Category: zerohedge

Authored by Josh Hammer via The Epoch Times,

Higher education might be the most pressing domestic issue confronting America today. As currently structured and carried out, higher education is a blight upon the nation—an affirmative hindrance to our efforts in aiding human flourishing and securing the common good. It is possible that no propagated belief in modern American history has been more intellectually, experientially and fiscally ruinous than the notion that a four-year bachelor’s degree-bestowing bender is a necessary rite of passage for entering adulthood.

Caviling about the systemic corruption of the academy is perhaps old hat. By the time William F. Buckley Jr. wrote “God and Man at Yale” in 1951, the metamorphosis of America’s ivory tower into something closely approximating a fifth column was well underway. But the situation has, in recent decades, worsened; it has metastasized into a cancer whose tendrils spread the latest faddish developments in intersectional, anti-American, anti-Western “woke-ism” all throughout the land.

It is both terrifying and perverse that America’s intellectual gatekeepers—the “elite”-forming, credentialing institutions that separate the “deplorables” from the ruling class—impress self-loathing pablum upon impressionable young minds. With some notable exceptions, American higher education today comprises madrasas of wokeness fundamentally hostile to the American regime and the American way of life. Many of the far left’s most toxic ideas, whether moral relativism, socialism, “anti-racism” or multiculturalism, either begin on campus or gain steam there. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of the more popular policies in conservative egghead circles today is to expand loan access to, and accreditation support for, trade school alternatives to traditional four-year bachelor’s degree-granting programs.

Intellectual bankruptcy notwithstanding, there are manifold more tangible problems associated with the failed higher education status quo. Four years spent on campus between the ages of 18 and 22 means four prime years forgone from acquiring vocational skills, advancing a career, and mating and forming families. It also often means, due in part to the federal government’s effective monopoly over the student loan industry, four years of willful indebtedness to major in such patently silly “subjects” as “gender studies.” Student loans are now the second-largest source of collective American debt, behind only mortgage debt. By some staggering estimates, Americans have over $1.5 trillion in student loan debt.

The modern Democratic Party is heavily reliant on woke college graduates for political support, and many on the left have warmed in recent years to large-scale student loan “forgiveness” (at least as a halfway measure, compared to the far left’s support for universal free college). Most recently, the likely incoming president, Democrat Joe Biden, has called for “immediate” forgiveness of $10,000 of student loan debt for borrowers.

This policy is idiotic in the extreme and brazenly immoral. Republicans and sensible Democrats must unite to defeat it.

The higher education-student loan complex is in desperate need of more transparency and accountability—not more bailouts. A prudent first step would be for creditors, whether public or (ideally) private, to present clear information about salaries and career paths for graduating high school seniors to consider before they commit to taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to major in “ethnic studies.” The worst possible thing we could do would be a mass bailout of this nature, which would initiate a vicious, never-ending cycle of tuition spikes, more indebtedness and more bailouts. It is a quintessential exercise in trying to apply a Band-Aid to a grievously slit artery.

Think the moral hazard problems associated with the 2008 bank bailouts were bad? Wait until you see where this irresponsible experiment could end.

Numerous other problems abound. Such a bailout is inherently regressive, as it would disproportionately benefit woke children who decided they could afford four years of the decadent ivory tower wasteland, and disproportionately harm taxpayers who themselves did not go to college. Such a bailout would also be manifestly unfair to those graduates who have diligently worked to pay off their loans in earnest—even if it meant forsaking jobs they otherwise would have preferred to take in favor of jobs that pay more. In other words, such a bailout would inculcate the worst lessons in fiscal imprudence and recklessness—all while letting the universities off the hook for their running what amounts to one sustained racket.

American higher education needs a wrecking ball—not a bailout.

The virus pandemic is accelerating the trend of robots replacing humans in the workplace. One robot that is quickly being adopted by mega-corporations is Boston Dynamics’ compact four-legged robot, called Spot. 

June was the month when Boston Dynamics began selling Spot. By July, Ford Motor Company received the robot dog, equipped with five cameras to survey its Van Dyke Transmission Plant in Michigan. 

Ford employed the four-legged robot over human surveyors to save money and time. The Michigan-based automobile manufacture isn’t the only company embracing robot dogs to complete mundane tasks generally performed by humans. Reuters notes BP Plc has programed Spot to “read gauges, look for corrosion, map out the facility, and even sniff out methane on its Mad Dog rig.” 

