LA Judge Orders City, County To Offer All Skid Row Homeless Shelter By Fall
A Los Angeles federal judge on Tuesday ordered the city and county to offer some form of shelter or housing to the entire homeless population of skid row by October, according to the LA Times.
The order by Judge David O. Carter – a preliminary injunction granted to plaintiffs in the case last week – also requires the city and county to offer single mothers and their children on skid row a place to stay within 90 days, help families within 120 days before the Oct. 18 deadline for the rest of the homeless population in the area. The city must also put $1 billion into an escrow account to fund the program.
It is unknown whether the city or county will challenge the order, which were found to have wrongly focused on permanent housing at the expense of more temporary shelter, “knowing that massive development delays were likely while people died in the streets,” according to the report.
“Los Angeles has lost its parks, beaches, schools, sidewalks, and highway systems due to the inaction of city and county officials who have left our homeless citizens with no other place to turn,” wrote Carter in his 110-page brief which was ‘sprinkled with quotes from Abraham Lincoln and an extensive history of how skid row was first created.’
“All of the rhetoric, promises, plans, and budgeting cannot obscure the shameful reality of this crisis — that year after year, there are more homeless Angelenos, and year after year, more homeless Angelenos die on the streets,” the briefing continues. According to the report, over 1,300 homeless people died in Los Angeles county last year.
In the last homeless count in January 2020, more than 4,600 unhoused people were found to be living on skid row — about 2,500 in large shelters and 2,093 on the streets. They account for only slightly more than 10% of the city’s overall homeless population, and it’s not clear what Carter’s order might mean for other parts of the city.
The judge wrote that “after adequate shelter is offered,” he would allow the city to enforce laws that keep streets and sidewalks clear of tents so long as they’re consistent with previous legal rulings that have limited the enforcement of such rules. That appears to only apply to skid row.
He also ordered the county to offer “support services to all homeless residents who accept the offer of housing” including placements in “appropriate emergency, interim, or permanent housing and treatment services.” The costs would be split by the city and county, he said. -LA Times
The county previously attempted to wiggle out of the case, arguing that it was solely a matter for the city to handle, and that the county had been ‘aggressively responding to homelessness’ already without any direction from the court. County attorneys argued that they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars through a sales tax and other measures.
Outside counsel for the county, Skip Miller, said that the push for an injunction “is an attempt by property owners and businesses to rid their neighborhood of homeless people,” adding “There is no legal basis for an injunction because the county is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on proven strategies.”
The plaintiffs, the LA Alliance for Human Rights, are ‘ecstatic’ about the ruling, according to their attorney, Matthew Umhofer, who said that the judge’s order was exactly what they were seeking when they filed the case.
“This is exactly the kind of aggressive emergency action that we think is necessary on the issue of homelessness in Los Angeles,” said Umhofer.
Is there a chance to recover and to effectively vanquish Covid-19, at least to end the pandemic and return to normal lives again?
We function here as prognosticators and contrarians that seek to inform and share and to learn, and we thus argue yes, and while we were blindsided and there were grave initial mistakes and some very consequential such as the very flawed and botched initial testing by the CDC that left the United States vulnerable and flying blind and allowed the virus to seed for 4 to 5 weeks initially, the following are the key components of the Covid-19 response that should have been enacted from inception (save 3-4 weeks initially to understand the pathogen) and which should be urgently implemented based on the experiences over the last 14 months or so. In our opinion.
We offer this as a pathway forward and ask that we consider these as we try to deal with essentially failed approaches thus far, and use our common sense and deductive reasoning and logic to interpret the science and make informed decisions. We call on the medical experts who inform governments to likely for the first time, use some common sense and logic and some critical thinking; if it is all about the science, we implore the medical decision-makers to follow the data and science and to use it and use critical analysis of the data; we argue they have not; these decision-makers must understand the impact of their policies and stopping Covid ‘at all costs’ is not a policy and not attainable; if a policy is devastating and causing great harm to the population, you stop it, you do not harden it and reapply it as that is patently absurd and harmful; as such, we also ask our decision-makers to conduct the appropriate hazard analyses and cost-effective analyses.
