting to force someone to choose a director based on the color of that person’s skin, or what’s swinging between their legs.

Yet we’re rapidly reaching a point where you’re not going to be able to do business anymore unless you have a disabled non-binary pansexual Native American who identifies as a seedless watermelon on the Board of your own company.

We can also expect taxes to go up. And I’m not only talking about federal or national taxes. Covid has also bankrupted many states, cities, and provinces around the world. So local taxes are going to go through the roof.

The city council of Nashville, Tennessee, for example, recently approved a ‘Covid’ property tax increase of 34%!

And the Soviet Socialist Republic of California has proposed new wealth taxes, increased income taxes, and even America’s first-ever EXIT TAX for feudal tax serfs who want to leave the state.

People who just want to stay home, play victim, and collect free money from the government, have never had it so good.

But other people who actually want to live their lives and be productive human beings are facing a relentless onslaught of rage and oppression.

Think about it– completely innocent people are watching their businesses burn to the ground thanks to peaceful protesters, or they’re being tasered or pepper sprayed simply for sitting by themselves without wearing a mask.

And this isn’t going away anytime soon.

Regardless of the election outcome, this trend is gaining momentum.

Remember back in 2012 when Barack Obama told business owners, “You didn’t build that,” referring to their businesses?

People freaked out and said, “This guy is a Communist!”

I’m sure many of us long for those days when that was the most shocking thing to come out of a politician’s mouth.

Then Comrade Bernie stormed the country in 2016. It was unthinkable– a card-carrying socialist became a leading Presidential contender in the Land of the Free. But at least Bernie’s ideas were still considered radical back then.

Today it’s all mainstream. Massive tax increases, free everything, Green New Whatever You Want. These are no longer considered radical ideas.

(As my lawyer jokes, the whole world has been doing that old dance, “to the left, to the left, to the left, to the left. . .”)

None of this even scratches the surface of the structural economic problems; it’s become almost pointless to comment on the national debt (which just passed $27 TRILLION a few days ago, a whopping 138% of GDP.)

But they just can’t stop spending. There’s no bill that’s too expensive for Congress. And no amount of money that the Federal Reserve shouldn’t print.

The Fed actually said earlier this week that there would be “tragic” consequences if the government didn’t keep spending trillions of dollars, and suggested there was minimal risk of the Fed printing too much money.

Print money, go into debt, and it’s all consequence-free!

That’s pretty much where we are today.

Personally I remain optimistic about the future; I truly believe that, regardless of what happens in the world, our species will continue to rise… and there will always be opportunities to propser and thrive.

But in light of such obvious trends, it seems sensible to take on those opportunities from a position of strength.

That’s what a Plan B is all about. And as you can see, I do it too.

I take these planning sessions very seriously, and I think this is a remarkably good practice: hold a periodic, formal session at least once a year with 1-3 experienced, knowledgeable people that you really trust.

Look at where your life is going, assess the risks and opportunities, and make a deliberate plan for your safety, success, and prosperity.

Source

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Harris Leans Into Prosecutor Past at Vice Presidential Debate

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Separated by sheets of plexiglass, the 2020 vice presidential nominees engaged in a debate that otherwise felt normal—so normal that it was disorienting. For a moment, we all remembered what politics was like in the pre-Trump era. There was much less shouting, that’s for sure. The whole tone was a lot more dignified, just dripping with civility and old-school talking points. Most people seem to think that’s a good thing (though I’m not entirely convinced).

Vice President Mike Pence did the best he could with what he had to work with, giving well-worn Trumpian spin a calm and reassuring facade while hearkening back to an earlier Republican era. Pence is AM talk radio, the Bush years, and think-tank staff in bowties, not memes and Twitter trends and cultural grievances. He’s soothing—and it scares me, in the same way that Sen. Kamala Harris scares me.

Both Harris and Pence serve as a reminder of how potent bad ideas and policy can be when they come in a competent and relatively uncontroversial package. For all of Pence’s dignity and calm, he still was up there defending the actions of President Donald Trump and promising more of the same. Meanwhile, Harris leaned into the tough-but-progressive-on-crime look that she has spent her career cultivating—and enacting in ways not noticeably different from plain old tough-on-crime policies.

