Category: zerohedge

A vibrant economic recovery of America’s largest city that is New York City, depends on the return of office workers; otherwise, the absence of white-collar folks means a painful recovery is ahead. 

As of Sept. 18, about six months after the virus pandemic began, only 10% of Manhattan office workers were back, according to The Wall Street Journal, quoting commercial real estate services and investment firm CBRE Group Inc.’s latest report. That represents a slight uptick from the 6% to 8% level seen in July, a month after strict social distancing measures were eased because of the virus pandemic. 

Months and months of empty office buildings across the borough paralyzed the local economy, which resulted in a collapse in consumption as workers stayed home. The spillover effect has since led to a collapse in small businesses across the area. 

CBRE’s report noted on a national level, about a quarter of office workers returned to their desks in September. The figure was higher in certain metropolitan areas such as Dallas at 40% and the Los Angeles metro area at 32%. The reoccupation rate across NYC is 32%. 

The low rate of office workers returning to Manhattan is a significant disappointment for anyone who remotely thought NYC’s economic recovery would resemble a “V” by the fourth quarter of 2020. 

With new clusters of cases emerging in Brooklyn and NYC’s northern suburbs in recent days, new fears of restrictions to businesses and schools could be nearing. 

Already, mobility trends around the city, according to Apple’s Mobility Trends Tracker, shows driving, walking, and transit is slumping as the virus cases are increasing in the city. 

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said “significant action” is needed to mitigate the spread of the virus in hot spot areas.  A continued rise in cases could affect the city’s reopening of schools. 

New virus developments come as NYC prepares this week to reopen public schools and permit restaurants to allow some indoor dining. A surge in the virus and the slow return to the workplace suggests a vibrant recovery in the real economy won’t be seen this year. A direct consequence of the virus-induced downturn is the implosion of commercial real estate woes, an exodus of city-dwellers to suburbs, jump in murders and homelessness, and the collapse of small businesses. 

So again, remind us how the real economy is in a “V” recovery? 

By John Hirschauer of RealClearEducation

Those viral moments, however, fail to capture the state of free expression on campus in its full nuance and complexity. To provide a more detailed look at the state of speech at American colleges and universities, RealClearEducation collaborated with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the survey-research group College Pulse on the 2020 College Free Speech Survey.

Nearly 20,000 undergraduates at 55 major American colleges and universities participated in the survey. Students were asked a series of questions, meant to gauge their own commitment to free speech and their perception of their peers’ tolerance for diverse points of view. Institutions were ranked according to student sentiment on free expression. 

The results were dispiriting. As RealClearEducation’s Nathan Harden highlighted on Tuesday, nearly “20% of students say that using violence to stop an unwanted speech or event is in some cases acceptable,” and some 60 percent of the undergraduates surveyed “say they have kept quiet due to fear of how others would respond.”

One university in particular stands out for the discrepancy between its official posture on free speech and the views of its students on the state of speech on campus. Georgetown University, which hosts the Free Speech Project at Georgetown University and is apparently committed to promoting free expression, struggled mightily in the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings, ranking 48th out of the 55 colleges and universities included. 

A granular look at the data from Georgetown is startling. Forty percent of Georgetown undergraduates surveyed were not confident that the administration would support an embattled speaker in a free-speech controversy. Sixty-eight percent of students felt that it might be acceptable to shout down a speaker on campus, while 17% felt it could be acceptable in some cases to use violence to stop a speech on campus. This atmosphere of intolerance extends to the classroom, many students said. When asked to share a moment where the student felt unable to express an opinion on campus, one Georgetown student wrote, “In almost every class, I feel like I [cannot] express my opinions.” 

Georgetown’s code of conduct contains regulations that have the effect of stifling speech and negatively affecting the school’s overall score. For example, “incivility”– defined as any language that “disrespects another individual” – is forbidden at Georgetown, and “uncivil” students could face disciplinary actions for their remarks. This creates a potential chilling effect on speech, and “disrespect” can, of course, have an expansive definition in the hair-trigger world of undergraduate education. 