Adam Ballard, BP’s facilities technology manager, said the robot dog would make working on an offshore oil rig safer by reducing the number of people. He said the tasks Spot would be assigned will free up personnel to focus on other mission-critical assignments. 

“Several hours a day, several operators will walk the facility; read gauges; listen for noise that doesn’t sound right; look out at the horizon for anomalies, boats that may not be caught on radar; look for sheens. 

“What we’re doing with Spot is really trying to replicate that observation piece,” Ballard said, adding that an operator could then review the information from a central location.

“We believe a lot of that up-front, remote work preparation can be done with a remotely-controlled robot… being able to pan, tilt, zoom and really understand the entire area in real conditions, real-time,” he said.

Watch: Spot Learns New Tricks On Oil Rig 

BP hopes Spot’s ability to gather data on oil rigs will cut down human personnel throughout rigs located in the Gulf of Mexico.

We’re sure other companies will follow Ford or BP in the rush to automate their workforce under the cover of the virus pandemic.

This comes as SoftBank Group Corp., the owner of Boston Dynamics, is exploring a sale of the company to Hyundai Motor Co., according to Bloomberg, suggesting upon the sale, Spot could be slated for mass production. 

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics.com,

Amid the fire and fury of Rudy Giuliani’s raucous, 90-minute press conference Thursday laying out President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor famous for busting the mob in the 1980s, declined to offer an opinion on one very substantive question: Does he think the American election system is so rigged and Trump supporters are so mistrustful of the election process that federal authorities should monitor the two Georgia Senate runoffs set for Jan. 5?

“I can’t say what’s going to be done about it. … I really can’t give you an opinion on that,” Giuliani told a reporter when the freewheeling, opinion-filled presser shifted to questions from the media.

“I think every election should learn something from this and be very, very careful with the next election.”

The reporter who shot the first question at Giuliani brought up Operation Greylord, an investigation conducted by the FBI, the IRS’ criminal division, the U.S. Postal Service and the Chicago police that rooted out court corruption in Cook County, Ill., in the 1980s.

The three-year undercover operation resulted in the indictments of 92 judges and other officials, most of whom were convicted. The trials extended over 10 years.

Even though it was a friendly question, Giuliani didn’t want to go there.

“I have no idea where the FBI had been for the last four years,” he remarked.

“…I don’t know what we have to do to get the FBI to wake up. Maybe we need a new agency to protect us. I have no idea.”

No matter what you think of Giuliani’s defiant press conference and Donald Trump’s refusal to concede, trust in the U.S. election system among nearly half of the nation who voted for the president is hitting new lows.

A Morning Consult survey released this week found the share of Republicans who trust official election results has dropped by 43 percentage points. In a poll conducted in late October, 70% of Republicans said official election results will be either “very” or “most likely” reliable. In the post-Nov. 3 survey, just 27% say the same, with two-thirds of Republicans saying the 2020 election was not free and fair.

Giuliani and others assert that widespread fraud is what shifted Georgia to the Democrats in the presidential race, not the changing demographics of the state and Stacey Abrams’ much-touted voter-registration and turnout drives. Fueled by an army of well-founded liberal groups, Abrams groups registered 800,000 Georgians to vote this year.

Georgia completed its by-hand recount of 5 million ballots Thursday, and — despite uncovering 6,000 ballots overlooked in the initial process — it validated the initial outcome: Joe Biden won the state by more than 10,000 votes. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (pictured) plans to certify the results later Friday.

With Senate control hanging in the balance, cash from deep-pocketed special interest groups is flooding into the Peach State – some $125 million over the last two weeks — and an army of activists from across the political spectrum have arrived to organize and orchestrate highly targeted turnout efforts. The race is now on to get 23,000 of the state’s 17-year-olds — those who will turn 18 before Jan. 5 — to register to vote by the Dec. 7 deadline, using Twitch streams, mobile gaming spots and online algorithm-targeted ads.

So much is riding on the two runoffs pitting GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler against, respectively, Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, that failed Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and columnist Tom Friedman encouraged Democrats to move to the state temporarily and register to vote.

The pair have since backtracked, arguing their remarks were flippant and meant to underscore the contest’s high stakes. Still, some wealthy California Democrats are reportedly traveling to Georgia to boost turnout operations and do whatever is necessary to help Democrats win the seats.

