Category: zerohedge

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

All tyrannical systems need a large contingent of cheerleaders in order to survive and thrive; a group of exploitable and devout acolytes that will carry the torch and evangelize the masses with the ideology of control. Without this aggressive percentage of the population, totalitarians cannot remain in power. In the US and most of the west, leftist ideologues have filled this role nicely. They claim they are fighting for the rights of the downtrodden but their actions speak much louder than their words.

They have supported and viciously defended nearly every draconian measure that governments and corporate elites have enacted in the past few years. They supported mass censorship of conservatives and moderates by Big Tech companies. They supported national lockdowns which destroyed hundreds of thousands of small businesses and violated the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. They continue to support unscientific mask rules which have been proven to achieve nothing tangible in terms of preventing viral spread. They support the use of “vaccine passports” which would effectively cut non-vaccinated people out of the normal economy and normal society and drive them into poverty. And, now they are all over the web trying to propagandize for the jab.

We know these unhinged creatures by many names, including social justice warriors, snowflakes, puritans, leftists, Marxists, communists, globalists, collectivists, narcissists, etc. Basically, they are some of the worst people on the planet, and while they usually drone on about “institutional racism” that doesn’t exist, or a rape culture that doesn’t exist, or a patriarchy that doesn’t exist (though I’m starting to wonder if maybe we should start one), they have now found a new love in the covid “crisis”.

But before I address the Woke Cult and and their perverse relationship with the establishment, I have to ask a basic question about the “vaccine” which no one in the mainstream seems to be asking:

Why should we take an experimental mRNA vaccine for a virus that 99.7% of people outside of nursing homes will easily survive?

This question alone usually explodes the heads of vaccine cultists. Most of them for some reason still believe the death rate of covid is “3% or more”. Why do they peddle this nonsense? Well, I would note that the mainstream media NEVER discusses the death rate of covid; they instead let people make assumptions based on things they have heard in the past from entities like the World Health Organization or the CDC.

The 3% stat appears to have come from PREDICTIONS made by the WHO in January of 2020 before the virus had fully hit the US, as well as a preliminary study by Lancet. These predictions were pushed forward by the Imperial College of London, a globalist institution which created the complex mandate and lockdown models that nations across the world are now using to control the public. Their models were so utterly wrong that it is bewildering to anyone familiar with statistical theory or medical management.

As it turns out, the death rate for covid is a mere 0.26% of those infected (it was never 3%) and we have known this for quite some time. Nursing home patients with preexisting conditions make up around 40% of all deaths. Over 80% of all deaths were people over the age of 65. And, according to the CDC, at least 30% of all covid hospitalizations were due to complications associated with severe obesity.

So, if you are not over 65 and you are not a disgusting fat-body, then you have very little to worry about from covid statistically. If you are over 65 and you are fat, then you have around a 0.26% chance of dying if you become infected. If you are over 65, fat, and live in a nursing home, then maybe you should be worried.

The bottom line is, covid is a non-threat to the vast majority of people, but there is a large group of obsessives out there that seem to want to be afraid of it anyway, or, they just want us to be afraid.

The virtue signaling around the vaccines is growing increasingly bizarre. There are numerous YouTube videos, TikTok videos, articles, and social media posts by people smugly proclaiming their jab status as if they have just been touched by the hand of God as the chosen ones. Furthermore, the idolization of medical frauds like Dr. Anthony Fauci is cringeworthy. If you don’t believe me you can see some examples below:

It appears that the SJWs are trying real hard to normalize covid vaccines by manufacturing a consensus. If everyone is doing it, then you might get left out and isolated from the crowd, and that’s a scary thought, right?

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I’m detecting some serious desperation behind this astro-turf movement against “anti-vaxers”. No one listens to the cult of woke, no one likes them and no one trusts them to be informed or honest in their agenda. Yet, they wield considerable power in our society because they are being backed by governments and corporations. Their relationship to the establishment is symbiotic.

This is not to say any of these people are aware of the underlying agenda. The mindset behind vaccine virtue signaling could be attributed to some base frailties the average leftist suffers from:

First, they have a habit of relying on the government and the system in general to provide for their feelings of normalcy. That is to say, they worship the covid vaccine partly because they see it as their ticket to appeasing the government and being given access to certain comforts. Sadly, they don’t realize that those comforts can be taken back anytime they want if they were not so cowardly.

In my county residents here have been ignoring the covid mandates for most of the past year. No one wears the masks. No one is using social distancing. And over 70% of the population is not vaccinated. The consequence? Only 17 deaths in the past year, most of which were people with preexisting conditions, and we have been free the whole damn time because we chose to be.

Second, leftists always argue from a position of “the majority”, even when they are not the majority. Covid is a tool, like a psychological crowbar used to leverage compliance, because the presumption is that it is a threat to everyone. And, if everyone is threatened by the same bogeyman, then everyone is part of the same monolith, the same collective. And if everyone is part of the same collective, then everyone must fight that bogeyman together in unity. If you do not work with the collective, that means you are working against the collective.

“We live in a society”, the leftists arrogantly spit and sneer, “which means you must do what WE say is best for everyone”.