Last night, Harris again tried to have it both ways on criminal justice. She promised to decriminalize marijuana and made other nods to policing and prison reforms. But at the same time, she talked up her (highly destructive) past in law enforcement.

“I think Joe asked me to serve with him because I have a career that included being elected the first woman district attorney of San Francisco, where I created models of innovation for law enforcement, in terms of reform of the criminal justice system,” she said near the beginning, adding that she was the first “black woman to be elected attorney general of the state of California, where I ran the second largest department of justice in the United States.”

Harris promised that a Biden-Harris administration would offer more of the same.

“Having served as the attorney general of the state of California, the work that I did is a model of what our nation needs to do and we will be able to do under a Joe Biden presidency,” said Harris.

As attorney general, Harris tried to keep people locked up in overcrowded prisons after a court said they should be released, fought against a ruling that the state’s death penalty was unconstitutional, opposed making police wear body cameras statewide, refused to endorse sentencing reform measures, argued for the destruction of the online-speech-protecting law known as Section 230, refused to intervene in a case where myriad cops and prosecutors in her old district were accused of child exploitation, posed for photo ops with the Border Patrol, chased publicity with unconstitutional prosecutions, and made it a major initiative to punish parents whose kids missed school.

Harris bragged twice last night about having “prosecuted the big banks for taking advantage of America’s homeowners.” But the money she won in that case didn’t go to help struggling homeowners. Instead, the settlement money was used to pay off state debt.

Pence himself tried to ding Harris on criminal justice reform, bringing up her walking out on a vote on a GOP-backed bill and saying: “When you were DA in San Francisco, when you left office, African-Americans were 19 times more likely to be prosecuted for minor drug offenses than whites and Hispanics. When you were attorney general of California, you increased the disproportionate incarceration of blacks in California.”

But Pence just spent his previous answer denying that systemic racism exists, and he is part of an administration that’s been horrible on crime in its own ways. Federal law enforcement just spent the summer snatching protesters off the streets and generally making an authoritarian spectacle of itself. Pence is in no place to be pointing fingers about inhumane or overly punitive responses.

You can watch the debate here. A transcript is here. The New York Times has a play-by-play here. And here’s more VP debate coverage from Reason:

FREE MARKETS

In a decade-old case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, the tech company Oracle is suing Google for alleged copyright infringement. Oracle claims “that Google infringed on copyrights related to using roughly 11,000 lines of code from the Java programming platform to develop Android,” explains The Washington Post.

Oracle, which acquired Java in 2010 when it bought Sun Microsystems, has sought $9 billion in damages, arguing that Google used the code without its permission.

Google argued that weaving that code into Android was protected under the “fair use” doctrine….The case, which has broad ramifications for the software industry, has bounced around various courts over the years. In 2016, jurors ruled Google’s use of the Java code was permitted as fair use under federal copyright law. Two years later, a federal appeals court overturned that, ruling that there is “nothing fair about taking a copyrighted work verbatim and using it for the same purpose and function as the original in a competing platform.”

FREE MINDS

“Four weeks before Election Day, third-party presidential candidates continue to lag in the polls compared to the spike year of 2016, when 5.7 percent of the electorate went nontraditional for POTUS,” notes Reason‘s Matt Welch.

But while “Libertarian Jo Jorgensen sits at just 2 percent, while the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins is at a temporarily high 1.4 percent that will revert closer to 1 once the next poll rolls over,” they could still “be labeled ‘spoilers’ depending on how this high-intensity election plays out,” Welch writes.

QUICK HITS

• “Poisons, plots and psychic powers—why is the president’s health such fertile ground for the paranoid imagination?” Reason‘s Jesse Walker explores the long history of presidential assassination theories at The New York Times.

• Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn are revolting against Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s lockdown rules.

• The Trump administration’s COVID-19 outbreak has infected “34 White House staffers and other contacts,” according to a government memo obtained by ABC News.

• Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop who kneeled on George Floyd’s neck and has been charged with his murder, was released from jail yesterday on $1 million bail.