Our pathway forward is as follows:
Properly and strongly protect the high-risk elderly persons with medical conditions and vulnerable persons e.g. frail persons with comorbid conditions, obese persons; elderly persons in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, long-term care facilities etc. are most at risk for severe illness or death from Covid-19 and they must be protected as a basis for any response to work; staff infecting nursing home residents remains the key breach in transmission and the rate-limiting step and has to be focused on immediately; stop staff from entering the nursing homes and infecting residents (sequester staff on site for one to two weeks at a time with no prejudice if they cannot, or use nursing home students or nearby hotels for residence to control transmission); we have failed to secure our nursing home residents and we have caused tens of thousands of deaths and we still continue to not secure the nursing homes
Immediately end all societal lockdown, shelter-in-place, mask mandate, and school closure policies; we must reopen all of our economies in the US, Canada (provinces such as Ontario), UK etc. as there are tremendous harms to these economic closures; there are catastrophic costs to these policies and evidence accumulated across one year now strongly suggests that these are highly ineffective and do not work; they are absolutely baseless and without merit; stop relying on hypothetical ‘worst case scenario’ projection models, as they have been incredibly inaccurate and grossly flawed; the crushing harms and devastation from these far outweigh any benefit and the harms are most pronounced among the poorer in society who are least able to afford the restrictions; the lockdown itself kills people, destroys families, prevents education of our children; child abuse is being missed by closed schools and the lockdowns promotes child abuse; lost jobs cause stress in the household and with closed schools, children are vulnerable as the visibility is gone and this is catastrophic; there is near zero risk to children from Covid and we are harming them by school closures, it was one of the most devastating misapplications of public policy; most of the decisions made by the governments and their medical advisors including Dr. Fauci who I have much respect for, are illogical, absurd, irrational, nonsensical, specious, and in most part reckless and have caused far greater harms with their policies
Isolate ONLY the sick/symptomatic persons (no isolation of asymptomatic persons); stop contact tracing where the virus has already spread extensively as it confers no benefit; stop isolating persons who are not sick/not symptomatic (are asymptomatic); stop wide testing of asymptomatic persons
Foster improved hand-washing hygiene and improved sanitation
Promote and offer early ambulatory outpatient therapeutics including combined and sequenced antivirals and anti-infectives and for some drugs as prophylaxis (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, doxycycline, bromhexine, colchicine, favipiravir, quercetin etc.), corticosteroid (budesonide, dexamethasone, prednisone and methylprednisolone etc.), and antithrombotic drugs (aspirin, enoxaparin etc.) as needed for those who do become ill, especially high-risk persons and those in congregate settings such as nursing homes, assisted living facilities, long-term care facilities etc.; we recognize that future research would clarify and define the benefit of these early treatments; we believe that it is not possible to overstate the philosophy that since early in-center treatment with already available medications (repurposed) in nursing homes and similar settings is associated with a large reduction in mortality among nursing home residents, there can be no scientifically sound reasons, nor moral rationale for not utilizing these forms of treatment; we are trying to prevent hospitalizations and save lives and strongly believe that this approach can be impactful and merits strong consideration; the accumulating early treatment evidence is compelling and deserving of very serious consideration and study as a therapeutic option, given this emergency. To do otherwise is to fail our patients
Vaccines should be mainly available to those over 70 years of age who are high-risk and only after shared decision-making with their clinicians whereby patients can make informed decisions and consent to being fully informed; offer vaccines to high-risk front line medical staff who interact with high-risk persons; we however believe that this pandemic could have been and can be ended without vaccines e.g. via the simultaneous use of combined strong protections of the elderly and high-risk, early outpatient treatment, isolation of the sick only, hand-washing hygiene, and allowing the low-risk portion of the population to become infected naturally and harmlessly with reasonable precautions as part of normal living; a vast amount of our views on this is based on the lack of safety data and testing for these vaccines, leaving us unable to judge the future impact; we are already seeing adverse effects and even deaths recorded due to the vaccines
Thus, vaccines are not to be given/prioritized for those under 70 years of age who are healthy, and at no time be given to young persons e.g. those under 19 years of age; no vaccines are to be administered to pediatric/children age e.g. 6 months to 19 years or so as there is no evidence to support vaccinations; the benefits do not outweigh the risks
Begin immediate testing for T-cell immunity before vaccinating the designated group, if we are vaccinating the higher-risk persons; we do not vaccinate persons who have active infection or who have recovered from infection
Routine public service announcements (PSAs) are to be given on the benefits of Vitamin D supplements for persons with darker skin colours and those confined within congregate settings for prolonged periods, as well as messaging about the benefits of weight loss for those overweight and obese
Use a more reliable test other than the RT-PCR test and if this is to be used, use a positive threshold cut-point or cycle count threshold (Ct) of 25 cycles/amplifications and below to denote a positive case (infectious and possibly pathogenic); above Ct of 25 denotes nonculturable, nonviable virus and essentially prior infection or viral dust or fragments
Allow and foster the low-risk persons in the population e.g. infants, children, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged adults and all those who are reasonably healthy with no serious medical conditions, to live unfettered normal lives with sensible precautions so as to allow for natural exposure immunity; it is this portion of society that will substantially help develop population level ‘herd’ immunity (either via natural exposure, a vaccine, a combination of both, or even from therapeutics such as early treatment that reduces symptoms and thus transmission)