As I already thoroughly outlined above, covid is not a threat to everyone. It’s not even a threat to more than 0.26% of people. We do NOT “live in a society”, at least, we don’t live in their society or under their rules. They don’t care about saving lives, this is just the excuse they need to exert control. Control is what they most desire.

How do I know this? Look at the mania surrounding the very existence of anti-lockdown activists and “anti-vaxers”. Look at how much they talk about us. They can’t stop themselves. Why do these people care so much whether or not we take the vaccine? If it actually works, then they are perfectly safe from us, and when we all die horrible deaths from covid they can say “we told you so”.

What they really fear is that we are right and they are wrong. The science is certainly on our side and has been for the duration of the pandemic. The WHO was wrong, the CDC was wrong, the Imperial College of London was wrong. The anti-lockdown activists were closer to the mark than all of them combined. The masks have been proven to be useless. The lockdowns have been proven to be useless. The death rate predictions were proven to be highly exaggerated. And, now the very need for the vaccines is in question.

In terms of the recent mainstream media narrative, we can draw a couple of conclusions: For one, the vaccine rollout is not going according to plan. Everyday the media is awash in stories about “vaccine hesitancy” and what the government needs to do about it. This tells me that far too many Americans are refusing the shot, so, the propaganda is being turned up to eleven.

I suspect the vaccine virtue signaling is a part of that campaign, or it is at least being encouraged by the establishment. Don’t you want to be on the right side of history? Don’t you want to be on the “side that cares about people”? Or do you want to be on the “selfish side”, the side that wants to kill grandma, the side that is racist and sexist and nasty and icky?

Another easy conclusion we can draw from the media is that this is not going away and the establishment intends to press the issue if we continue to defy them. I have seen the suggestion of “force” only gingerly broached in the past, but recently the narrative is becoming more aggressive. The word “force” is appearing more often. The media seeks to remind us that under that law, the establishment could make us take the vaccine. The message? We might as well get the vaccine now so that we can avoid any unpleasantness later.

We all know this is eventually going to end in war, but the elites need a huge ratio of pro-mandate people to effectively subjugate liberty minded individuals. They don’t have it and it shows.

Woke adherents see all of this same propaganda everyday; they hear the message loud and clear: The system is indicating that the vaccines will be mandatory whether by government declaration or by corporate requirement. So, leftists are scrambling to show their allegiance to their god (the state), and they act as good little foot-soldiers to gain extra virtue points.

There are many reasons not to accept an experimental vaccine, some of them scientific and some of them based on principle. I would simply point out that many virologists have spoken out on the safety of these vaccines including a former VP of Pfizer, Dr. Michael Yeadon, who along with his peers concluded that NO ONE should take the mRNA vaccines until further testing is done, otherwise there is considerable danger of long term health effects including autoimmune disorders and infertility.

The mRNA gene therapy push is at its core a giant experimental trial using the masses as unwitting test subjects. We really have no idea what the consequences will ultimately be, but I have a feeling that within a couple of years we will see the results and it will not be pretty. There is a reason why governments are making it legally impossible to sue vaccine producers for vaccine side effects.

Beyond the many health concerns, there is the problem of incrementalism. One vaccination alone might not be a big threat. Maybe it’s a gamble that doesn’t end in snake eyes for most people. But what about the next one? And the next one? What about the next 20 jabs? There are now half a dozen different mutations of covid being mentioned by the government and the media as being potentially resistant to current vaccines and more dangerous than the first iteration of the virus.

This is surely a lie, but it drives home the reality that the mandates are meant to go on forever. If we accept them now, they will never end. Just because you are vaccinated today does not mean you will be free tomorrow.

And, with each new vaccine there arises the specter of vaccine passports. And with vaccine passports there arises the specter of complete government micro-management of people’s lives. Sure, you can choose to not get vaccinated, but the system is going to make certain you suffer for it until you can’t survive without the jab. The vaccine is a stepping stone to tyranny disguised as empathy and duty to your community.

The woke cult adores this kind of environment, however. This is the type of dark slimy cave they like to nest in. The need to control others is an aberration, a mental deficiency common to psychopaths, but in the new world the control freaks are given justification and free rein. The striking irony here is that these people like to control, but they also like to BE controlled. They find comfort and safety in their chains. The world is a scary place, and being independent within it takes courage, mental fortitude and a willingness to learn from our mistakes so that we gain wisdom and experience in the process.

The platitudes and pontificating of the leftist mob are an attempt to avoid the tribulations of real life; their submission to the state no matter how dubious or evil is an attempt to feel safe from their own irrational fears, their weaknesses and their inadequacies.

As the author Robert Anton Wilson once said:

“The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.”

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For months now, as most US states have largely reopened their economies (with even hard-hit NYC preparing to be “fully reopened” by July1), Canada has lagged behind, leaving restrictions on travel and businesses in place, while the pace of the country’s vaccination campaign has lagged the US.

But apparently all the pressure is finally getting to PM Justin Trudeau, because Bloomberg reported Friday that Trudeau’s government has begun preliminary internal discussions about reopening the border with the US, even as COVID cases have been more stubborn up north.