• A good reminder that the crusade against the tech industry is partly rooted in traditional media companies resenting its effect on their profits.

• THC-spiked PBR seltzer is coming to California.

• A new study finds “that maternal age at last birth is positively associated with telomere length, meaning that women who delivered their last child later in life were likely to have longer telomeres, a biomarker of long-term health and longevity.”

• Black Friday is 10 days this year.

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FBI Stonewalls Over Hunter Biden; Refuses To Provide Congress Answers On Burisma, China

FBI Stonewalls Over Hunter Biden; Refuses To Provide Congress Answers On Burisma, China

Tyler Durden

Thu, 10/08/2020 – 10:19

The FBI is stonewalling a congressional inquiry into Hunter Biden’s overseas business activity described in a Senate report last month which chronicles the Biden family’s international conflicts of interest, as well as potentially criminal business activity, according to The Federalist.

The Senate report detailed Hunter’s financial dealings with Ukrainian, Chinese and Russian businesses created potential “criminal financial, counterintelligence and extortion concerns,” and alarmed US officials who perceived an ethical conflict of interest and flagged potential crimes ranging from sex trafficking to bribery.

Last week, in response to the report, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan (R) – the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, demanded answers from the FBI over what actions it’s taken, if any, regarding 2015 reports from the DOJ, that the owner of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma paid a $7 million bribe to government officials to shut down an investigation while Hunter sat on its board.

“The report by Chairman Johnson and Chairman Grassley shows that the FBI has been aware of some alleged misconduct for years,” Jordan wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Jordan also highlighted concerns raised within the Obama State Department regarding Biden’s lucrative board position with Burisma. He raked in upwards of $50,000 a month despite his lack of experience while his father, Joe Biden, served as the administration’s “public face” of White House policy towards the Eastern European ally.

“The report detailed widespread concern within the Obama-Biden Administration about Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian company founded by Mykola Zlochevsky,” Jordan wrote. “The Chairmen noted that they had asked the FBI about its actions in response to these allegations, but have received no answer from you.” –The Federalist

The FBI, meanwhile, is stonewalling. In response to Jordan’s letter demanding answers obtained by The Federalist, the agency has refused to acknowledge any investigation of Hunter Biden’s overseas conduct.

“Consistent with longstanding Department of Justice and FBI policy and practice, however, the FBI can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing investigation or persons or entities under investigation,” reads the letter, adding that Sens. Jordan and Grassley, the authors of the Senate report, received the same non-answer.

And as The Federalist‘s Triastan Justice notes, the FBI was happy to weigh in on the Russiagate scandal when former Director James Comey confirmed that President Trump was under investigation for suspected ties to the Kremlin – a smear campaign which Hillary Clinton allegedly approved and US intelligence agencies willingly participated in.

What’s more, CIA Director Gina Haspel has reportedly been stonewalling as well – as senior US intelligence tell The Federalist that she’s deliberately blocking the release of central Russiagate documents in the hope that Trump loses the November election.

In a Wednesday letter, Johnson and Grassley demanded that Haspel comply with their request for records following a two-month delay.

“The American people have a right to know the full extent of official action taken by federal officials during the 2016 campaign, the presidential transition, and into the Trump administration,” wrote the Senators. “The information that has already been made public reveals what might be the most outrageous abuse of power in U.S. history against a presidential candidate and sitting president. Unfortunately, many of the puzzle pieces remain hidden, and some of that information rests within your agency.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30Ni7zp Tyler Durden

Harris Leans Into Prosecutor Past at Vice Presidential Debate

spnphotosten049746

Separated by sheets of plexiglass, the 2020 vice presidential nominees engaged in a debate that otherwise felt normal—so normal that it was disorienting. For a moment, we all remembered what politics was like in the pre-Trump era. There was much less shouting, that’s for sure. The whole tone was a lot more dignified, just dripping with civility and old-school talking points. Most people seem to think that’s a good thing (though I’m not entirely convinced).

Vice President Mike Pence did the best he could with what he had to work with, giving well-worn Trumpian spin a calm and reassuring facade while hearkening back to an earlier Republican era. Pence is AM talk radio, the Bush years, and think-tank staff in bowties, not memes and Twitter trends and cultural grievances. He’s soothing—and it scares me, in the same way that Sen. Kamala Harris scares me.