Recognize that asymptomatic spread is rare if at all and urgently provide messaging to the public that all persons who get infected are not at equal risk of severe illness or death; that there is an age gradient to severity of outcomes e.g. 25-year old David who is a healthy male is not at the same risk of severe illness or death if infected with SARS-CoV-2 as 80-year old Janet who is very sick with 2 underlying medical conditions such as renal disease and cardiovascular disease and who is obese
Recognize that a more ‘focused’ pandemic response (Great Barrington Declaration) approach that is targeted to age and risk is the best approach; ‘one size does not fit all’ when we are devising a pandemic response
Ensure hospitals are equipped and do not get overwhelmed
Understand that the immune systems of children are developing and being set for life and as such, we must allow them to engage freely with the environment; we may be damaging their immune systems long-term and we must allow their immune systems to be taxed and tuned up daily; children must not be confined indoors as transmission is far greater when confined indoors and it is just common sense
End masking and social distancing in any manner for children given their near zero risk of infection or spreading Covid virus as well as their exceedingly low risk of severe illness or death if infected; the science behind 6-feet social distancing was not there and was pseudo-science, embarrassingly weak and fear-based
Stop the mass media hysteria and fear about variants and mutations, as this is a good aspect, as when viruses mutate they typically mutate to much milder versions; the vast majority of people who are infected do not have a serious problem with Covid; infections are not important and a serious problem and one may argue ‘who cares’ about that number; what is critical is not the fear over infections, it is the hospitalization, ICU use, and deaths, not the number of infections; we need to get a grip and stop the fear mongering; if the infections do not result in consequential cases that need hospitalization or end in death, then we must stop the misinformation, hysteria and fear to the public
* * *
Contributing Authors
Paul E Alexander MSc PhD, McMaster University and GUIDE Research Methods Group, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada elias98_99@yahoo.com
Howard C. Tenenbaum DDS, Dip. Perio., PhD, FRCD(C) Centre for Advanced Dental Research and Care, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Faculties of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada howard.tenenbaum@sinaihealth.ca
“That’s How Crazy The Market Is” – A “Virtually Unheard Of Trade” Spotted In Lumber
On Monday we highlighted a remarkable fact about the buying frenzy in the US lumber market: lumber futures were up for 16 consecutive days, a stretch without a down day since March 26, and while they did dip on Tuesday, the have more than recovered this latest decline, and are now up 19 of the past 20 days.
This surge in lumber prices to record highs, which was driven by an unprecedented shortages coupled with soaring demand by homebuilders…
… has also translated to unprecedented events in the supply chain, with Bloomberg today reporting a remarkable episode showing how extreme America’s shortage of lumber has become: For the first time in recent memory, a lumberyard was the one selling wood to a supplier.
Needless to say, this kind of trade – where a customer sells goods to its traditional supplier – is virtually unheard of.
MaterialsXchange, a Chicago-based digital trading platform for physical wood products, reports that the trade involved a lumberyard selling about 30,000 square feet of oriented strand board, or OSB ( a cheaper stand-in for plywood that is widely used to make house floors and walls).
“Building materials are moving from company to company in nontraditional flows,” said MaterialsXchange co-founder and CEO Mike Wisnefski. He added that prices have gotten so high that some homebuilders are being forced to cancel projects, leaving certain lumberyards with a little “excess inventory.”
On Wednesday, his company brokered another OSB sale involving a US East Coast lumberyard selling to another one in Arkansas at $1,500 per 1,000 square feet, surpassing a record $999 that was reached at the end of March, based on Random Lengths pricing.
For those confused, Bloomberg explains: in a normal world, wholesale distributors buy lumber from sawmills and sell that to the yards that homebuilders frequent. But lumber markets today are anything but normal with futures surging by more than 60% to record levels this year as the entire timber supply chain collapses under the weight of soaring demand from people renovating their homes and buying bigger ones. As a result, sawmills can’t keep up with orders. Truck shipments have been delayed. And distributors are running short on product.
“That’s how crazy the marketplace is,” said RCM Alternatives lumber analyst Brian Leonard, who has covered the industry for 35 years and had previously never heard of lumberyards selling to distributors. “Obviously it shouldn’t happen. You never push product back up the chain but you can today because of the volatility of the market.”
Furthermore, “reverse” trades like the one that occurred earlier this month will push wood prices even higher. Distributors buying back supply from yards will inevitably mark up prices to the customers they resell to, “potentially creating a vicious cycle that continues to stoke what has already proven to be an unrelenting lumber rally”, according to Bloomberg.
And, as we discussed earlier this week, soaring lumber prices are directly translating into much higher prices for new homes, making housing – where prices have already exploded thanks to the Biden stimulus and the Fed’s ZIRP – even more unaffordable.
US Strategic Command, the branch of the US military responsible for America’s nuclear arsenal, tweeted the following on Tuesday:
“The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.”
The statement, which STRATCOM called a “preview” of the Posture Statement it submits to US Congress every year, was a bit intense for Twitter and sparked a lot of alarmed responses. This alarm was due not to any inaccuracy in STRATCOM’s frank statement, but due to the bizarre fact that our world’s increasing risk of nuclear war barely features in mainstream discourse.
#USSTRATCOM Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option. pic.twitter.com/4Oe7xkl05L
STRATCOM has been preparing not just to use its nuclear arsenal for deterrence but also to “win” a nuclear war should one arise from the (entirely US-created) “conditions” which are “neither linear nor predictable”. And it’s looking increasingly likely that one will as the prevailing orthodoxy among western imperialists that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost rushes headlong toward America’s plunge into post-primacy.
STRATCOM commander Charles Richard told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that China’s nuclear capabilities are advancing so rapidly that they’re not even bothering with intelligence vetted more than a month ago in their briefings because it’s probably already out of date, urging an upgrade in America’s nuclear infrastructure. Richard reportedly testified that a portion of China’s nuclear arsenal has been recently primed for ready use.