Whether outside parties flocking there could backfire on Democrats by fueling parochial pride is an open question, but Republicans are on high alert. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr last week warned that moving to the state temporarily to vote is a felony offense that carries a 10-year prison sentence and a maximum $100,000 fine.

“You can’t be a canvasser for [Michael] Bloomberg – you can’t be a canvasser for the Koch brothers and decide, ‘Hey, I’m going to vote while I’m here,’” Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia election official, said last week.

Though Yang insists it was obvious he was joking, conservatives deeply concerned about election fraud aren’t laughing.

Hans von Spakovsky, an election law expert at the Heritage Foundation who has advocated for stricter voting laws, is urging Georgia Republicans to implement a detailed plan before the runoff to combat several types of potential voter fraud.

Republican officials should comb through voter registration lists and divide them up by voters in each precinct, he told RealClearPolitics. Every polling location has a local monitoring committee, he explained, and each chairman should get the list of voters for that precinct. Voter registration lists can then be checked against the DMV’s list of residents and other state record databases.

“I would distribute the list and say, ‘Look at everybody in your neighborhood who goes to that polling place — are there people on it that are not part of your community?’ Go over the list and check addresses” and ask neighbors if people recently moved there, he said.

“If there’s a single family home in your neighborhood, and there’s 20 people registered there, okay, that’s a problem,” he said.

“They should immediately bring that to the attention of local officials. That’s what they ought to be doing now.”

But the No. 1 priority for combating voting fraud — or even the perception of it — should be to have poll workers, not just poll watchers, actually opening and counting mail-in ballots, providing eyes and ears on the ground, he argued.

Von Spakovsky, who worked on behalf of Republicans in the 2000 Florida Bush-Gore recount, said Republicans must demand more transparency. He cited media reports that only one observer per 10 tables of vote counting was allowed during the Georgia recount because of COVID-19 social distancing rules.

“Whoa, what is going on with that?” he asked. “There ought to be an observer at every single table where the recount is occurring. That’s what they did in Florida. I know. I was there.”

Heritage Action, the Heritage Foundation’s political arm, says it’s mobilizing 20,000 of its local members in Georgia for door-knocking, phone calls and texts. It’s also recruiting a team of at least 100 poll workers to watch for any attempts to manipulate election results. Jenny Beth Martin, president of the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, said her group plans to train poll workers and poll watchers on what to look for. “We will be engaging in precinct operations,” she told RCP.

All of these efforts take manpower, and Republicans are privately fretting that the GOP didn’t do enough to prevent the runoff by countering Abrams’ extensive grassroots activities. As Giuliani signaled, they also don’t trust the FBI or other federal authorities to do anything to guard against or investigate fraud if there’s evidence of it occurring.

John Yoo, a conservative lawyer who worked in the George W. Bush Justice administration, says Trump’s concerns about expanded mail-in voting leading to more opportunities for voter fraud are well-founded. President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III, secretary of state under George H.W. Bush, came to the same conclusion in 2005 after heading the Commission on Federal Election Reform, which concluded that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

The practice of targeting senior citizen nursing homes and hospitals and helping elderly voters fill out their ballots is such a common practice that there’s a name for it among political operatives – “granny farming.” During the pandemic, there has been new concern about disenfranchising elderly people’s right to vote because of older Americans’ reluctance to go to the polls. But that fear has been abused, Yoo asserted.

Critics of ballot harvesting, or the third-party collection of mail-in ballots, often refer to an incident uncovered by the Miami Herald in 1998 in which a 70-year-old woman recovering from a stroke complained about being badgered for her absentee ballot by a political operative who then filled it out and took it from her.

“What everyone should be concerned about is if we see suspicious levels of voting – more votes than residents – at nursing homes or group homes,” Yoo said. He skeptical, however, that a significant number of people have moved illegally to vote.

Instead, he says the two areas of greatest concern are ballot harvesting and the tabulation or accounting process of all ballots.

Trump’s legal team has taken aim at the electronic voting tabulation process and the Dominion Voting System machines involved. Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s lawyers, insists that the president won by “millions of votes” and that the Dominion software altered the tallies. She has cited an affidavit signed by a former military official from Venezuela that the system was used to electronically flip votes for strongmen Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro.

The state of Georgia uses Dominion machines and software, but Raffensberger, the secretary of state, said an audit of those machines found no signs of foul play.

And Jason Snead, the executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project, says that Trump’s legal team has yet to provide enough evidence of widespread fraud for him to believe Dominion altered or tampered with “millions of votes or anything along those lines.”