Dr. Joshua Mitchell, who teaches political theory in Georgetown’s Government department, is not surprised that many students are uncomfortable expressing themselves candidly in class. “I’ll teach something in class that questions a politically correct position on a particular issue, and when I do, I’ll get crickets. No one will speak up and say anything. Then, students will come to office hours and say, ‘I agree with you, but I could never say it publicly.’” 

“It is a complicated picture,” Mitchell said. “It’s not as though faculty and administration at Georgetown are actively suppressing conservative speech – it’s subtler than that, for the most part. When there is an opportunity to replace a conservative faculty member, for example, the faculty will decide that they’re not going to replace him. There is a quiet agreement not to reach out to people on the other side.” When the faculty is almost exclusively comprised of professors with one worldview, Mitchell said, students who disagree with the prevailing views of the faculty are less likely to speak up.

A Georgetown University spokesperson responded to a request for comment by noting that the university “is committed to the free and open exchanges of ideas, even if those ideas may be found difficult or objectionable by some.” The spokesperson said that Georgetown’s “long-standing Speech and Expression policy has guided our approach to speech while maintaining the fundamental right of members of our community to free expression, dialogue and academic inquiry. We respect members of our community’s right to express personal views and are committed to maintaining the values of academic freedom and serving as a forum for the free exchange of ideas, even when those ideas may be controversial and objectionable to some.”

While the university reaffirmed its commitment to free expression, Dr. Mitchell laments that many students “don’t see many alternatives” to the “hegemony of identity politics.” He thinks that the identitarian focus of many administrators is fostering an arid, “choreographed” conversation about difficult political issues on campus. Mitchell is hopeful, however, that things will improve. “There has been a subtle turn in the student body. There is a generational shift,” he said. “Many of the younger students at Georgetown know that the account identity politics gives is not adequate, and that you cannot build a society around it.”

The U.S. wild pig population is rapidly increasing across the country, which has been characterized as a ticking “feral swine bomb,” according to a new report. 

“I’ve heard it referred to as a feral swine bomb,” Dale Nolte, manager of the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program (NFSP) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), told The Atlantic.

Nolte said, “they multiply so rapidly. To go from a thousand to two thousand, it’s not a big deal. But if you’ve got a million, it doesn’t take long to get to 4 [million], then 8 million.”

Feral swine have caused significant damage to property, agriculture (crops and livestock), native species, and ecosystems, with an estimated damage cost of upwards $2.5 billion per annum. The hogs have a reputation for carrying at least 30 viral and bacterial diseases and at least 40 parasites. 

Ryan Brook, a University of Saskatchewan biologist who researches feral pigs, estimates these highly invasive species will occupy 386,000 square miles across the country by the end of 2020. At the moment, the hogs are expanding at about 35,000 square miles per year.

Brook said many of the wild pigs are a crossbreed between domestic ones and European wild boar:

“The problem with the hybrids is you get all of the massive benefits of all of that genetics… It creates what we’d call super-pigs.,” he said. 

According to Nolte, these super pigs are highly intelligent and have a good sense of smell, along with a shield of bone, up to 2 inches thick, around their shoulders, which offers some protection against small-caliber bullets. 

At least 1.5 million of these hogs roam Texas, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife; these pigs have four tusks and are brown and black color once they mature. They can weigh between 75 to 250 pounds on average, and run up to 30 mph. 

“Pig populations are completely out of control,” Brook warned. 

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Over the last few days, a swarm of almost 600 earthquakes has shaken southern California, and a lot of people are becoming extremely concerned about what will happen next.  In fact, if you go on Twitter right now you will find a tremendous amount of speculation that “the Big One” could be coming.  The experts are trying to calm the general public by assuring them that it is probably not likely that “the Big One” is imminent, but they don’t know for sure.  Forecasting earthquakes is not like forecasting the weather, and experts will continue to tell us that a major event is not likely until the day when one finally happens.

But what everyone can agree upon is that earthquake swarms cause the probability of a major event to rise.  Of course that doesn’t mean that there will be a major event associated with this current earthquake swarm, and there may not be a major event if an earthquake swarm occurs next month.  But without a doubt what is going on in southern California right now is worth watching.