The fact that those in charge of US nuclear weapons now see both Russia and China as a major nuclear threat, and the fact that US cold warriors are escalating against both of them, is horrifying. The fact that they’re again playing with “low-yield” nukes designed to actually be used on the battlefield makes it even more so. This is to say nothing of tensions between nuclear-armed Pakistan and nuclear-armed India, between nuclear-armed Israel and its neighbors, and between nuclear-armed North Korea and the western empire.
While China keeps the majority of its forces in a peacetime status, increasing evidence suggests China has moved a portion of its nuclear force to a Launch on Warning (LOW) posture and are adopting a limited “high alert duty” strategy. @US_Stratcom testimony at SASC right now.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has the 2021 Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, citing the rising threat of nuclear war:
“Accelerating nuclear programs in multiple countries moved the world into less stable and manageable territory last year. Development of hypersonic glide vehicles, ballistic missile defenses, and weapons-delivery systems that can flexibly use conventional or nuclear warheads may raise the probability of miscalculation in times of tension. Events like the deadly assault earlier this month on the US Capitol renewed legitimate concerns about national leaders who have sole control of the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear nations, however, have ignored or undermined practical and available diplomatic and security tools for managing nuclear risks. By our estimation, the potential for the world to stumble into nuclear war — an ever-present danger over the last 75 years — increased in 2020. An extremely dangerous global failure to address existential threats — what we called ‘the new abnormal’ in 2019 — tightened its grip in the nuclear realm in the past year, increasing the likelihood of catastrophe.”
In a recent interview with Phoenix Media Co-op’s Slava Zilber, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft nuclear policy specialist Joe Cirincione described a ramp-up in weapons technology among all nuclear-armed nations in the world, the future of which he described as “bleak”:
“We right now have a global nuclear arms race. Each of the nine nuclear-armed nations are building new weapons. Some are replacing weapons that are getting old. Others are expanding their arsenals. But all of these new weapons represent new capabilities for these countries. So you’re seeing a qualitative and a quantitative arms race that is completely unchecked.
“If you look at the data that’s collected by the Federation of American Scientists, for example, you see that — since the 1980s at the height of the Cold War — we have slashed the global nuclear arsenals. We went from a world in 1986 where there were almost 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world down to where we are now where there’s just about 13,500 nuclear weapons. Tremendous progress. 85% reduction in the stockpile…
“But it’s flattened out. There really haven’t been significant reductions for years. The 2010 New START agreement was the last successful arms control agreement. That was 11 years ago. There’s been no reduction agreement since then. There’ve been no talks about new reductions agreements. Now I think the future of arms control is bleak. It’s bleak. And I see no interest really in a new round of arms control either from the United States or from Russia. So I’m pessimistic about our prospects.”
As I all too frequently find myself having to remind people, the primary risk here is not that anyone will choose to have a nuclear war, it’s that a nuke will be deployed amid heightening tensions as a result of miscommunication, miscalculation, misfire, or malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war, thereby setting off everyone’s nukes as per Mutually Assured Destruction.
The more tense things get, the likelier such an event becomes. This new cold war is happening along two fronts, with a bunch of proxy conflicts complicating things even further. There are so very many small moving parts, and it’s impossible to remain in control of all of them.
People like to think every nuclear-armed country has one “The Button” with which they can consciously choose to start a nuclear war after careful deliberation, but it doesn’t work that way. There are thousands of people in the world controlling different parts of different nuclear arsenals who could independently initiate a nuclear war. Thousands of “The Buttons”. It only takes one. The arrogance of believing anyone can control such a conflict safely, for years, is astounding.
A 2014 report published in the journal Earth’s Future found that it would only take the detonation of 100 nuclear warheads to throw 5 teragrams of black soot into the earth’s stratosphere for decades, blocking out the sun and making the photosynthesis of plants impossible. This could easily starve every terrestrial organism to death that didn’t die of radiation or climate chaos first. China has hundreds of nuclear weapons; Russia and the United States have thousands.
This should be the main thing everyone talks about. There is literally no more urgent matter on earth than the looming possibility that everyone might die in a nuclear war.
But people don’t see it.
On a recent Tucker Carlson Tonight appearance, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard did a solid job describing the horrors of nuclear war and the very real possibility that it could be inflicted upon us due to America’s insane brinkmanship with Russia. She spoke earnestly about how “such a war would come at a cost beyond anything we can really imagine,” painting an entirely accurate picture of “hundreds of millions of people dying and suffering, seeing their flesh being burned from their bones.”
Gabbard is correct, and was right to give such a confrontational account of what we are looking at right now. But if you read the replies to Gabbard’s tweet in which she shared a clip from the interview, you’ll see a deluge of commenters accusing her of “hyperbole”, saying she’s being soft on Putin, and admonishing her for appearing on Tucker Carlson. It’s like they can’t even hear what she’s saying, how real it is, how significant it is.