Both Harris and Pence serve as a reminder of how potent bad ideas and policy can be when they come in a competent and relatively uncontroversial package. For all of Pence’s dignity and calm, he still was up there defending the actions of President Donald Trump and promising more of the same. Meanwhile, Harris leaned into the tough-but-progressive-on-crime look that she has spent her career cultivating—and enacting in ways not noticeably different from plain old tough-on-crime policies.

Last night, Harris again tried to have it both ways on criminal justice. She promised to decriminalize marijuana and made other nods to policing and prison reforms. But at the same time, she talked up her (highly destructive) past in law enforcement.

“I think Joe asked me to serve with him because I have a career that included being elected the first woman district attorney of San Francisco, where I created models of innovation for law enforcement, in terms of reform of the criminal justice system,” she said near the beginning, adding that she was the first “black woman to be elected attorney general of the state of California, where I ran the second largest department of justice in the United States.”

Harris promised that a Biden-Harris administration would offer more of the same.

“Having served as the attorney general of the state of California, the work that I did is a model of what our nation needs to do and we will be able to do under a Joe Biden presidency,” said Harris.

As attorney general, Harris tried to keep people locked up in overcrowded prisons after a court said they should be released, fought against a ruling that the state’s death penalty was unconstitutional, opposed making police wear body cameras statewide, refused to endorse sentencing reform measures, argued for the destruction of the online-speech-protecting law known as Section 230, refused to intervene in a case where myriad cops and prosecutors in her old district were accused of child exploitation, posed for photo ops with the Border Patrol, chased publicity with unconstitutional prosecutions, and made it a major initiative to punish parents whose kids missed school.

Harris bragged twice last night about having “prosecuted the big banks for taking advantage of America’s homeowners.” But the money she won in that case didn’t go to help struggling homeowners. Instead, the settlement money was used to pay off state debt.

Pence himself tried to ding Harris on criminal justice reform, bringing up her walking out on a vote on a GOP-backed bill and saying: “When you were DA in San Francisco, when you left office, African-Americans were 19 times more likely to be prosecuted for minor drug offenses than whites and Hispanics. When you were attorney general of California, you increased the disproportionate incarceration of blacks in California.”

But Pence just spent his previous answer denying that systemic racism exists, and he is part of an administration that’s been horrible on crime in its own ways. Federal law enforcement just spent the summer snatching protesters off the streets and generally making an authoritarian spectacle of itself. Pence is in no place to be pointing fingers about inhumane or overly punitive responses.

You can watch the debate here. A transcript is here. The New York Times has a play-by-play here. And here’s more VP debate coverage from Reason:

FREE MARKETS

In a decade-old case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, the tech company Oracle is suing Google for alleged copyright infringement. Oracle claims “that Google infringed on copyrights related to using roughly 11,000 lines of code from the Java programming platform to develop Android,” explains The Washington Post.

Oracle, which acquired Java in 2010 when it bought Sun Microsystems, has sought $9 billion in damages, arguing that Google used the code without its permission.

Google argued that weaving that code into Android was protected under the “fair use” doctrine….The case, which has broad ramifications for the software industry, has bounced around various courts over the years. In 2016, jurors ruled Google’s use of the Java code was permitted as fair use under federal copyright law. Two years later, a federal appeals court overturned that, ruling that there is “nothing fair about taking a copyrighted work verbatim and using it for the same purpose and function as the original in a competing platform.”

FREE MINDS

“Four weeks before Election Day, third-party presidential candidates continue to lag in the polls compared to the spike year of 2016, when 5.7 percent of the electorate went nontraditional for POTUS,” notes Reason‘s Matt Welch.

But while “Libertarian Jo Jorgensen sits at just 2 percent, while the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins is at a temporarily high 1.4 percent that will revert closer to 1 once the next poll rolls over,” they could still “be labeled ‘spoilers’ depending on how this high-intensity election plays out,” Welch writes.