“There are clearly issues that happened on Election Day, and some of them have been well documented,” he said. “Some counties in a few states had problems with some equipment, but nothing that was really outside the norm for these sorts of systems.” 

Snead said those making election laws have the responsibility to ensure that they’re managing the demand for increased mail-in voting options during COVID in a way “that will ensure that those ballots are properly protected and that the election system as whole runs smoothly, efficiently and securely.”

One of the problems is that election fraud is hard to prove, and local district attorneys have shown little appetite for prosecuting it. Such cases take a lot of time to investigate, and state legislatures haven’t made the issue a funding priority, von Spakovsky and others say.

In 2018 Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich launched an election integrity unit to “preserve public confidence in the integrity of our elections by vigilantly defending ballot safeguards and common-sense voting laws.”

On Tuesday Brnovich publicly called on critics of the election process to come forward with “facts and evidence” so his office can investigate.

After an election that has fueled so much distrust in the system, von Spakosvksy is urging all states to create similar election integrity units in their attorney general offices and for legislatures to provide enough resources for those units to do a thorough job.

Snead said Brnovich is pursuing a “blockbuster” ballot harvesting case dealing with two provisions of Arizona law that the Supreme Court has said it would review this fall. One aspect deals with state laws requiring people to vote at their specific precinct and another to restrict ballot harvesting, limiting who can collect and deliver a person’s ballot to a family member, household member or caregiver.

Depending on how the high court rules, more restrictive voting laws in several states could be on the chopping block — or enshrined as needed safeguards.

“So this is going to be a big, big case,” he said. “It has the potential to help define and shape election law going forward.”

Public health experts have repeatedly warned that COVID-19 conditions are set to worsen across the country before they get better. 

States and cities are reimposing strict social distancing measures, along with the increasing threat of lockdowns early next year if a Biden presidency is seen. 

The virus pandemic and strict social distancing rules have already fueled a mental health crisis among Americans. 

Months ago, we explained restrictions resulted in a dangerously sharp rise in mental illness. The CDC recently said disruptions to daily life during the pandemic lockdowns, anxiety about contracting the virus, and isolation at home have taken a deep toll on Americans’ mental health. 

As the second wave of the virus ravages nearly every state, real-time data of Americans’ mental health via Google Search trends of more than 400 health symptoms, signs, and conditions suggest that the mental health crisis continues to silently rage. 

Examining Google’s COVID-19 Search Trends symptoms dataset, we found recent searches for “anxiety,” “panic attack,” and “night terror” are on the rise in recent months, coinciding with the reemergence of the second coronavirus wave. 

Internet searches for “anxiety” have erupted across the country in recent months, breaching March’s highs in the summer period. As virus cases continue to hit records this fall, anxiety levels will also rise. 

Searches for “panic attacks” have also surged. 

Even “night terror” has risen above the levels from the beginning of the pandemic. 

The unintended consequences of the virus pandemic and socio-economic implosion of the country appear to be a public health crisis. 

Authored by Tho Bishop via The Mises Institute,

It is an overplayed cliché to refer to the insanity of the current year. Still, 2020 manages to surprise. It is increasingly looking like 2020 has created the greatest challenge to democratic legitimacy in the past century.

Yesterday was a truly remarkable day in American history.

The official legal team for President Donald Trump—led by Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis—outlined an argument that America’s elections were hijacked by a conspiracy involving Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic corporation, and elected officials of both parties. The team claimed that these actors collaborated with foreign enemies of the president to ensure he lost the 2020 election, actively inflating the vote totals for Joe Biden. The evidence, they say, will include hundreds of sworn affidavits and other documents that will validate their accusations. They also implied that the Department of Justice is either actively involved in this plot or serving to protect those involved.

The press conference was heavy in bold and striking claims, but so far the legal team has not provided enough documentation to adequately vet the claims made. It is certainly true that questions existed about some of these voting systems prior to the election and that the official results include all sorts of unprecedented voting trends that have sparked questions about their statistical likelihood. Unlikely outcomes are not, however, impossible outcomes, and there are no accusations that any voting machines were illegally used without going through the legally required certification processes.

Any serious legal challenge by Trump’s campaign team will require significant evidence that they have yet to make available. Of course, if the claims are accurate, the case involves a crime that may be beyond the capabilities of America’s judicial system.

What the Trump campaign can legally prove, however, is almost a secondary issue at this point.