Senior officials have begun to formally talk about options for how to proceed, three people familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition that they not be identified. One question under consideration is whether to employ a two-track system in which quarantine and testing requirements would be relaxed for vaccinated travelers.

The world’s longest international border has been shuttered since March 2020 to most non-essential travel, dramatically reducing land and air traffic between the two countries. The restrictions have hit the nation’s tourism and airline sectors particularly hard — one estimate says the measures cost those industries about C$20 billion ($16.5 billion) in revenue last year.

“In the end, it’s a political decision, and at what point does the Canadian side — and it’s the Canadian side at this point that’s the slowpoke — decide that they’re ready to receive and what categories of people that they’ll open up to,” Michael Kergin, a former Canadian ambassador to the U.S., said in a phone interview. “A staged reopening would be the logical approach.”

Any reopening of the border would be gradual and contingent on cases continuing to decline in both the US and Canada. The third wave of the pandemic has hit the northern nation harder because of a vaccine rollout that’s been slowed by supply issues and shipment delays.

Many Canadian provinces remain in extended lockdowns even as the country has ramped up its vaccination campaign. Though the pace of new cases has slowed in April and May, the slowdown hasn’t been as extreme as what’s being seen in the US.

One issue is that the two sides need to agree on a common approach. For example, they would need to agree on a system for verifying vaccine passports, something Trudeau has said Canada is open to doing to help restore cross-border travel, even as President Biden has said he doesn’t favor “vaccine passports” .

“It would make sense for us to align with partners around the world on some sort of proof of vaccination or vaccine certification,” Trudeau said at a May 4 news conference. “We are looking very carefully at it, hoping to align with allied countries, but I can’t speak for the United States and the choices they might make around who to welcome into their country.”

Trudeau is also working with the EU on a bilateral plan. The European bloc has already embraced vaccine passports and will soon begin allowing vaccinated tourists from the US, Canada and elsewhere to start returning to Europe for the summer holidays. As for whether Americans will be able to visit Toronto this summer, that remains unclear.

Authored by GQ Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours)

The American Medical Association (AMA), the largest national organization representing physicians and medical students in the United States, says it will set aside its long-held concept of meritocracy in favor of “racial justice” and “health equity.”

In an 86-page strategic plan released May 11, the AMA set out a three-year road map detailing how the advocacy group will use its influence to dismantle “structural and institutional racism” and advance “social and racial justice” in America’s health care system.

According to its plan, the AMA will be following a host of strategies, including implementing “racial and social justice” throughout the AMA enterprise culture, systems, policies, and practices; expanding medical education to include critical race theory; and pushing toward “racial healing, reconciliation, and transformation” regarding the organization’s own “racially discriminatory” past.

The AMA also makes clear that it now rejects the concepts of “equality” and “meritocracy,” which have been goals in the fields of medical science and medical care.

“Equality as a process means providing the same amounts and types of resources across populations,” the association said. “Seeking to treat everyone the ‘same,’ ignores the historical legacy of disinvestment and deprivation through historical policy and practice of marginalizing and minoritizing communities.”

While the AMA doesn’t run America’s health care system, it holds tremendous influence over medical schools and teaching hospitals that train physicians and other health professionals. Those institutes, the AMA says, must reject meritocracy, which it describes as a harmful narrative that “ignores the inequitably distributed social, structural and political resources.”

“The commonly held narrative of meritocracy is the idea that people are successful purely because of their individual effort,” it states. “Medical education has largely been based on such flawed meritocratic ideals, and it will take intentional focus and effort to recognize, review and revise this deeply flawed interpretation.”

Instead, the AMA suggests, medical schools should incorporate into their programs critical race theory, an offshoot of Marxism that views society through the lens of a power struggle between the race of oppressors and that of the oppressed. As a result, according to the theory, all long-established institutions of Western society are considered to be tools of racial oppression.

“Expand medical school and physician education to include equity, anti-racism, structural competency, public health and social sciences, critical race theory and historical basis of disease,” reads the document, which is loaded with critical race theory vocabulary.

In a statement that accompanied the plan, AMA President Gerald Harmon said he is “fully committed to this cause” and called on the medical community to join the effort.

“We believe that by leveraging the power of our membership, our influence, and our reach we can help bring real and lasting change to medicine,” he said.

The controversy around critical race theory in U.S. institutions gained more attention in 2020, when President Donald Trump banned the use of training materials based on “divisive and harmful sex and race-based ideologies” in federal workplaces. President Joe Biden rescinded the order, instead issuing an order stating that his administration would pursue “a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all.”

The Biden administration’s infrastructure proposal layouts 100% carbon-free or clean electricity by 2035. Such an ambitious goal will require a massive new workforce, hundreds of billions of dollars in funding, and community support.

But all is not kosher as wind turbine projects across the country have hit turbulence among local officials and residents. 

President Biden’s proposed Energy Efficiency and Clean Electricity Standard calls for tens of thousands of wind turbines. These massive windmill-looking machines destroy any beautiful landscape and are noisy.