People’s failure to wrap their minds around this issue is a testament to the power of normalcy bias, a cognitive glitch which causes us to assume that because something bad hasn’t happened in the past, it won’t happen in the future. We survived the last cold war by the skin of our teeth, entirely by sheer, dumb luck; the only reason people are around to bleat “hyperbole” is because we got lucky. There’s no reason to believe we’ll get lucky in this new cold war environment; only normalcy bias says we will. Believing we’ll survive this cold war just because we survived the last one is as sane as believing Russian roulette is safe because the guy passing you the gun didn’t die.
It’s also a testament to the power of plain old psychological compartmentalization. People can’t handle the idea of everything ending, of everyone they know and love dying, of watching their loved ones die in flames or from radiation poisoning right in front of them, all because someone made a mistake at the wrong time after a bunch of imperialists decided that US planetary domination was worth rolling the dice on the life of every terrestrial organism for.
But mostly it’s a testament to the ubiquitous malpractice of the western media. It’s inconvenient to the agendas of the imperial war machine to have people protesting these insane cold war games of nuclear brinkmanship, so their media stenographers barely touch on this issue. If mainstream journalism actually existed, this flirtation with nuclear war would be front and center in everyone’s awareness and people would be flooding the streets in protest against their lives being toyed with as casino chips in an insane all-or-nothing gamble.
This is so much bigger than any of the petty little things we spend our mental energy on from day to day. It’s bigger than whatever your number one pet issue is. It’s bigger than your disdain for Moscow or Beijing. It’s bigger than my disdain for the US empire. It’s bigger than our political opinions. It’s bigger than whatever argument we might be having on the internet. It’s bigger than whether or not we’ve got a problem with Tulsi Gabbard appearing on Tucker Carlson.
Because once the nukes start flying, none of that will matter. None of it. All that will matter is the fact that this is all ending. If you open the door and see a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon, all of your mental priorities will rearrange themselves real quick.
We should not be in this situation. There is no good reason governments should be playing these games with these weapons. There is no good reason we can’t just get along with each other and collaborate toward a healthy world together. Only the psychopathic agendas of power-hungry imperialists perpetuate this insane balancing act, and it benefits none of us ordinary people in any way.
The rising threat of nuclear war is the most urgent matter in the world, and it’s absolute madness that we’re not talking about it all the time.
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Top Twelve Political Donors Give $1 Out Of Every $13
Just twelve political donors are responsible for $1 out of every $13 in contributions to federal candidates and committees since the 2010 election cycle, according to a watchdog group Issue One, which wants less money in politics.
Together, the donors and their spouses donated $3.4 billion to all federal candidates, according to Bloomberg, citing the nonprofit.
Of the biggest donors, six were aligned with Republicans and six with Democrats. Topping the list were two donors who also self-financed their 2020 Democratic presidential campaigns: former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer. In total, Bloomberg gave $1.4 billion in the period and Steyer $653 million. -Bloomberg
The heavy donations began after the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling allowing for unlimited independent spending to influence elections. The Court ruled that independent spending on elections was protected under the First Amendment – which led to unlimited spending by Super PACs, “setting off an arms race of fundraising by groups seeking to influence elections,” according to the report.
“Our government can’t be responsive to all Americans if our elected officials are beholden to the elite donor class,” said Nick Penniman, the founder and chief executive officer of Issue One.
Big political donors tend to live in just a handful of wealthy zip codes. The top areas for campaign contributions are home to 2.5 million people, less than 1% of the U.S. population, but they accounted for 20% of the $45 million donated to federal candidates and committees. -Bloomberg
Other top Democratic donors include Paloma Partners hedge fund founder Donald Sussman, who gave $98 million, and Renaissance Technologies Founder James Simmons and his wife Marylin, who have donated $96 million.
The top GOP donors have been the late Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, giving $523 million, followed by Uline owners Richard Uihlein and wife Elizabeht, and Citadel’s Ken Griffin.
How can America unite again to do great things if we are led by people who believe America suffers from a great sickness of the soul, an original sin that dates back to her birth as a nation?
Consider.
After his long night of prayer for “the right verdict” to be pronounced — Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts — Joe Biden stepped before the White House cameras to tell us what it all meant.
George Floyd’s death, said Biden, “was a murder in the full light of day, and it ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism… that is a stain on our nation’s soul — the knee on the neck of justice for Black Americans.”
Astonishing. Biden is saying that when Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes as the life drained out of him, the world, for once, was getting a good, close look at the diseased soul of America.
What Chauvin was doing to Floyd, said the president of the United States, is a reflection of the kind of justice America delivers to Black Americans.
This is no aberration, Biden was saying. This is the routine reality.
Biden was introduced by Kamala Harris, who said much the same:
“America has a long history of systemic racism. Black Americans and Black men in particular have been treated throughout the course of our history as less than human.”
At Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield delivered what The Wall Street Journal called, “a recitation of America’s sins (that) could have come from China’s Global Times.”
Said Thomas-Greenfield:
“I have… seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles. … Racism is the problem of the racist. And it is the problem of the society that produces the racist.”
What our diplomat to the world is saying is that our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights are interwoven with white supremacy and that America, to this day, continues to breed racists.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at a Congressional Black Caucus event after the verdict, turned her eyes heavenward in gratitude:
“Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice….For being there to call out to your mom — how heartbreaking was that … And because of you … your name will always be synonymous with justice.”