According to the Los Angeles Times, this current swarm of quakes has been centered “around the town of Westmoreland in Imperial County”…

A swarm of hundreds of small earthquakes struck in and around the town of Westmoreland in Imperial County over the past couple days

The Southern California Seismic Network recorded nearly 600 earthquakes, the smallest a magnitude 1.1, as of 6 a.m. Thursday, according to a report from the project by Caltech and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Most of the rumbling has been relatively minor, but during a period of less than three hours on Wednesday there were 45 earthquakes of at least magnitude 3.0…

‘In just 2.5hr Westmorland swarm has had 45 quakes of M≥3.0. One of the largest swarms we have had in the Imperial Valley – and it is historically the most active swarms in SoCal,’ seismologist Dr Lucy Jones wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night.

A magnitude 4.9 quake has been the largest event so far, and we shall see what else happens over the next several days.

According to Dr. Lucy Jones, this earthquake swarm has occurred along some small faults “that connect the San Andreas and Imperial faults”…

None of the earthquakes that have been happening in the Imperial Valley are anywhere near the San Andreas fault. They are in the Brawley Seismic Zone – a network of small faults that connect the San Andreas and Imperial faults.

This is an area that has had some pretty serious earthquake swarms in the past.

In fact, the USGS is telling us that there were also large swarms in the area in 1981 and in 2012…

The quake swarms “are located in an area of diffuse seismic activity between the San Andreas fault in the north and the Imperial fault to the south,” the USGS says. Previous swarms in the area happened in 1981 and 2012.

“Past swarms have remained active for 1 to 20 days, with an average duration of about a week,” the USGS reported.

Obviously the swarms of 1981 and 2012 did not produce something much larger, and hopefully this one will not either.

But the USGS is warning that there is a “very small probability” that a quake of magnitude 7.0 or above could potentially happen…

‘The ongoing swarm could trigger an earthquake significantly larger than the M4.9 that occurred on the 30 September (i.e., M7.0 and above),’ they warned.

‘While this is a very small probability, if such an earthquake were to occur, it would have serious impacts on communities nearby and would be followed by aftershocks that would increase the number of smaller earthquakes per day.’

However, as I noted above, the truth is that they don’t really know.

None of the experts has any way to reliably forecast earthquakes in advance, and someday when “the Big One” finally strikes there may not be any sort of advance warning at all.

But the experts do believe that it is inevitable that eventually “the Big One” will arrive, and one particularly alarming study concluded that the full length of the San Andreas fault could potentially “unzip all at once”….

For years, scientists believed the mighty San Andreas—the 800-mile-long fault running the length of California where the Pacific and North American plates meet—could only rupture in isolated sections.

But a recent study by federal, state and academic researchers showed that much of the fault could unzip all at once, unleashing a rare, singular catastrophe. Now, insurers have used that research to come up with a new analysis of the damage that could be caused by statewide break of the San Andreas.

Could you imagine the utter devastation that such an event would cause?

Scientists have discovered that enormous earthquakes in the distant past caused the ground to sink by as much as three feet in some portions of southern California, and some scientists have warned that if such an event happened today that “it could plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly”…

The Big One may be overdue to hit California, but scientists near LA have found a new risk for the area during a major earthquake.

They claim that if a major tremor hits the area, it could plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly.

If you have read my new book, you already understand why I keep relentlessly warning people about these things.

Unfortunately, one day the time for warning will be over and disaster will strike.  According to Cal State Fullerton professor Matt Kirby, a big enough quake could cause vast stretches of southern California to sink dramatically “relatively instantaneously”…

‘It´s something that would happen relatively instantaneously,’ Kirby said.

‘Probably today if it happened, you would see seawater rushing in.’

Right now, most people living in California are not thinking about earthquakes because they are dealing with the worst wildfire season in the history of the state.

Millions of acres have already burned, and the skies have been filled with smoke for weeks on end.

For many residents, this has been the final straw and they are finally moving out of the state.

But of course most Californians will just continue to stay where they are no matter what happens, and one day “the Big One” will turn all of their lives upside down in a single moment.