QUICK HITS

• “Poisons, plots and psychic powers—why is the president’s health such fertile ground for the paranoid imagination?” Reason‘s Jesse Walker explores the long history of presidential assassination theories at The New York Times.

• Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn are revolting against Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s lockdown rules.

• The Trump administration’s COVID-19 outbreak has infected “34 White House staffers and other contacts,” according to a government memo obtained by ABC News.

• Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis cop who kneeled on George Floyd’s neck and has been charged with his murder, was released from jail yesterday on $1 million bail.

• A good reminder that the crusade against the tech industry is partly rooted in traditional media companies resenting its effect on their profits.

• THC-spiked PBR seltzer is coming to California.

• A new study finds “that maternal age at last birth is positively associated with telomere length, meaning that women who delivered their last child later in life were likely to have longer telomeres, a biomarker of long-term health and longevity.”

• Black Friday is 10 days this year.

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Amidst Historic Ratings Plunge, NBA Commissioner Says League Likely To Pull ‘Black Lives Matter’ Messaging Next Year

Amidst Historic Ratings Plunge, NBA Commissioner Says League Likely To Pull ‘Black Lives Matter’ Messaging Next Year

Tyler Durden

Thu, 10/08/2020 – 10:00

It’s amazing how when ratings plunge and ad revenue starts to dry up, moral crusades go right back out the window…

Such is the case for the NBA, which has spent the better part of its shortened season on a political crusade on behalf of Black Lives Matter, leading to a sharp plunge in ratings that we have documented here on Zero Hedge.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver appeared to confirm early this week that Black Lives Matter messaging will be pulled from the court and from players jerseys next year. According to The Blaze, Silver alluded to the messaging being removed despite the league being “completely committed to standing for social justice and racial equality.” 

He said implementing the change is “something we’re gonna have to sit down with the players and discuss.”

He told Rachel Nichols of ESPN: “I would say, in terms of the messages you see on the court and our jerseys, this was an extraordinary moment in time when we began these discussions with the players and what we all lived through this summer. My sense is there’ll be somewhat a return to normalcy — that those messages will largely be left to be delivered off the floor.”

The NBA has seen its ratings (and likely its ad revenue) plunge to historic lows this year amidst the league’s decision to focus more on politics. 

It appears that viewers are no longer interested in the political and social justice messages of the NBA but rather were tuning in for (believe it or not) actual basketball. As the balance of the league has tipped from less sport to more activism, viewers are tuning out.

We noted days ago that Game 2 of the NBA Finals saw a major collapse in viewers, with just 4.5 million people tuning in. This is down 68% from last year’s game two, which Outkick notes, “featured a team in Canada”. 

In fact, the ratings made Game 2 the least watched NBA Finals game on record, dropping below the 7.41 Game 1, which was the lowest viewed finals opener in history. 

We have not only been documenting the NBA, but also documenting the recent ratings collapse that the NFL has suffered in the midst of also turning its league into a political movement over the last few months. 

Get woke, go broke!

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

Rabo: “We Live More And More In A World In Which Facts No Longer Matter”

Rabo: “We Live More And More In A World In Which Facts No Longer Matter”

Tyler Durden

Thu, 10/08/2020 – 09:45

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Day by day, we live more and more in a world in which facts no longer matter. Social media, a bitterly-bipartisan mainstream media, and socio-economic and cultural polarization all mean we can inhabit the world of facts we find most comfortable and convenient. Indeed, as the economy becomes more Dickensian in terms of income and wealth equality it also becomes more *literally* Dickensian:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

And that’s just the US Vice-Presidential debate from last night, which offered up generous helpings of political pound(ing)s, shillings, and (Mike) Pence. Which for those who don’t know, was the old British Imperial money system until 1971 when, as my late grandmother referred to it, the UK joined the “decimal diddle dum dee club”. And one wonders how people ever wondered how Brexit could happen…

Of course, the VP debate also saw vast quantities of question-dodging over key issues, or answers that seemed to be to entirely different questions – to no response from the moderator-bot, which only seemed to be programmed to worry if people over-ran, rather than running over facts. It was still a vast improvement last week, however, in that there was actually some debate in it.