Implication: Floyd died to redeem America of her original sin of racism.
All in all, quite a commentary on our leaders.
For, again, our president and vice president are saying that this people and country still suffer from a sickness of the soul that dates back to its formative days.
The 1960s radicals who vilified our country as “Amerika” were rightly called “anti-American.” Today, the difference between what they said about America and what our highest elected leaders are saying is hard to discern.
Our enemies have picked up on this. In Anchorage, after Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Beijing out for repression in Hong Kong and “genocide” in Xinjiang, China’s foreign minister was right back in his face.
You Americans should look to your own sins and clean up your house before lecturing the world on political morality, he said. Today, that Chinese foreign minister could cite Biden and Harris as his chief witnesses that America is a nation sick in its soul.
We hear our leaders’ attacks on America. Where is their defense?
What other nation has provided the same measures of personal and political freedoms and material blessings for 40 million Black people as has the United States?
If people of color are treated “as less than human” in America, as Harris says, why are so many people of color seeking desperately to get across our Southern border to build their future here?
What is the real truth about race in America that goes unmentioned in the mainstream media’s endless hunt for encounters between Black men and white cops?
The main perpetrators of violent crimes against Black Americans — are other Black Americans. Black men, ages 16 to 40, are 3% of the U.S. population but commit roughly a third of America’s violent crimes.
Defund police, restrict police, remove police and you will get more of what the police prevent — crimes, especially violent crimes, in your community.
When Biden and Harris spoke of “systemic racism” afflicting our society, they were not describing their enlightened selves. And it was Hillary Clinton who identified the people the leftist elites have in mind:
“You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. … The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. … Some of those folks… are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
What Clinton, Biden and Harris are all saying is that, though the moral sickness of racism pervades our society, we are the vaccinated ones.
Used Car Prices Continue To Soar, Smashing Records Amid “Decimated Supply”
Used car prices in the U.S. continue to skyrocket as a result of both the country’s economic recovery and an ongoing supply crunch.
The Manheim U.S. Used Vehicle Value Index has continued to soar through the month of April, to a new record, as a result of the worsening of a semiconductor shortage, low lot inventories, and a continuing post-Covid “boom”.
The index was up 6.8% in the first 15 days of April, Bloomberg noted. The index is up an astounding 52% from the same time last year to 191.4.
The data, which is put together by Cox Automotive, “takes into account all U.S. sales through Cox’s Manheim automotive auctions that fall in to one of 20 different market classes”.
Cox Chief Economist Jonathan Smoke commented about the spike:
“Demand is perfectly stimulated from improving consumer sentiment, recovering jobs, accumulated pandemic savings, tax refund season, and American Rescue Plan cash payments.
Supply was decimated last year by COVID-19 shutdowns reducing new vehicle production, and used supply was reduced from strong demand last summer.
Production remains limited as supply chains struggle to overcome issues like the semiconductor shortages.”
Recall, we pointed out at the beginning of this month that low inventories and chip shortages had prices re-accelerating in 2021 – at a stunning rate – after a brief pause from October to December.
From 1995 to the end of 2019, used-vehicle prices have risen at around a 1.5% to 2.0% per annum (admittedly with some pops and drops along the way). The last year has seen prices rising at around 15% per annum… and April’s 6.1% spike MoM sent the year-over-year change in prices up a stunning 52.2%.
Source: Bloomberg
As we detailed previously, the current semiconductor shortage at automotive assembly plants and very light dealer inventories, especially in pickup trucks, is driving marginal demand here.
While many market observers suggest this pricing rebound should be viewed as a short-term phenomenon, WardsAuto.com notes that the trend has stubbornly continued.
And while low inventories have meant transaction volumes are admittedly much lower than they have been in the years leading up to 2020, this is another example of the importance of the used-vehicle segment in supporting the automotive industry’s recovery in the wake of a tumultuous pandemic year.
The low-inventory scenario on the new-vehicle side of the market has been, and will continue to be, particularly tough, limiting the mid- to-long-term outlook for used-vehicle supply.
Journalism is hard. To portray the world accurately to a layman audience without delving into the complexities and nuances of the universe we inhabit, writers must always simplify, explain, and make difficult content relatable for their readers. You can do this well and comprehensively, and you can do it poorly.
Often, writers simplify and give concrete examples with the best of intentions, even though I don’t put it past some of the activist writers out there to fudge what they portray and fidget with the details. But what really strikes a nerve with me is when writers end up misleading so grossly that their readers walk away with a completely twisted view of the world. The late Hans Rosling was a master at pricking the bubbles that these mistakes had created in our heads.
I have summarized his perhaps most valuable advice to Always Be Comparing Thy Number; never let numbers stand alone; always have readily available comparisons that let you answer the crucial questions: is that a lot? What was it last year? Ten years ago? Do informed researchers think it’s a lot?
Most of us don’t walk around with easily comparable frameworks for what’s a large and small number in areas we know nothing about – how many people normally die in car accidents or from medical errors, how long the Amazon River is or how much ice there is in the world. Implicitly or explicitly, we rely on fact-checking journalists to tell us in the process of covering the crucial topic they’re writing about.
