Stephen Miller Latest White House Official To Tests Positive For COVID-19 Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 19:56
Millions of angry lefties are taking to social media to express their glee over the news that Stephen Miller, a senior aide to President Trump widely seen as the architect of his immigration policy (known to liberals as “kids in cages”), has become the latest White House staffer to test positive.
By our count, that makes him the 33rd person infected in the White House outbreak by our count, which includes 11 staffers who tested positive after the debate in Cleveland. According to NBC News, the number stands at 23.
Another VERY big shoe drops in @WhiteHouse — key #Trump advisor and architect of anti-immigration policies Steve Miller has #COVID19 .
Also, a Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff aide USCG Admiral got infected in WH Trump mtg last week: Now entire joint chiefs meet virtually.
MORE https://t.co/Ym9xA3BSXT
Miller has released a statement to the press: “I have been working remotely and self-isolating, testing negative every day through yesterday. Today, I tested positive for COVID-19 and am in quarantine.” His plans regarding the length of his quarantine aren’t clear. According to the New York Daily News, it was “not immediately clear” whether Miller attended the Sept. 26 ceremony announcing Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination.
Miller has been working from home since Friday.
It also appears that the military aide who tested positive – reported earlier today – is among those responsible for carrying the “football” that contains launch codes for nuclear weapons has also tested positive, a person familiar with the matter said.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3iGzfgm Tyler Durden
Biden Says “We Shouldn’t Have Debate” Next Week If Trump Still Has Coronavirus Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 19:54
Will there be another debate or won’t there?
While Trump is certainly eager to get back on the podium, and certainly not in some virtual setting, his challenger is not so sure.
Moments after the NYT published an Editorial Board op-ed arguing that “In-Person Debates Are Too Dangerous. Cancel Them”, Joe Biden spoke at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, Joe Biden said Tuesday night that he and Donald Trump should scrap their next debate if the president is still infected with the coronavirus.
“I think if he still has Covid we shouldn’t have a debate,” Biden told reporters.
The next debate is scheduled for next Thursday, Oct. 15 in Miami. Which likely means that Trump will have to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that neither he, nor anyone on his debate prep team is contagious in just over a week. Considering that most of those people are, in fact, infected as of this moment, that could prove a tall order, and may force the next debate to be virtual.
Update- WH debate prep room & Covid
President Trump: Positive
Kellyanne Conway: Positive
Bill Stepien: Positive
Hope Hicks: Positive
Chris Christie Positive Stephen Miller Positive
Rudy Giuliani – negative so far
Jason Miller – negative so far https://t.co/Gf5rtX7ZMS
Taiwan Presents Weapons Shopping List To US At Key Defense Industry Conference Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 19:45
Taiwan is set to present a veritable weapons shopping list to American officials during the annual US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference, which began Monday and is continuing Tuesday.
The conference is yet another event attracting the ire and watchful scrutiny of China, given it is representative of the growing military cooperation between Taipei and Washington, and goes back to 2002.
Taiwan military drills, via CNN
However, weapons sales will be a closed-door discussion issue. Among closed-door topics include “US defense cooperation with Taiwan, the defense procurement process and Taiwan’s defence and national security needs,” the council said according to South China Morning Post. It will also “provide opportunities to connect with others working on Taiwan defense and national security issues.”
Also sure to catch Beijing’s notice following last month’s ratcheting PLA aerial and sea drills around the island is the following statement on the conference agenda:“Taiwan’s deputy defense minister Chang Guan-chung is expected to brief the US side on the weaponry most needed and urgently sought by the island after seeing growing military intimidation from Beijing.”
Ahead of the conference Reuters pointed out last month the US is content to further build up ‘Fortress Taiwan’ while “needling China” – as it “plans to sell as many as seven major weapons systems, including mines, cruise missiles and drones to Taiwan, four people familiar with the discussions said, as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on China.”
That prior extensive report previewed Taiwan’s ‘defense needs’ – some of which are in various phases of passing US legal hurdles and discussions, according to Reuters :
Drones that can see over the horizon for surveillance and targeting, coupled with advanced missiles and coastal defenses that include smart mines and anti-submarine capabilities to impede a sea invasion…
A Lockheed Martin-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), essentially a truck-based rocket launcher, is among the weapons Taiwan wants, people familiar with the negotiations said.
at least four large sophisticated aerial drones to Taiwan for what could be about $600 million.
under discussion are land-based Boeing-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles to serve as a coastal defense against cruise missiles.