WSJ explains since 2015, about 300 government entities across the US have rejected wind farm projects. In Scituate, Massachusetts, people complained to local officials that a wind turbine in the coastal town was noisy and prevented them from sleeping. Officials restricted the operation of the wind turbine to only daytime use. 

On April 7, a proposed wind farm in Foster, Road Island, was rejected by the planning board. Residents heard horror stories from the people of Portsmouth who had turbines installed near their homes resulting in noise disturbances, vibrations, and loss in home values.

With Gallup survey data showing 70% of Americans want “more emphasis” on clean energy such as wind, one would think wind farms would be very receptive in towns and communities. 

What’s shocking, as WSJ outlines, “the fiercest fights against Big Wind are happening in the bluest states.” These virtue-signaling liberals who oppose wind farms can be characterized as “NIMBY,” an acronym for the phrase “not in my back yard,” or would rather see green energy developments, not in their community but elsewhere. 

John Riggi, a town councilman in Yates, New York, has been fighting a proposed wind farm project for seven years. He said, “we are fighting to keep our lands free from environmentally destructive, culture-killing, and unwanted industrial renewable-energy projects.”

The common theme among municipalities and residents rejecting wind farms is the same. They complain about noise pollution, falling property values, ruined views, and the potential loss of tourism dollars. To fight Big Wind, local officials are implementing noise and height limits, setting zoning setbacks, and even building heliports, preventing the construction of wind turbines within a 1-mile radius of landing pads.

In December, Madison County, Iowa, outright banned new wind turbines. Conflicts among towns and Big Wind bring into question how the Biden administration will install tens of thousands of wind turbines and other green energy systems to fulfill their 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035. 

What’s even more mindboggling are blue states filled with virtue-signaling liberals are opposing wind farms the most because they don’t want these monstrous turbines in their backyard that create noise pollution, destroy views, and damaged property values. 

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via

“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

– Hermann Goering, Nazi leader

With all that is crashing down upon us, from government-manipulated crises to the blowback arising from a society that has repeatedly prized technological expedience and mass-marketed values over self-ownership and individual sovereignty, those coming of age today are facing some of the greatest threats to freedom the world has ever witnessed.

It’s downright frightening.

Young people will find themselves overtaxed, burdened with excessive college debt, and struggling to find worthwhile employment in a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion. Their privacy will be eviscerated by the surveillance state. They will be threatened, intimidated and beaten by militarized police. They will be the subjects of a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies and government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice.

As such, they will find themselves forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands that “we the people” be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

It’s a dismal prospect, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, we failed to guard against such a future.

Worse, we who should have known better neglected to maintain our freedoms or provide our young people with the tools necessary to resist oppression and survive, let alone succeed, in the impersonal jungle that is modern America.

We brought them into homes fractured by divorce, distracted by mindless entertainment, and obsessed with the pursuit of materialism. We institutionalized them in daycares and afterschool programs, substituting time with teachers and childcare workers for parental involvement. We turned them into test-takers instead of thinkers and automatons instead of activists.

We allowed them to languish in schools which not only look like prisons but function like prisons, as well—where conformity is the rule and freedom is the exception. We made them easy prey for our corporate overlords, while instilling in them the values of a celebrity-obsessed, technology-driven culture devoid of any true spirituality. And we taught them to believe that the pursuit of their own personal happiness trumped all other virtues, including any empathy whatsoever for their fellow human beings.

We have allowed them to be manipulated by a corporate culture that simply wants money and control. However, as Aldous Huxley warned: “The victim of mind-manipulation does not know he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible and he believes himself to be free.”

No, we haven’t done this generation any favors.

Based on the current political climate, things could very well get much worse before they ever take a turn for the better. Here are a few pieces of advice that will hopefully help those coming of age today survive the perils of the journey that awaits:

Be a thinking individual. For all of its claims to champion the individual, American culture advocates a stark conformity which, as John F. Kennedy warned, is “the jailer of freedom, and the enemy of growth.” Worry less about fitting in with the rest of the world and instead, as Henry David Thoreau urged, become “a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.”

Learn your rights. We’re losing our freedoms for one simple reason: most of us don’t know anything about our freedoms. At a minimum, anyone who has graduated from high school, let alone college, should know the Bill of Rights backwards and forwards. However, the average young person, let alone citizen, has very little knowledge of their rights for the simple reason that the educational system no longer teaches them and spends little time on the rights of the people. So grab a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and study them at home. And when the time comes, stand up for your rights before it’s too late.

Speak truth to power. Don’t be naive about those in positions of authority. As James Madison, who wrote our Bill of Rights, observed, “All men having power ought to be distrusted.” We must learn the lessons of history. People in power, more often than not, abuse that power. To maintain our freedoms, this will mean challenging government officials whenever they exceed the bounds of their office.

Resist all things that numb you. Don’t measure your worth by what you own or earn. Likewise, don’t become mindless consumers unaware of the world around you. Resist all things that numb you, put you to sleep or help you “cope” with so-called “reality.” Those who establish the rules and laws that govern society’s actions desire compliant subjects. However, as George Orwell warned, “Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they rebelled, they cannot become conscious.” It is these conscious individuals who change the world for the better.