Who ‘won’? See the various polls from different sides of the political aisle: CNN said Harris 59% – 38%; Telemundo said Pence 76% – 24%. But the key point is that nowadays whomever *you* like won – after all, it is the ‘epoch of belief’. Likewise, whomever *you* like is comfortably winning the election. That is the meme both sides can cling to until 3 November. (And then, political risk analysts fear, it may be time for either loser to embrace a conspiracy theory as to why they didn’t actually lose.) Yet if we wanted to pretend actual facts mattered for a fleeting moment, the key question would be which side’s base feels more enthused after having sat through the VP debate: who got more policy red (or blue) meat thrown their way?

Talking of the (overdone) red meat side of things, the Heavenly side (as shall be explained), the conspiracy-theory side, and the ‘best of times, worst of times’ side, yet again we also see a Tweet from Trump trumping other news. Trump announced he believes the drug he was treated with is a “cure”; more important than the vaccine (which is coming “very, very shortly….right after the election”); and Regeneron will be shortly be freely available *and free* to those who need it. Indeed, Trump said he wants everybody to be given the same treatment he got without payment as “It wasn’t your fault…, it was China’s fault, and China is going to pay a big price.”

Is that related to the Bloomberg story yesterday talking about a possible looming US crackdown on Tencent and Ant Financial to stop China expanding its digital payments platforms? Or is it related to Mike Pompeo busily trying to form an Asian version of NATO? Or is it something else equally world-splitting if carried out in full?

Another good question that wasn’t asked at all at the VP debate that happened after that Trump video: is free Regeneron socialised medicine? The media aren’t asking either, instead running with the Trumpian phrase it was “a blessing from God” he caught Covid-19 (which he instantly qualified to “a blessing in disguise,” which itself is disguised in all those exegesis-esque headlines).

Meanwhile, preceding both the VP debate and the Trump video we had the FOMC minutes, a body which has played as large a role in our drift into all forms of Dickensianism as anyone. As Philip Marey notes, these represent “The quiet before the storm”. In particular, he points out that the minutes revealed quite some disagreement within the FOMC regarding the forward guidance on rates: a Dickensian dichotomy, one might say. As long as we are in a pandemic environment this may not matter very much. However, he believes that “by the time we get closer to the exit, the practice of flexible average inflation targeting may become a cacophony”. There’s something to look forward to.

The minutes also showed that the economic outlook (and thus the FOMC’s projections) assumed additional fiscal support, and that if future fiscal support was significantly smaller or arrived later than expected the FOMC thinks the pace of the recovery could be slower than anticipated. “Send more money now,” in short. This could still happen before the election in one form or another, even if Larry Kudlow isn’t in the loop. After all, if you are giving away Regeneron free now, why not?

Philip concludes that several headwinds are converging in Q4 that could upset the economic recovery, and that the next time the Fed meets will be in the stormy environment after Election Day.  

The Fed, meanwhile, will continue to try to send us the message that ends the book whose long opening line I have already quoted: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”(**Spoiler alert** – that particular guy gets his head cut off in a revolution.)

Which is what Nicola Sturgeon must be thinking of as she closes down central Scotland’s pubs (and restaurants) for over two weeks(?)

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/34zbJgp Tyler Durden

EU Warns COVID-19 Vaccine Before New Year “Very Unlikely”; Another Titans Player Tests Positive: Live Updates

EU Warns COVID-19 Vaccine Before New Year “Very Unlikely”; Another Titans Player Tests Positive: Live Updates

Tyler Durden

Thu, 10/08/2020 – 09:30

Where we left off Wednesday evening, health authorities in Brazil announced that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Latin America’s most populous country had finally surpassed 5 million cases as the outbreak starts to accelerate once again. Brazil reported 31,553 new cases last night, along with 734 new deaths, which pushed Brazil’s death toll to just under 150k.

In other news, South Korea has just sentenced a man accused of lying to authorities about his job and whereabouts during a coronavirus-tracing investigation to jail for six months. The case was the most high-profile investigation yet as SK authorities continue their aggressive efforts to track, trace and quarantine, Yonhap reports.