Real Vision CEO and co-founder, Raoul Pal, joins senior editor, Ash Bennington, to interpret the latest financial newsflow. Raoul explores the possibility of a top forming in U.S. equities through the lens of his “GMI crash pattern.” He and Ash then analyze President Trump’s diagnosis of COVID-19 and investigate its potential market impact. Raoul then talks about today’s interview with hedge fund legend Dmitry Balyasny as well as next week’s interview with bond kingpin Jeffrey Gundlach. Raoul and Ash briefly discuss the criminal charges brought against BitMEX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges. Lastly, Raoul shares his view on the enfeebled energy sector. In the intro, Real Vision’s Jack Farley breaks down the price action following the COVID-19 outbreak in the White House.

US intelligence, the Pentagon, and national security officials are closely monitoring how America’s rivals and enemies “react” to Thursday night’s shock news of President Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis, for which he’s since said to be exhibiting mild symptoms.

“The U.S. military stands ready to defend our country and its citizens,” Joint Staff spokesperson Col. Dave Butler said Friday, according to Politico. “There’s no change to the readiness or capability of our armed forces.”

“What we are anticipating is that the Russian actors and probably the Iranians will play this up,” one anonymous defense official also added. Further the countries of China and North Korea are also being monitored, according to the report.

Specifically US intelligence will scrutinizing any “subtle increase in activity against us, knowing we are preoccupied, and the opportunity to test us, perhaps,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA Senior Intelligence Service officer, described to Politico.

The former CIA officer emphasized that “Our enemies will see us in a vulnerable state.”

And another defense official stated:

“There is always the possibility that adversaries will seek to exploit the information space and talk propaganda…We are definitely monitoring and keeping aware.”

Typically such “monitoring” takes place in foreign media observation rooms set up within most intelligence agency branch HQs, which reports to the chain of command major developments conveyed via foreign state news organizations abroad.

Meanwhile Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who serves on the powerful Committee on Foreign Relations, had this warning for US adversaries:

Any adversary who views news of @POTUS testing positive as an opportunity to test the United States would be making a grave mistake.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) October 2, 2020

Other commentators wondered about the near future possibility of a 25th Amendment crisis being triggered, transferring head of state powers to the Vice President.

Still others questioned whether the opaque and controversial ‘Continuity of Government’ protocols, which were subject to post 9/11 discussion and debate in media for a time, might eventually be triggered should the president’s health turn dire.

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

This week provided additional confirmation that America is fully committed to a program of currency destruction.  Decades of terminal intelligence have gotten us to this special place.  We’ll have more on this in a moment.  But first some words on being fully committed.

We’ve never gutted a hog.  But we hear it’s a bloody mess.  The volume of blood that gushes out – as in, ‘bleeding like a stuck pig’ – is profuse.

Contemplating a bacon and egg breakfast plate reveals two types of commitment.  That of the chicken.  And that of the pig.  You may know this allegory.  The chicken’s involved in providing for the breakfast.  It provides the eggs.  But the pig’s fully committed to it.  For the pig must perish to provide the bacon.

America is presently bleeding like a stuck pig.  Public and private debts are hemorrhaging a bloody mess.  For example, the budget deficit for fiscal year 2020, which concluded on September 30, was $3.3 trillion.  By this, the federal government spent double what it generated via tax receipts and other confiscatory measures.  And the federal debt held by the public is now over 100 percent of GDP.

There’s no way the debt will be honestly paid.  It’s mathematically impossible.  Nor will it be paid through an honest default.  That’s politically unacceptable.

The debt, however, will be paid dishonestly.  It will be paid through dollar debasement.  America is fully committed to this.  Here’s why…

Words of Omission

Tuesday’s presidential debate has been called many things.  Most descriptions have cast it in a negative light.  Some political pundits used French to describe, in colorful terms, what type of show it was.

Here at the Economic Prism we offer a different assessment.  Namely, we found the presidential debate to be invigorating.  Like a New Year’s Day polar bear plunge, or a predawn distance jog, it was so painful that it was enjoyable.

President Trump’s grumpy bombast and bluster.  Biden’s scratching attempt to overcome his slide toward senility.  Utter disregard for facts.  And Chris Wallace, once again, striving, yet failing, to be Mike Wallace.