Don’t let technology turn you into zombies. Technology anesthetizes us to the all-too-real tragedies that surround us. Techno-gadgets are merely distractions from what’s really going on in America and around the world. As a result, we’ve begun mimicking the inhuman technology that surrounds us and we have lost our humanness. We’ve become sleepwalkers. If you’re going to make a difference in the world, you’re going to have to pull the earbuds out, turn off the cell phones and spend much less time viewing screens. Then, maybe you’ll see the world for what it really is.

Help others. We all have a calling in life. And I believe it boils down to one thing: You are here on this planet to help other people. In fact, none of us can exist very long without help from others. If we’re going to see any positive change for freedom, then we must change our view of what it means to be human and regain a sense of what it means to love and help one another. That will mean gaining the courage to stand up for the oppressed.

Give voice to moral outrage. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” There is no shortage of issues on which to take a stand. For instance, on any given night, over half a million people in the U.S. are homeless, and half of them are elderly. There are 46 million Americans living at or below the poverty line, and 16 million children living in households without adequate access to food. Congress creates, on average, more than 50 new criminal laws each year. With more than 2 million Americans in prison, and close to 7 million adults in correctional care, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. At least 2.7 million children in the United States have at least one parent in prison. At least 400 to 500 innocent people are killed by police officers every year. Americans are now eight times more likely to die in a police confrontation than they are to be killed by a terrorist. On an average day in America, over 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams. It costs the American taxpayer $52.6 billion every year to be spied on by the government intelligence agencies tasked with surveillance, data collection, counterintelligence and covert activities. All the while, since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.6 trillion to wage wars abroad and police the rest of the world. This is an egregious affront to anyone who believes in freedom.

Cultivate spirituality, reject materialism and put people first. When the things that matter most have been subordinated to materialism, we have lost our moral compass. We must change our values to reflect something more meaningful than technology, materialism and politics. Standing at the pulpit of the Riverside Church in New York City in April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. urged his listeners:

[W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motive and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Pitch in and do your part to make the world a better place. Don’t rely on someone else to do the heavy lifting for you. Don’t wait around for someone else to fix what ails you, your community or nation. As Gandhi urged: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Say no to war. Addressing the graduates at Binghampton Central High School in 1968, at a time when the country was waging war “on different fields, on different levels, and with different weapons,” Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling declared:

Too many wars are fought almost as if by rote. Too many wars are fought out of sloganry, out of battle hymns, out of aged, musty appeals to patriotism that went out with knighthood and moats. Love your country because it is eminently worthy of your affection. Respect it because it deserves your respect. Be loyal to it because it cannot survive without your loyalty. But do not accept the shedding of blood as a natural function or a prescribed way of history—even if history points this up by its repetition. That men die for causes does not necessarily sanctify that cause. And that men are maimed and torn to pieces every fifteen and twenty years does not immortalize or deify the act of war… find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow-man.

Finally, prepare yourselves for what lies ahead. The demons of our age—some of whom disguise themselves as politicians—delight in fomenting violence, sowing distrust and prejudice, and persuading the public to support tyranny disguised as patriotism and/or keeping us “safe.” Overcoming the evils of our age will require more than intellect and activism. It will require decency, morality, goodness, truth and toughness. As Serling concluded in his remarks to the graduating class of 1968:

“Toughness is the singular quality most required of you… we have left you a world far more botched than the one that was left to us… Part of your challenge is to seek out truth, to come up with a point of view not dictated to you by anyone, be he a congressman, even a minister… Are you tough enough to take the divisiveness of this land of ours, the fact that everything is polarized, black and white, this or that, absolutely right or absolutely wrong. This is one of the challenges. Be prepared to seek out the middle ground … that wondrous and very difficult-to-find Valhalla where man can look to both sides and see the errant truths that exist on both sides. If you must swing left or you must swing right—respect the other side. Honor the motives that come from the other side. Argue, debate, rebut—but don’t close those wondrous minds of yours to opposition. In their eyes, you’re the opposition. And ultimately … ultimately—you end divisiveness by compromise. And so long as men walk and breathe—there must be compromise…

Are you tough enough to face one of the uglier stains upon the fabric of our democracy—prejudice? It’s the basic root of most evil. It’s a part of the sickness of man. And it’s a part of man’s admission, his constant sick admission, that to exist he must find a scapegoat. To explain away his own deficiencies—he must try to find someone who he believes more deficient… Make your judgment of your fellow-man on what he says and what he believes and the way he acts. Be tough enough, please, to live with prejudice and give battle to it. It warps, it poisons, it distorts and it is self-destructive. It has fallout worse than a bomb … and worst of all it cheapens and demeans anyone who permits himself the luxury of hating.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the only way we’ll ever achieve change in this country is for the American people to finally say “enough is enough” and fight for the things that truly matter. 

It doesn’t matter how old you are or what your political ideology is. If you have something to say, speak up. Get active, and if need be, pick up a picket sign and get in the streets. And when civil liberties are violated, don’t remain silent about it.