After declaring that he wouldn’t participate in a remote debate, President Trump said during his first interview after returning to the White House from Walter Reed that he expected Eli Lilly’s antibody treatment to be approved shortly, along with the Regeneron cocktail that Trump was treated with during his stay at Walter Reed, which Trump hailed as a “cure” in a video published yesterday.

After declaring last night that Regeneron’s treatment would be made available to all who need it, Trump said on Fox Business Thursday morning that the therapeutics from Eli Lilly and Regeneron – or their equivalents – will be sent out “for free”.

Late last night, the FT published an exclusive report after obtaining a memorandum of understanding between AstraZeneca and a Brazilian manufacturer which exposed AZ’s pledge to provide its vaccine “at cost” until the pandemic is over as a misleading promise. Because in the memorandum, AZ stipulates that the pandemic will “end” on July 1 of 2021. Since the vaccine has yet to be approved, that should leave a very narrow window where the company is selling their vaccine “at cost”.  The “pandemic period” can only be extended if “AstraZeneca acting in good faith considers that the SARS-COV-2 pandemic is not over”.

Finally, the head of the EU’s medicine regulator, which has already struck deals with AstraZeneca and other vaccine developers to expedite their evaluation (the so-called “rolling reviews”) said Thursday that a COVID-19 vaccine is “looking unlikely by year end.”

“Technically, of course it’s possible. Practically it’s very difficult – it’s very unlikely,” said Guido Rasi, executive director of the European Medicines Agency, in an interview Thursday. Even if drugmakers “submit the data in a few weeks, we are already approaching middle of October, so if we wait a few weeks and we take a minimum time of evaluation, more or less we are at the end of the year.”

It’s still possible that EU member states could use national emergency powers to distribute a vaccine, especially as deaths start to climb as the ‘second wave’ takes hold. Already, the UK has set out plans in August to amend legislation and clarify its powers so that an unlicensed COVID jab could be temporarily authorized in Britain. However, Rasi discouraged this behavior, and said countries would be better served by focusing on building out their distribution infrastructure, rather than approving an experimental vaccine “a few days before” everyone else.

Perhaps the biggest story in the US right now, the cluster that has gripped the Tennessee Titans, saw a new development just minutes ago as the team announced another player had tested positive, bringing the team’s total for players and staff who have tested positive to more than 20.

Circling back to Europe, as more countries ramp up social distancing restrictions and ‘localized lockdowns’, DB has published its latest weekly update, showing that the European countries seeing the biggest surge in new cases are the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and France.

ITV’s Robert Peston reported last night that as cases climb in northern England, ministers are “likely” to close all hospitality venues in the region for a period until the outbreak cools.

In its latest weekly update, analysts at Goldman Sachs placed gave the US a reopening score of 67 out of 100 as Texas preparations to lift more restrictions were partly offset by another round of school and potentially business closures in NYC.

Here’s some more news from Thursday morning, as well as the overnight session.

India reports 78,524 cases in the last 24 hours, up from 72,049 the previous day, bringing the total to over 6.83 million. The death toll jumped by 971 to 105,526 (Source: Nikkei).

China reports 11 new cases for Wednesday, up from seven a day earlier. The new cases all were imported infections involving travelers from overseas. The number of new asymptomatic cases, which China does not count as confirmed cases, fell to eight from 24 a day earlier (Source: Nikkei).

In an exclusive report, the FT revealed that a copy of a memorandum of understanding between AstraZeneca (which is developing a COVID-19 vaccine with the help and cooperation of Oxford University) and the country of Brazil revealed that the drugmaker’s pledge to provide its drug “at cost” until the pandemic is “over” (Source: FT).

Indonesia’s infections reach a new daily high of 4,850 cases, with 108 deaths in the past 24 hours. Indonesia has now reported a total of 320,564 cases and 11,580 deaths. Health officials express concerns over potential further increases in the coming weeks, with labor unions and student groups taking to the streets over the past few days in protests against a contentious omnibus law on job creation (Source: Nikkei).

The next phase of the Boston Public Schools reopening plan was delayed Wednesday because the city’s coronavirus positivity rate has climbed higher than 4% (Source: AP).

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3iETU4j Tyler Durden