It was the sort of spectacle that demonstrates public degradation is integral to democratic government.  To be president, you must simultaneously sell your soul and roll around in the gutter.  For this reason, we give the debate a five star seal of approval.  However, the debate also offered another critical insight…

There were words that shouldn’t have been said.  There were also words that should have been said.  You see, words, and the absence of words, can be distractions.  And within a sequence of words there are sometimes obvious omissions.

Nowhere within the 98 minute presidential debate was there a single word of the country’s burgeoning $3.3 trillion budget deficit.  Nowhere was there a single word of the great $26.8 trillion national debt default that’s conflagrating like a savage windblown California wildfire.

Nowhere was there mention of the fake money system and the insidious way it concentrates wealth in the upper most end of the wealth spectrum.  Nowhere was there mention of the $157.7 trillion in unfunded liabilities, which includes the sacred cows of social security and Medicare.

Not from Trump.  Not from Biden.  Not even from Wallace the Younger.  What Gives?  Where’s the opposition?

The real issue at hand – the one omitted from debate – is the present crisis brought on by 50 years of relentless debt accumulation.  Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, the federal government has spent more than it takes in.  Now the debt has piled up past the point of no return; there’s no longer an expedient way to reverse course.

This is the real topic for debate.  This is the story that’s being entirely ignored by both presidential candidates.  This is the story of America’s decline.  This is a story that’s too grim to mention.  And this obvious omission from Tuesday’s debate is what makes the affair nothing more than a great big distraction.

“In America Money Does Grow on Trees”

The U.S. government, and by extension the American people, are fully committed to a program of currency debasement to inflate away the debt problem.  They believe executing an implicit default via inflation is the easier and softer way.

Intelligent minds, from John Law to Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, from John Maynard Keynes to Milton Friedman to Ben S. Bernanke, from Benjamin Strong to Alan Greenspan to Jerome Powell, and everyone in between, have promised something for nothing.  They’ve put their intelligent minds to the task…

Countercyclical stimulus spending.  Interest rate suppression.  Quantitative easing.  Elastic currencies.  Money shuffling.  Inflation targeting.  Smoke and mirrors.

…all so governments, and individuals, can spend well above what they can afford, and then welsh on the debt without consequences.  The ultimate gift of this intelligence is terminal.

But why stop now?  Americans, like a pig supplying bacon, are fully committed.

The hottest incarnation of terminal intelligence is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).  According to its purveyors, the USA can print all the money it needs to amplify the economy – debts and deficits be damned.

MMT, no doubt, is a system of big government statists.  A system where governments can hatch boondoggles without limits.  The whole theory, or lack thereof, is absurd.  But a growing base of supporters find it alluring.

The latest MMT messiah, Stephanie Kelton, has a new book.  It’s called, “The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy,” and it’s getting rave reviews from unlikely places.  Upon reading the book, gangasta rap pioneer, Ice Cube, for example, tweeted the following means of salvation:

“America loves to cry broke.  But in America money does grow on trees.”

You can already see what’s coming…

When financial markets crack, and the economy collapses, and the populace pleads for someone to “do something,” the President and Congress will oblige with full commitment.  MMT – or QE for the people – will be granted with money from nothing.  Debts will be paid in full.  And like the pig, the dollar will perish.

Enjoy the bacon while it lasts.

The world’s most developed countries are seeing population growth slow to a crawl, with the population of Japan, the EU and the US now expected to shrink between now and the beginning of the latter half of the 21st Century. As we noted on Jan. 1, the US recorded the slowest rate of population growth in a century between 2018 and 2019, thanks to the one-two punch of lower birth rates and declining immigration.

But the US is in comparatively good shape relative to Japan, which is already seeing deaths outstrip births.

With more younger people delaying family formation to focus on their careers, millennials are having children later than any prior generation. And as economists try to parse the long-term impact on the coronavirus pandemic on long-term demographic trends, it looks like – if anything – the outbreak has further soured many millennials on the notion of child-rearing.

A new study from Morning Consult found that 15% of millennials are less interested in having children because of the pandemic, while 17% said they would delay having children because of it. Another 7% said they’re now more interested in having children (perhaps after bonding with a relatively new partner during the lockdowns).