Too often, they don’t. And not only do they neglect their professional role, they tend to make our misunderstandings worse when they actually engage in contrived comparisons. In any story that includes climate change this tendency seems to have gone completely haywire (maybe the covidocracy can give it a run for its money).
Far from being settled, climate science is tricky: we don’t know well what happens to global temperatures when atmospheric CO2 doubles (“climate sensitivity”); we can’t properly model clouds and cloud formation, crucial for how much of the sun’s incoming heat will be reflected away; the range for best-guesses as to what the global temperature rise over the coming century will be is vast (maybe 1° Celsius – maybe 5° Celsius) – so vast, in fact, that it hardly warrants a quantification.
Yet, the science is “settled,” we hear, and we must “listen to the scientists.”
The Sea Level Rise, the Olympic Swimming Pools, and the Football Fields
But the worst crime are the subtle throwaway lines that journalists tuck onto their coverage of impending doom that give a completely mistaken impression about the future of the world.
Let’s start with the Amazon.
The Amazon forest is huge. So huge, in fact, that few of us can even fathom how mind-bogglingly huge it is: numbers just won’t do it justice – does anyone have a reference point for what 5.5 million square meters look like? The main Amazon River, not considering its countless tributaries, is some 6,400 km long: traveling at a comfortable 20 km/h (12.5 mph), it would take you a good two weeks of traveling day and night – probably more because of weather, currents, and debris. The area of the forest itself is the size of all U.S. states west of the Mississippi (minus Alaska): from the Gulf to the Canadian border, the Pacific to the Mississippi, all covered in forest.
In addition to that, we have the Cerrado, an area south and east of the Amazon the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi, that’s technically tropical savannah but few of us would hesitate calling it forested.
When the scientific journal Nature has a headline that reads “deforestation rate in 2020 is the greatest of the decade,” they’re not lying. The BBC even trumped them a little by slapping “deforestation ‘surges to 12-year high’” on unsuspecting readers. So, we get the impression that Brazilian deforestation is really bad:
Here I overlaid a simple trendline and a ten-year moving average for illustration. The 11,000 km2 deforested last year was indeed the highest since 2008, but is dwarfed by what routinely came before it. More importantly, we must ask: is it a lot? If your target rate of deforestation – in the poorest areas of a relatively poor country, mind you – is zero (which it shouldn’t be), it looks like things are not just terrible but going the wrong way. A longer, and wider, perspective tells you otherwise.
It didn’t take long before BBC’s science editor, David Shukman, brought up the familiar “football field-per minute” metric. The area deforested last year was around 1,552,320 standard British football fields, or over 4,000 of them each day, for just under 3 football fields a minute. While Shukman and countless others have tried to make the topic visually understandable for a layperson – we can imagine the size of three adjacent football fields – our imagination is quickly swamped by a “massively large area that I can’t even grapple with.” Quickly, when we scale those minutes to hours and days, we get the impression that huge areas of this important forest is melting away faster than ice cream on a hot summer’s day.
But we already know that the Amazon forest alone is some 5,500,000 m2 large, the portion within Brazil’s borders some 4,000,000 m2. What was deforested last year, then, was less than 0.3% of the Brazilian forest left standing. Now, does it still sound like an incredibly vast amount? If we estimate that farmers and loggers deforest a similar amount in the next few years, and we ignore potential runaway feedback processes for a minute, Brazilians have enough forest for 360 years. We know enough about economic development and Kuznets curves to know that Brazilians won’t mindlessly deforest the Amazon for that long.
Yet, the picture the reader carries with them is one of runaway deforestation rather than a mild return to longer-term trend.
The world of ice isn’t much better.
Here we don’t employ the unhelpful and unscientific metric of football fields per minute, but Olympic swimming pools to gauge the amount of meltwater – or sea meter equivalents to compare amounts of ice (mostly in Antarctica and the Greenland Ice Sheet, or ‘GIS’).
The Guardian, always ready to deliver alarmism, reported that the GIS lost a record 530 billion metric tons of ice in 2019. Again, we’re faced with a number we can’t relate to. Is that a lot? The journalist kindly calculated that it’s about 1 million tons of ice per minute, but that still doesn’t quite cut it – where can I store a million tons of ice? Enter the swimming pools. Think seven of them, in some gigantic swimming facility, filled to the brim with Greenland ice. OK, I can somewhat picture that amount of ice. But then we add seven more pools the next second; and seven more, the next. Quickly we run into the same problem we did with the football fields: this is just a massive amount of ice that’s melting. The images flash before our eyes: an ice-free world, the extra water in the oceans sweeping over our cities and drowning us all, Day After Tomorrow-style.
For some unfathomable reason, the journalists forgot to report how incredibly large the GIS is – not to mention Antarctica at something like 10x its volume. The ice sheet that covers 80% of Greenland is a dome of permanent ice, 1.7 million m2 and some 2-3 km thick at its peak. Comparing it in size to U.S. states, it’s something like the area of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Montana combined, covered in kilometers of ice. Estimates put it at 2.85 million cubic kilometers of ice, from which we last year lost about 530 km3. That’s 0.02% of the ice sheet. Unless I displaced a few zeros somewhere – which wouldn’t even change my argument – the GIS has enough ice left to fill more Olympic swimming pools than the dollar values of all the assets in the world (where each dollar’s value represents one Olympic swimming pool of ice). It’s, um, a lot.