Wake up, stand up, and make your activism count for something more than politics in a world turned upside down.

Restaurant owners are blaming generous unemployment benefits for the current labor shortage. Ahead of the busy summer season, some restaurateurs are warning they might have no other choice but to use robots. 

According to Andrew Gruel, founder and CEO of Slapfish seafood, with 11 locations in the Southwestern US and new ones quickly opening up across the country, if the labor shortage persists, significant changes to the restaurant industry are coming in the form of automation.

“What I fear in terms of the long-term effects of this is that we start to automate and robotize our industry,” Gruel told Fox News. “That’s the only option if a lot of these businesses are going to continue to try and survive, especially when there’s a lack of labor or if the cost of labor is so high that it’s prohibitive for anybody to grow.”

“It’s is a really, really tough and tight labor market,” said Gruel. “I’ve talked to restaurants who are not even opening because they don’t have the staff to be able to hit a certain amount of hours.”

Slapfish is so desperate for workers that it’s offering dishwashers with no experience for $20-$25 per hour. The chain is even offering $500 signing bonuses. 

“We’ve had to alter our operations. We’re limiting hours. My wife, myself, my kids we’re in 12, 14, 16 hours a day,” he said. “That’s really what it’s come down to. It’s a lot of owner-operators stepping in, scaling back on growth, and getting down in the weeds themselves.”

Gruel believes one primary reason for the labor shortage is President Biden’s unemployment benefits that disincentivize people to work because they make more money collecting stimulus checks.

In one Jersey Shore restaurant, called Island Grill, the labor shortage is getting so ridiculous that they have already turned to robotic servers. 

“Once we realized that we may not have any servers this summer, we were like, ‘Well, we may need to look into this a little more,'” Island Grill owner Andrew Yoa told News12. 

 Yoa said his restaurant is currently leasing the robot, known as “Little Peanut.” The robot serves as a food runner and busboy to support server staff.

“It’s basically extra arms for them so that they could be getting a drink order for someone and the meals for another table could be coming out or an appetizer could be coming out,” he said. “It can do multiple stops so it can stop at one station, drop off an appetizer and go to drop someone’s meal off.”

A full-blown labor shortage is underway thanks to trillions in Biden stimulus are now incentivizing potential workers not to seek gainful employment, but to sit back and collect the next stimmy check for doing absolutely nothing in what is becoming the world’s greatest “under the radar” experiment in Universal Basic Income.

The National Owners Association (NOA), an independent, self-funded advocacy group of McDonald’s franchisees, warned earlier this week that an “inflationary time bomb” is being triggered by labor shortages. 

NOA went on to warn that higher wages, signing bonuses, and paid interviews are no longer working as fast-food workers sit at home collecting stimulus checks. 

NOA said franchisees must increase pay and benefits to attract workers. These additional labor costs will be passed onto the consumer in the form of higher Big Mac prices. 

The Federal Reserve’s narrative that inflation is “transitory” is a load of crap. Prepare for much higher costs at fast-food joints. 

Bank of America recently warned clients: “Buckle up! Inflation is here.” 

As for now, technological unemployment is set to soar as workers are sidelined, showered by free money from the federal government that disincentivizes them from working. By the end of this decade, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fast-food workers will be displaced by automation and artificial intelligence. Now is the time to boost automation, get these workers out of crappy jobs and retrain them for the new economy. Or, in Biden’s world, keep these people at home on UBI.

Authored by Daniel Teng via The Epoch Times,

Four cyber and electoral system researchers have identified three flaws around the use of electronic voting at the 2020 election for the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) government.

The researchers said the issues did not affect the outcome of the most recent election but warned that the flaws could be exploited in future to sway voting patterns.

“We are not claiming that corruption occurred, nor that the system was designed with that goal in mind. There certainly were errors undetected by Elections ACT; however,” they said in a submission (pdf) to the ongoing Inquiry into the 2020 ACT Election and the Electoral Act.

“It is not good enough that there is no evidence of manipulation—a voting system should offer voters and scrutineers solid evidence that the votes are private, and the announced result is correct.”

The ACT, home to Australia’s capital city Canberra, was the first jurisdiction in the country to use the electronic voting and counting system (EVACS) and has done so in the subsequent 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections.

In the ACT Electoral Commission’s submission (pdf) to the Inquiry, they noted that the use of electronic voting had increased in the 2020 election to 70 percent, which is more than double the amount from the 2016 election.

Meanwhile, the submission compiled by Andrew Conway, Thomas Haines, Tim Wilson-Brown, and Vanessa Teague, CEO of Thinking Cybersecurity, said, “We found three errors that could potentially change the results of an election, though in 2020—by good luck—they do not seem to have changed the winners.”

The first was that EVACS had issues with how it handled preference votes. The system—which groups votes based on “transfer value”—failed to group certain votes because they acquired their transfer value in different ways.

“In 2020, this caused some tallies to be wrong by more than 20 votes; in general, it could cause much larger divergences,” they said.

A second issue was that the ACT Electoral Act explicitly requires counts to be “rounded down” to 6 decimal places, but EVACS rounded to the “nearest” 6 decimal places.