Yesterday’s press conference has entrenched the current American president in the position that his anointed successor is illegitimate and that he is the one who holds a democratic mandate to govern.

America has had controversial electoral outcomes before, such as the elections of 2000 and 1876, which ended up being decided by party leaders in a smoke-filled backroom (Republican Rutherford Hayes was given the presidency over Samuel Tilden in exchange for the repeal of Reconstructionist-era laws in the Southern states).

There are several key differences between these instances and the current political turmoil: you now have a populist sitting president, actively despised by the corporate press, who is simultaneously disliked by the establishment of his own party and passionately beloved by his base.

As I noted in an article a few days after the election:

regardless of the legal outcome, America is about to find itself with a president that will be viewed as illegitimate by a large portion of the population—and perhaps even the majority of some states. There is no institution left that has the credibility to push back against the gut feeling of millions of people who have spent the last few months organizing car parades and Trumptillas that their democracy has been hijacked by a political party that despises them.

The response we will receive from the corporate press, Very Serious pundits, and the various talking heads representing all the institutions that Trump has repeatedly mocked and belittled is obvious. Trump’s legal team is being dismissed as a bunch of partisan, sycophantic cranks spinning baseless conspiracy theories. Donald Trump is being portrayed as a spoiled, entitled man-child who would rather take down American democracy than admit he lost. His supporters will be dismissed and mocked as, at best, dumb suckers or, at worst, potentially violent right-wing extremists.

The problem is that, regardless of one’s opinion of Donald Trump or the specific claims made by his legal team, America’s elite and those in power have no credibility of their own.

For almost four years, the corporate press has propped up various false stories about the president while simultaneously propping up his political enemies and actively ignoring stories about the misconduct of Joe Biden’s son and potential conflicts of interest regarding the former vice president. The concerted effort to ask serious questions even forced journalists like Glenn Greenwald to ditch a media company he helped found.

At the same time, progressively-aligned Big Tech companies (many of which are staffed by former members of Kamala Harris’s political offices) have been taking an increasingly aggressive role in censoring and editorializing President Trump and his supporters.

Their claims that they have an ethical obligation to combat “misinformation” in the name of “democracy” are undermined by their willingness to actively assist the Chinese Communist Party in censoring dissidents.

Meanwhile, the professional political class in this country, lauded as “experts” by the bad actors mentioned above, has long mocked the notion of democratic oversight. An explicit example was offered just recently when Jim Jeffrey, a US envoy to Syria, gleefully disclosed to DefenseOne that American military leaders successfully maintained a larger military presence in the country than President Trump had ordered. The power of America’s professional bureaucracy goes beyond military matters, however, and the hope of much of America’s elite is that US policy will be increasingly influenced by their colleagues at the UN and other globalist institutions. Be it the Paris Accord or the Great Reset, many American progressives increasingly view very serious policy matters as issues too important to be entrusted to American voters.

Further still, America’s political environment has become so polarized and hostile that you have many elected officials in positions of influence who openly despise large swaths of the American population. For example, Arizona’s secretary of state—the woman in charge of election integrity in the state—described Trump’s base as “neo-Nazis” in 2017. Given her public statements, why would any Trump supporters have any faith in a governing body she influences to count votes? Meanwhile, the secretary of state in Michigan was a former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing hate group.

It would, of course, be wrong to suggest that the elites of the American left are alone in their hatred of their political enemies. While the Left has tended to be more violent in recent years, there are many Republican voters who consider the political left immoral, un-American, and a threat to their families. The difference is that, outside of a few levers of federal power held by the Republican Party, the American right does not have nearly the same institutional support that the Left does currently.

It appears that 2020 may be the year that finally proves that the façade of democracy is not enough to maintain a unified political body. The election process does not inevitably lead to compromise and tolerance, but rather ends in those in power and those who are politically vanquished. When the losers of elections do not view their loss as a genuine reflection of democratic will, but rather an illegitimate coup, it is difficult to maintain governance over a population. Joe Biden appointing John Kasich–type Republicans will do little to soothe and reassure those who view a Biden presidency as little different than an occupational force.

This is why Ludwig von Mises viewed political decentralization and secession as a necessary component of liberal democracy. The proper objective of the democratic process was the peaceful transfer of power reflecting changes in the political will—political self-determination—rather than some form of civil worship of the will of the majority. When political differences become irreconcilable, true political decentralization allows for the breaking of political unions.