To be sure, MC surveyed 4,400 adults from Sept. 8-10, with a margin of error of 1 percentage point; the number of childless adults surveyed totaled 2,201 people with a 2 percentage point margin of error, and the margin of error for the childless millennials subsample is 4 points.

“That’s a very dramatic change in behavior,” said Dr. Phillip Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College and former senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers who studies the economics of fertility. “All these things are foreshadowing what we might expect to see happen in a few months, when we see the first of the children conceived during the pandemic start being born.”

When asked why they don’t want kids, millennials cite myriad reasons all of which relate back to not feeling financially secure enough (though a few cited climate change).

Put another way: the “baby bust” seen over the last ten years as millennials waited longer to have children could end up looking less like a “blip” and more like a permanent, long-lasting trend. Especially as more child care responsibilities shift away from schools and toward parents, making having a child in the near term even less attractive for young people with few financial resources to draw on.

Authored by James Bovard via The American Institute for Economic Research,

“People want to be safe,” Joe Biden repeatedly declared in Tuesday night’s debate. The 2020 presidential race could turn into a referendum on whether vastly increasing government power can provide “freedom from fear.” This has been a recurring theme in recent American history that consistently brings out the worst in both politicians and voters. 

The 2020 presidential campaign thus far has plenty of unpleasant parallels to 9/11 and the 2004 election. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were the biggest intelligence failure by U.S. government agencies since Pearl Harbor. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ignored bushels of evidence of an international conspiracy and a bucket of warnings that Arabs with terrorist connections were receiving pilot training inside the U.S. Yet, after the attacks terrified the nation, polls speedily showed a doubling in the percentage of Americans who trusted government to “do the right thing.” The media fanned this blind faith as if it was the high road to public safety. President George W. Bush exploited that credulity to seize far more power and to deceive the nation into war against Iraq. 

While Bush is now being lionized by the establishment media (thanks to his criticisms of Trump), few people recall that he ran the most fear-mongering presidential reelection campaign in modern American history. Bush 2004 campaign ads showed firemen carrying a flag-draped corpse from the rubble at Ground Zero in New York and a pack of wolves coming to attack home viewers as an announcer warned that “weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.” One commentator suggested that the ad hinted that voters would be eaten by wolves if John Kerry won.

Just before 2004 Election Day a senior GOP strategist told the New York Daily News that “anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush.” People who saw terrorism as the biggest issue in the 2004 election voted for Bush by a 6 to 1 margin. Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, observed that the Bush campaign was “using the fear factor almost exclusively. This is a highly researched decision with all the tools of public opinion management. It’s nothing but a reflection that it works.” 

Like the federal failures preceding the 9/11 attacks, the Covid pandemic was far more damaging because of testing and other blunders by the Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration. The World Health Organization spurred disastrous policies by forecasting a mortality that was 50 times higher than the rate the U.S. experienced. The pointless, punitive lockdowns imposed by governors and mayors disrupted hundreds of millions of American lives while doing little or nothing to curb the spread of the virus to seven million Americans. In the same way that Bush lionized federal agencies after 9/11 despite their failures to prevent the attacks, Biden and his media allies are pushing for blind faith in “data and science” – regardless of the debacles we have seen this year. 

One epidemiologist suggests that Covid-19 should actually be called SARS-NoV-3. Biden and the Democratic Party are seeking power by seeking voters to hold Trump personally responsible for more than 200,000 Americans dying from the pandemic. In his public comments, Biden has repeatedly wildly exaggerated the death toll, publicly asserting that millions of Americans have been killed by Covid-19. It is difficult to know if Biden was intentionally misleading audiences or was momentarily clueless. 

In Tuesday’s debate, Biden looked into the camera and asked viewers:

“How many of you got up this morning and had an empty chair at the kitchen table because someone died of Covid?”

It is most unlikely that people would have such an empty chair – unless they resided in a nursing home. The Justice Department Office of Civil Rights is currently investigating “governors of states that issued orders which may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of elderly nursing home residents. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan required nursing homes to admit Covid-19 patients to their vulnerable populations, often without adequate testing.” 