“This causes errors on the order of millionths of a vote and is very unlikely to change the outcome,” the researchers conceded.

Lastly, EVACS had further inaccuracies with rounding transfer values.

“This is important because a transfer value’s effect may be multiplied by thousands of votes. This causes errors on the order of thousandths of votes and could possibly make a difference in a very close race.”

Voters in the electorate of Eden-Monaro on July 2, 2016, in Canberra, Australia (Martin Ollman/Getty Images)

The researchers recommended the system—including voting code and system documentation—be made available publicly six months before an election so errors or vulnerabilities can be identified.

Further, all system modifications, audits, and declarations should be complete before candidate nominations close.

They also called for onsite e-voting systems to be used in conjunction with paper records that are voter-verifiable. Lastly, they said internet voting needed to be discontinued due to the “high levels” of risk involved in current internet software.

In Australia, similar concerns have been raised around New South Wales’ iVote system in 2019, where Teague, who at the time worked for the University of Melbourne, found an error that could convert valid votes into invalid ones and not be counted.

Scrutiny around voting systems, however, reached fever-pitch during the contentious 2020 U.S. presidential election.

In one instance in Michigan state’s Antrim County, two counts of the same vote—one conducted digitally and the latter via hand recount—revealed vastly different results.

Earlier in 2016, concerns were already being raised around electronic voting systems in the United States, including problems with faulty touchscreens, outdated software, hacking through a local wireless network, and poor encryption.

What was once a feel-good story about millennials moving out of their parents basements and finally buying houses of their own has now turned into a story about them being priced out of the market. Thanks, Federal Reserve.

The scorching hot price of housing has forced millennials to now turn to fixer-uppers as a “more affordable solution” for homes to buy, a new Business Insider report notes. According to Bank of America Research’s sixth annual millennial home improvement survey, 82% of millennials have said they are more likely to buy a fixer-upper than a newly built home.

The U.S. has been underbuilding homes since the Great Recession, the report notes, pushing millennials toward their “second housing crisis in 12 years”. Demand from millennials has “only exacerbated the shrinking inventory” and “led to cutthroat competition rife with bidding wars”,  BI notes. 

The report points out Instagram pages like Cheap Old Houses, which focuses on historic homes selling for no more than $100,000 that offer fixer-upper opportunities. The account has grown to 1.5 million followers from 750,000 early last year. 

The devil is, of course, in the details. Fixer-upper homes often wind up costing just as much as newly built homes. The B of A survey noted that while many buyers started their projects within 6 months of buying their homes, the larger portions of remodels – like bathroom and kitchen projects – get remanded to the back burner in favor of cheaper fixes like painting and landscaping.

Millennials “feel more at ease painting and wallpapering and upgrading appliances, compared to more complex projects like altering floor plans and roofing,” BI notes. As a result, some are now taking out loans to complete larger portions of their remodels. B of A notes that loans are being used more frequently than cash to fund projects over $10,000. 42% of respondents are using debt, versus 34% back in 2017.

Recall, we noted days ago that the Federal Reserve continued to increase its holdings of mortgage-backed securities by the tune of $40 billion per month, fueling a housing bubble with record-low mortgage rates and low inventory. 

Even as the housing sector has more than recovered from the downturn, Chair Jerome Powell continues “pedal to the metal” with MBS purchases. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), this has resulted in the median price for a single-family home to soar the most on record in the first quarter. 

“Nationally, the median existing-home sales price rose 16.2% on a year-over-year basis to $319,200, a record high since 1989. All regions recorded double-digit year-over-year price growth, with the Northeast seeing a 22.1% increase, followed by the West (18.0%), South (15.0%), and Midwest (14.4%),” NAR said. 

Here’s Powell’s quote in full from an April press conference:

“Yeah. I mean, we started buying MBS because the mortgage-backed security market was really experiencing severe dysfunction, and we’ve sort of articulated, you know, what our exit path is from that. It’s not meant to provide direct assistance to the housing market. That was never the intent. It was really just to keep that as, it’s a very close relation to the Treasury market, and a very important market on its own.

And so, that’s why we bought as we did during the global financial crisis. We bought MBS, too. Again, not intention to send help to the housing market, which was really not a problem this time at all. So, and, you know, it’s a situation where we will taper asset purchases when the time comes to do that, and those purchases will come to zero over time. And that time is not yet.”

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said, “record-high home prices are happening across nearly all markets, big and small, even in those metros that have long been considered off-the-radar in prior years for many home-seekers.” 

Of the 183 metro areas covered by NAR, 163 had double-digit price gains, up from 161 in the fourth quarter. In a separate report, Redfin’s monthly data showed that in April, homes sold at their fastest pace on record with nearly half off-market within one week.

Authored by GQ Pan via The Epoch Times,

A school choice movement aimed at serving Minnesota’s black community has vowed to tackle the notion that the United States is a racist nation, saying such narratives are “structured to undermine the lives of black Americans.”