Will that end up being the ultimate result of the position of Trump’s legal team? Who knows. Trump and a few lawyers will certainly not be enough to overturn the official results or to successfully spur a Trump secession movement. What will be interesting is how the institution of the Republican Party will respond to the escalating rhetoric of the president.

Under President Obama, the Republican Party remained civil and submissive while its Tea Party base discussed ideas like nullification and a convention of states. The sterility of the traditional GOP is likely a major reason why Donald Trump was able to take over the party. How much of the modern GOP will continue to follow the forty-fifth president, and how many will end up being perfectly content with being partners with Joe Biden?

What we can be sure of is that it will be much harder for Biden to win over many of the 70+ million Americans who voted for Donald Trump earlier this month.

As COVID-19 cases surge pushing hospitalizations to levels unseen since the start of the pandemic, hospitals around the country are facing a staffing crisis. According to Bloomberg, 1 in 5 American hospitals anticipates a “critical staffing shortage” within a week’s time, according to DHHS.

Midwestern states like Missouri, Wisconsin and North Dakota have reported the highest share of hospitals worried about staffing shortages as deaths and hospitalizations soar.

In a phrase that’s reminiscent of coverage from back in the spring, when hospital workers in some of NYC’s most unloved neighborhoods were wearing trash bags instead of PPE, Bloomberg warned that a dearth of doctors and nurses could risk pushing the mortality rate even higher. Frontline workers are “vulnerable to the consequences of overwork”, Bloomberg reported. In an example of just how bad it can get, readers might remember a rash of doctor suicides in NYC, and in other places as well. 

Source: Bloomberg

What’s more, given the staffing issues, hospitals around the country are bracing for a “holiday spike”, forcing health care workers to spend yet another holiday away from their families.

The biggest problem this time around is that rural areas in the Midwest and elsewhere that were largely spared earlier in the year are now seeing outbreaks in their communities, which have in some cases badly strained the more threadbare facilities available in these areas.

Here’s an example: Sprawling, sparsely populated Siskiyou County along California’s northern border hit a milestone this week. After months of dodging a major COVID-19 outbreak, seven people were hospitalized with coronavirus infections and the number of available ICU beds in the county briefly dropped to zero, which sent local public health officials into a full-blown panic.

Management at the hospital pleaded with the townspeople to wear their masks and wash their hands, advising that more infections would inevitably lead to a surge in deaths.

Another major difference this time around: During the spring and summer, the outbreaks were largely confined to a specific region of the country, allowing resources and staff to be ‘spread around’ from states with low numbers to states with high numbers. The problem is that right now, all 50 states are seeing their outbreaks accelerate. While the Midwest has been battered, Chicago hasn’t benefited from the federal resources or the help from nearby states that New York did back in the spring.

That’s one reason that makes the recent increase in deaths more concerning, since if the numbers continue to rise, there won’t be any ‘cavalry’ for struggling states to call.

“Earlier in the year, we were able to redeploy staff and resources to these hot spots,” one official said. “We really were talking about hot spots. The problem now is when every place is a hot spot, you lose the ability to redeploy. And that’s as simple as that.”

Fortunately, Pfizer confirmed on Friday that it has submitted its paperwork for an emergency-use authorization for its vaccine, which should be administered to the first non-trial patients by mid-December, the company said.

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

The big news organizations say Joe Biden’s the next president of the USA.  That claims of election fraud and fixing are baseless.  Do you believe them?  Do you trust them?

Regardless, Biden’s acting as if.  He’s talking to foreign leaders.  He’s meeting with vaccine makers.  He’s making big plans.  He’s planning big things.  But, apparently, he’s not progressive enough.

This week, for example, an organization called Justice Democrats accused Biden of appointing corporate-friendly insiders.  They say these “corporate-friendly insiders […] will not help usher in the most progressive Democratic administration in generations.”

Certainly, Biden’s getting plenty of advice.  The political puppet has left many strings to be pulled.  Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer want Biden to erase the first $50,000 of a person’s student loan debt.  According to Schumer, “Joe Biden can do that with the pen as opposed to legislation.”

Will Biden listen to them?  Will he listen to progressive superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?  On Monday, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, tweeted:

“Student loan forgiveness is good, actually.

“We should also push for tuition-free public colleges to avoid this huge debt bubble from financially decimating ppl every generation.  It’s one of the easiest progressive policies to ‘pay for,’ w/ multiple avenues from a Wall St transaction tax to an ultra-wealth tax to cover it.”