Biden has responded to the fears he helped fanned by proposing a national lockdown if Covid infection rates rise if he is elected president. Rather than learning from the failures of earlier lockdowns, Biden proffers a bigger Reverse Neutron Bomb – something that obliterates the remnants of the economy and schooling while purportedly preserving the lives (if not the sanity) of the people locked into their homes.

In the 2004 election, Bush narrowly defeated John Kerry, aided in part by a slew of bogus terrorist attack warnings that injected last-minute tremors into many voters. The next five weeks could bring many similar pandemic false alarms, perhaps spurred by bogus test data that is even more shameless than the FBI’s 2004 ludicrous “booby-trapped beer coolers” terrorist alert to get the redneck vote out for George W. 

Democrats have periodically portrayed themselves as the party of civil liberties but they cannot afford that pretense when playing the Pandemic Panic Card. As federal judge William Stickman IV recently ruled, “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” Attorney General William Barr was even more blunt, warning that imposing “a national lockdown, stay-at-home orders, is like house arrest. It’s — you know, other than slavery… this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”

The 2020 election may turn on how many Americans remain utterly terrified by the political-media alarms on Covid-19. British philosopher John Stuart Mill warned in 1842: “Persons of timid character are the more predisposed to believe any statement, the more it is calculated to alarm them.” It is almost irrelevant whether 10 or 20 or 30 percent of the citizenry can see through a politician’s fearmongering.  In a democracy, as long as enough people can be frightened, all people can be subjugated. 

Biden is effectively promising to rescue people who “want to be safe.” But there is nothing in either his record or the records of federal agencies or governors to indicate that people would be better off closeted until notified it is safe to come out. In the long run, people have more to fear from politicians than from viruses.

Turkey’s Anadolu Agency has released gruesome never-before-seen footage related to journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder. It is the second anniversary of his killing at the hands of a hit team believed sent by crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. 

No less than 15 men were sent to kill one individual who ran afoul of MbS, which included a bone saw used to dismember his body as he entered the consulate to do paperwork related to his impending marriage. Now for the first time police footage has been published of Turkish forensics investigators showing up to document what they found.

Cemal Kaşıkçı’nın öldürüldüğü yerin görüntüleri ortaya çıktı pic.twitter.com/efKlHM9i7v

— ANADOLU AJANSI (@anadoluajansi) October 2, 2020

The police footage appears to show scattered clothing, as well as fluids on the walls – likely blood – revealed through crime scene UV blacklight.

It also shows a drainage pipe to a sewage area below, possibly used to dispose of the remains; however, Khashoggi’s body was never found.

Recall that the Turks released to the world a slow drip of damning information meant to put immense pressure on the Saudis over the killing, and which proved politically embarrassing in the weeks and months after the Oct. 2018 murder. It appears they are at it again now with this previously classified crime scene footage.

Oh my dear lord. Turkish news agency releases new footage from forensic team’s investigation of the site of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and subsequent discarding of his remains. https://t.co/oT1OZ8C86m

— İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي (@iyad_elbaghdadi) October 2, 2020

On Friday Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office called for the true killers who ordered and executed the hit to be punished.

“Jamal’s killers have since been exfiltrated. Harboured. Brought to a show trial. Allowed to walk free,” Fahrettin Altun, Erdogan’s communications director, said in a tweet.

“We all know Jamal’s killers. Let’s make them pay: Send the Saudi henchmen to Turkey. Let them appear in a public court with international observers. Cooperate with the criminal investigation in Turkey – the only investigation that was ever intended to shed light on what happened.”

We all know Jamal’s killers. Let’s make them pay:
Send the Saudi henchmen to Turkey.
Let them appear in a public court with international observers.
Cooperate with the criminal investigation in Turkey – the only investigation that was ever intended to shed light on what happened.

— Fahrettin Altun (@fahrettinaltun) October 2, 2020

Saudi Arabia announced early last month that eight of its citizens have been convicted by a Saudi court for the grizzly slaying, and were given 20 years each. A prior 2019 trial had sentenced five to execution, but was later overturned.

Since the killing Riyadh has issued multiple conflicting narratives – all of which appear crafted to shield MbS and the royal family from any ultimate blame.

Indeed the 35-year old crown prince appears to have gotten off scot-free, and is soon due to become king given his father’s continued ill health.