The newly founded organization, TakeCharge Minnesota, describes itself on its website as seeking to “inspire and educate the black community and other minority groups in the Twin Cities to take charge of their own lives, the lives of the families and communities, as citizens fully granted to them in the Constitution.”

“We acknowledge that racist people exist in the country, but explicitly reject the notion that the United States of America is a racist country,” the organization states.

“We also denounce the idea that the country is guilty of systemic racism, white privilege and abhor the concept of identity politics and the promotion of victimhood in minority communities.”

According to the website, the organization is headed by Kendall Qualls, a health care executive and Army veteran. He was also a Republican contender for Minnesota’s 3rd Congressional District, which remains occupied by incumbent Democrat Rep. Dean Phillips following the 2020 election.

“People who helped me in life were black and white, rich and poor, male and female, gay and straight,” Qualls said in March in an interview with the Minnesota Reformer.

“Americans help each other when they see someone trying to better their lot in life, and most Americans don’t put a filter on it based on skin color.”

“To me, it’s insulting to hear that black people can’t get ahead because of systemic racism,” he told the outlet.

TakeCharge Minnesota also lists five core doctrines it wants to promote, including the one that says “restoring the two-parent black family should be a priority both locally and nationally,” a belief in opposition to that of the Black Lives Matter organization, which calls for an end to the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”

“The nuclear family is the bedrock of any society and it has been decimated and ignored in the Black community for five decades,”

TakeCharge Minnesota declares, adding that raising children in a marriage is “the best way to reduce poverty, combat inequality, and develop socially productive children.”

School choice programs have gained popularity in recent years among the nation’s black families, plenty of which have been benefited from the expansion of high-quality public school alternatives, especially those in low-income neighborhoods. An October 2020 survey by conservative think tank Manhattan Institute found that between 51 and 62 percent of all respondents supported state funding of charter schools. This support was higher for black respondents in all states and ranged from 58 to 67 percent.

America’s billionaire class is now the second most “bloated” in the world after…Sweden?

If that sounds strange, it’s just one example of how the global explosion in wealth is impacting the world in unexpected ways.

This is according to research by FT contributing editor Ruchir Sharma, who has been tracking the global rise of billionaires over the past decade while devising metrics to allow for an apples-to-apples comparison. In this way, Sharma has been able to determine whether individual billionaires derived their wealth from “good” sources (“clean” industries like tech or manufacturing) vs. “bad” billionaires who inherited their wealth, or built it in more corrupt corners of the economy, like real-estate or natural resources (primarily oil).

The tremendous surge in prices of assets from stocks, to homes, to used cars to collectibles has benefited the wealthy most of all. Last year, China led the world in billionaire-creation, with 238 billionaires created, roughly one every 36 hours, bringing the country’s total to 626. In aggregate, billionaire wealth climbed to $13 trillion from $5 trillion in the span of a year.

Sharma highlighted wealth inequality across a group of developed and developing economies by comparing total billionaire wealth to GDP, the annual aggregate value of goods and services produced in a given economy.

Source: FT

The surge in equity valuations over the past year accrued primarily to “good” billionaires, as Sharma characterized them (though of course AOC and those like her believe that there are no ‘good’ billionaires, and that billionaires’ existence is a ‘policy error’). “‘Good’ billionaires still rule the class,” he said.

Sharma also found that national reputation had little bearing on billionaire wealth accumulation over the past year, which saw billionaires in left-leaning France see their total assets jump from 11% to 17% of French GDP. Meanwhile, in conservative Britain, billionaires share of wealth remained flat.

While the population of billionaires exploded in China (something that may have informed Beijing’s crackdown on its tech billionaires) inequality in the US actually decreased slightly, perhaps due to the stimulus that stuffed bank accounts of working-class Americans and those who lost work.

While Jeff Bezos gets a lot of hate as a modern-day robber-baron, Sharma points out that Bezos’ wealth is actually smaller than the Rockefeller fortune in its heyday.

The scale of American wealth is also worth considering in context. As the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos’s $177bn may seem mind-boggling. But at 0.8 per cent of GDP, it is far from Rockefeller wealth, which at his peak amounted to 1.6 per cent of GDP. There are, however, many real Rockefellers in other countries, including five in Sweden, two each in Mexico, France, India and Indonesia, and one each in Spain, Canada, Italy and Russia. Top of the Rockefellers list are self-made fashion king Amancio Ortega of Spain, telecom titan Carlos Slim of Mexico and Bernard Arnault of France; each has a fortune equivalent to more than 5 per cent of his home country’s GDP. 

But there are some billionaires who are more wealthy than Rockefeller, using a ratio of their total wealth to the annual GDP of their respective home economy.

One notable recent development: In the emerging world, Russia has long held the title of world capital for “bad” billionaires. But last year, it ceded that title to Mexico. The 2020 surge took Mexico’s share of “bad” billionaire wealth up to 75%, leaving Russia second worst among the big developing nations, at 60%, or 3x the average for emerging nations. 

The backlash to the “billionaire class” typically increases in correlation with the pace of their wealth accumulation. Whatever happens next in terms of the evolution of public attitudes toward the concentration of wealth in family fortunes will depend on where the boom goes from here.