Wow!  Biden hasn’t even moved into the White House and things have gone stoopid silly.  Where to begin?

Cut It Off

Without question, the student debt crisis is a disgrace.  There are roughly 45 million student loan borrowers who owe on the order of $1.6 trillion.  Most of this debt is from federal student loans.

The federal government is responsible for this mess.  It supplied the credit that distorted the world in this way that would have otherwise been impossible.  The gas of massive amounts of federal student loans inflated a higher education bubble…and an industry of entitled, fake intellectuals.

The business model generally requires signing credulous 18-year-olds up for massive amounts of government backed student loans.  These young adults have been told since before they could count that college was the magical path to a bright future.  But as tuition costs ran higher, propelled by more and more student loans, the value proposition no longer penciled out.

Yet forgiving student loans rewards a corrupted education industry.  It allows colleges and universities to perpetuate in inflated product.  Hence, rather than forgiving student debt, as the progressives desire, we offer another novel approach.  That is, cut off government sponsored student loans.  Scuttle the gravy train that supplies universities with undeserved wealth.

Now what would happen to all these high paid professors and fancy country club style college campuses without all this government sponsored debt?  For starters, tuition prices would fall.  Professor salaries would also fall.  And college campuses would adjust to their more modest means.

Would the product – the education – be inferior?  Not for the technical disciplines that matter.  Smaller budgets, however, would help trim the fat, and eliminate many of the nonsense quack ‘studies’ courses.  These courses have little redeeming value and only exist because they’re funded by an abundance of federal student loans.

Tuition-free public colleges at the expense of the rich, on the other hand, would certainly result in an inferior education.  They would turn college into an extension of high school.  Grades 13 through 16 would become daycare for young adults.  Students would graduate as unprepared as today’s 12th graders.  What a ridiculous waste of time and money.

The U.S. Government Will Inflate To The Bitter End 

The point is, $1.6 trillion in government sponsored student loan debt has piled up like a rush-hour wreck on the 405 Freeway through west Los Angeles.  This is a problem of the governments making.  And government solutions will only make things worse.  Here’s why?

Forgiving student loan debt with the stroke of a pen does not make it go away.  Debt, remember, is unearned money that’s borrowed from the future.  It must either be repaid or defaulted on.  Given that this is government sponsored debt, the act of erasing it merely transfers it from student borrowers to the American public – that’s you.

And how will the American public pay for it?  U.S. government revenue for fiscal year 2020 was $3.42 trillion.  Yet spending was $6.55 trillion.  The difference – a $3.13 trillion deficit – was made up with debt.

Nancy Pelosi is currently pushing for Congress to adopt her $3.4 trillion coronavirus bailout package.  Tack on $1.6 trillion for student loan forgiveness and we’re up to $5 trillion.  And that’s before accounting for Medicare, agriculture, defense, social security, transportation, veterans affairs, and the many other federal programs.  And what about all the other demands Biden somehow owes?

The Justice Democrats are calling “for Biden to create an Office of Climate Mobilization on Day 1.”  What an Office of Climate Mobilization is, exactly, is unclear.  But it sounds expensive.  And guess who will get to pay for it?  You will.

You see where all roads lead back to, right?

The dead end of dollar debasement.  The U.S. government will inflate to the bitter end.  And Creepy Joe – with the progressives egging him on – is just the man for the job.

Tune in for this special edition of the Daily Briefing to hear from Ed and Raoul live at 4:30 PM ET. Raoul will provide an update on his macro thesis, trades he’s bullish on, and answer questions from the audience.

You’ve heard of “super spreaders” but what about “super emitters”? 

According to the woke vernacular, that a term reserved for those frequent-flyers who a recent study found represent just 1% of the world’s population yet who have caused half of aviation’s carbon emissions in 2018. This excludes the “wokest” of virtue-signalling super emitters – those who fly around the globe in ultra-emitting private jets, lecturing the rest of the world about the dangers of global warming. We can only imagine that if those were also included, then the number would be revised from 1% to 0.01%.

According to a study by Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, only 11% of the world’s population took a flight in 2018 and 4% flew abroad, and predictably US air passengers have by far the biggest carbon footprint among rich countries. Its aviation emissions are bigger than the next 10 countries combined, including the UK, Japan, Germany and Australia, the study reports (it wasn’t clear if China was excluded because of a far backroom exchanges of yuan/bitcoin).