A listener to British statistician and economist Tim Harford’s show More or Less wondered about a figure he had heard in the media of 70 meters of sea level rise if all of Antarctica melted. Bethan Davies at University of London helps explain that if all the ice in the West Antarctica, East Antarctica, and Antarctic Peninsula ice sheets were to melt, we’d be looking at something like 58 meters rise in global sea levels. In her defense, Davies quickly dispelled any notions of that happening: zero, nada, zilch. Antarctica’s vast ice sheets probably will contribute to sea level rises over the next century, but nothing like the 50+ meters that scary hypothetical calculations like those conjure up – with walls of ocean water suddenly battering down our coastal lands.
Still, journalists keep talking about a future without ice, about ice-free summers in the Arctic, and casually throwing in “sea level rise if x were to melt completely” as if x was in any danger of melting away entirely over anything but geological time frames. This places the completely wrong ideas in their readers’ heads and gravely misinforms the public about the world.
Doctors abide by the “First, do no harm” promise. Maybe journalists should too.
Under Armor Rescues Billionaire Kevin Plank’s Shaky Port Covington Project
Former Under Armor founder Kevin Plank’s Port Covington project in Baltimore City is one of the largest urban revitalization projects in the US. Earlier this week, Under Armour, announced plans to move its global headquarters to Port Covington, effectively saving the billionaire from a forced exit of the project by Goldman Sachs, according to Baltimore Brew.
Plank’s Port Covington project is a much different one than what was initially announced in 2016. Plank personally bought up all the land in the area and sold it in 2016 to the athletic footwear and apparel maker for $70 million. During that period, a series of bonds issued by Baltimore City left taxpayers on the hook for $137 million.
On Monday, Under Armor announced a scaled-down version of the Port Covington project. The move saved the billionaire from a forced sale of his land around the project area. Several years ago, Plank entered into a joint venture agreement with Goldman Sachs in return for construction financing.
The venture notes that if Under Armour “determines not to proceed with the development of its headquarters or moves its headquarters anywhere that is not within the Port Covington peninsula,” Goldman Sachs has the ability to force Plank to sell his Port Covington property. Now it’s important to note that Plank owns everything north of Cromwell Street and west of Hanover Street, while Under Armour owns the land south of Cromwell Street.
Here’s Goldman’s legal jargon titled “Under Armour Exit Event” that explains what happens if Under Armor doesn’t commit to Port Covington:
Monday’s press release was timely since the land has sat dormant for seven years with the initial promise of building a city within a city. What becomes more evident is that Plank needed to show Goldman Sachs some progress the land would be developed.
Plank’s vision from the start was a moon shot. The project has since been drastically scaled down. Under Armour’s current CEO Patrik Frisk blamed it on a “post-Covid reality.” Their newly proposed Port Covington headquarters will be much smaller than 2016 designs, mostly due to today’s hybrid work environment.
So how much scaled back?
Well, in 2016, Plank promised Under Armour would build a 3.9 million-square-foot campus at Port Covington. He even said the city within the city would add 10,000 plus jobs to the community. Now the company has committed to 310,000 square feet of new space and has shrunk its workforce after years of layoffs to 1,700. The addition of local jobs is expected to be a fraction of what was initially proposed.
Plank also said Baltimore would receive $6.9 billion of offices, apartments, retail district, and affordable housing, all under original designs. This was more than enough for the city of Baltimore to issue a $660 million of city-backed TIF (tax increment) bond financing for the project.
From the beginning, the project seemed too good to be true. After 2016, the company’s equity tanked amid layoffs, restructurings, and accounting probes by the SEC.
After Plank was removed as CEO from the company in late 2019 and demoted to executive chairman and brand chief – his private real estate venture, Sagamore Development, was also rebranded as the Weller Development Co., operated by two of his close associates, as he took a step back. Though likely pulling the strings in the background.
For Plank to access the TIF bond, he would need Under Armour to commit to building at Port Covington. Such a move would allow him to refinance $77.5 million in property mortgages and receive $25.3 million in “soft costs” he claims to have spent on engineering, architecture, and lobbying costs for the project.
Billionaire Plank was “saved by the bell,” or instead, a press release.
Daily Briefing: Relentless Markets & Paper Cuts: The Return of Volatility?
Real Vision senior editor Ash Bennington hosts managing editor Ed Harrison and editor Jack Farley for a live talk on the biggest market-moving stories as the week comes to a close. Harrison covers credit and shares additional thoughts on “The Great Biden Tax Grab.” Bennington makes sense of today’s economic data and takes a look at the cooling-off of crypto prices as well as the widening spread between the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and its net asset value. Farley looks at price action in commodities such as lumber, oil, as well as the recent shocking news from Kimberly Clark that the bull market in toilet paper could be over.