The research, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, collated a range of data and found large proportions of people in every country did not fly at all each year – 53% in the US, 65% in Germany and 66% in Taiwan. In the UK, separate data shows 48% of people did not fly abroad in 2018. Yet it is these people who will be hit just as hard by whatever “green” tax is coming by our new socialist overlords.

On average, North Americans flew 50 times more than Africans in 2018, 10 times more than those in the Asia-Pacific region and 7.5 times more than Latin Americans. Europeans and those in the Middle East flew 25 times further than Africans and five times more than Asians.

Of course, the real culprit is not the US but China, although this woke study conveniently ignored the footprint of Beijing (which may or may not have funded the study): while the analysis showed the US produced the most emissions among rich nations, China does not make data available.

What was most interesting, however, is that the study showed that an elite group enjoying frequent flights had a big impact on CO2 emissions, and yet according to conventional wisdom everyone should be punished in the form of higher taxes, prices, etc when the transgressions of a handful of woke virtue-signalers are most responsible for rise in airplane-linked emissions.

Naturally, since this was a study on climate change, socialism wasn’t far behind: Dan Rutherford, at the International Council on Clean Transportation and not part of the research team, said the analysis raised the question of “equality.”

“The benefits of aviation are more inequitably shared across the world than probably any other major emission source,” he said. “So there’s a clear risk that the special treatment enjoyed by airlines just protects the economic interests of the globally wealthy.”

The frequent flyers identified in the study travelled about 35,000 miles (56,000km) a year, Gössling said, equivalent to three long-haul flights a year, one short-haul flight per month, or some combination of the two.

Things got really silly when the researchers somehow estimated the “cost of the climate damage” whatever that means, caused by aviation’s emissions at $100BN in 2018. The absence of payments to cover this damage “represents a major subsidy to the most affluent”, the researchers said. “This highlights the need to scrutinise the sector, and in particular the super emitters.”

So what do the socialists researchers suggest? Why taxes of course.

A levy on frequent fliers is one proposal to discourage flights. “Somebody will need to pay to decarbonise flight – why shouldn’t it be frequent flyers?” Rutherford said. But Gössling was less enthusiastic, pointing out that frequent flyers were usually very wealthy, meaning higher ticket prices may not deter them.

“Perhaps a more productive way is to ask airlines to increase the share of [low carbon] synthetic fuels mix every year up to 100% by 2050,” Gössling said. A mandate for sustainable aviation fuel starting in 2025 is backed by some in the industry.

Yup: at this point the “scientists” were reduced to bickering over who should be taxed more to solve the world’s problems. What neither of them appears to realize is that whatever the so-called “cost of climate change”, the Fed will meet all of it by printing an even greater amount and then depositing it into the digital dollar accounts of those deemed “virtuous” enough by the world’s socialist overlords.

Finally, do the wealth-redistributionist “researchers” do as they preach and stop flying themselves? Apparently not: “I’m not saying I’ll never fly again. But if I can avoid it, I really, really try,” Gössling said whimsically.

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

President Trump has announced that he is ordering a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq during the waning days of his administration.

Why only partial? And why now in the waning days of his presidency? After all, when Trump campaigned in 2016. his expressed aim was to bring all the troops home from those two countries. He repeatedly vowed to bring an end to America’s “forever wars.”

There is a simple explanation for Trump’s failure, one that unfortunately so many Americans are loathe to consider: It’s not the president who is in charge of foreign policy. Instead it is the Pentagon and the CIA that are in charge.

Trump had four years to bring home those troops. Clearly he wanted to. The reason he didn’t – the reason he still can’t – is because the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA won’t let him.

Longtime readers of my blog know that I have periodically referenced a book titled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, who is a professor of law at Tufts University and served as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He knows what he is talking about. I highly recommend his book.

Glennon’s thesis is a simple one:

The real power of the federal government lies with the national-security establishment – namely the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.

They permit the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court to maintain the veneer of power.

That veneer is unimportant to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.

What’s important to them is who holds the power, not who appears to hold the power.

Trump’s inability to bring the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq provides confirmation of Glennon’s thesis. Trump wanted to bring them home. He vowed to bring them home. He had four years to bring them home. He was unable to do so. The Pentagon and the CIA simply would not permit it.

In his Farewell Address in 1961, President Eisenhower warned about the danger to America’s democratic processes from what he called the “military-industrial complex.”

That was almost 60 years ago. As we have seen with President Trump, the national-security state has grown ever more powerful since then.