Other systems include “underwater sea mines and other capabilities to deter amphibious landing, or immediate attack,” Taiwan’s de facto ambassador here to United States said in July.
Anti-tank missile systems are also said to be under consideration, at a moment Chinese PLA naval and aerial drills near the island have been on the uptick. Beijing has repeatedly signaled that it considers reunification as a landmark mission and won’t stand idly by as external forces intervene in what it sees as inter-China affairs.
For this week’s US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference, no US official will need to visit the island given the talks are being done entirely by remote means due to the global pandemic.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/34qYQow Tyler Durden
Systemic corruption and the implosion of the social contract have consequences: It’s called collapse.
Social and economic decay is so glacial that only those few who remember an earlier set-point are equipped to even notice the decline. That’s the position we find ourselves in today.
Many Americans will discount the systemic corruption that characterizes the American way of life because they’ve known nothing but systemic corruption. They’ve habituated to it because they have no memory of a time when looting wasn’t legalized and maximizing self-enrichment by any means available wasn’t the unwritten law of the land.
If you don’t yet see America as little more than an intertwined collection of skims, scams, frauds, embezzlements, lies, gaming-the-system, obfuscation of risk and exploitation of the masses by insiders, please read How Corruption is Becoming America’s Operating System. (nakedcapitalism.com, via Cheryl A.)
Simply put, corruption is cost-free in America because most of it is legal. And whatever is still illegal is never applied to the elites and insiders, except (as per Communist regime corruption) for a rare show trial where an example is made of an egregious fall-guy (think Bernie Madoff: whistleblowers’ repeated attempts to expose the fraud to regulators were blown off for years. It was only when Madoff ripped off wealthy and powerful insiders did he go down.)
There are three primary sources for the complete systemic corruption of America. One is the transition from civic responsibility for the social contract and the national interest to winner-take-most legalized looting.
This transition is visible in the history of empires in the final stage of collapse. The assumption underlying the social order slides from a shared duty to the nation and fellow citizens to an obsession with evading civic duties: military service, taxes, and following the rules are all avoided by insiders and elites, and this moral/social rot then corrupts the entire social order as elites and insiders lean ever more heavily on the remaining productive class to pay the taxes and provide the military muscle to defend their wealth.
That corruption is now everywhere in America is obvious to all but those adamantly blinded by denial. The JP Morgans pay fines as a cost of doing corrupt business, while “public servants” game the system to maximize their pensions with a variety of tricks: colluding to boost the overtime of the retiring insider; finding a quack physican to sign off on a fake “heart murmur” so the insider pays no taxes on their “disability” check, and so on in an endless parade of lies, scams, skims and insider tricks.
The excuse is always the same: everybody does it. This is of course the collapse not just of the social contract but of morality in general: anything goes and winners take most. Insiders look the other way lest their own skims and scams be contested, and elites and insiders view those who aren’t skimming and scamming as chumps to be pitied.
The second dynamic is that financialization has completely corrupted the American economy, and that corruption has now spread to the political and social orders. Once the financial sector conquered the real economy, it began siphoning 95% of the economy’s wealth to the top .01% and their toadies, lackeys, apologists, enforcers and technocrats.
As they hollowed out the real economy, distorted incentives and made moral hazard the guiding principle of the American way of life, the recipients of financialization’s domination gained the wealth to buy political power from the pathetically corruptible political class.
The corruption that we call financialization corrupted democracy and undermined the social contract by eviscerating the value of labor and creating a pay-to-play political order that’s a mockery of democracy.
The third factor is the decay of America’s institutions into fronts for personal gain. While Higher Education insiders are masters of self-serving PR, the truth is they’re not concerned about their debt-serf “customers” (students) learning the essential skills needed in the tumultuous decades ahead–they’re worried that the revenues needed to pay their enormous salaries and benefits might dry up.
“Education” is nothing but a front for the corruption of self-enrichment by the elites and insiders at the top.
The same is true of “healthcare.” The concern of insiders isn’t the declining health of America’s populace, it’s the decline in revenues as fewer “customers” come in for the financial scalping of emergency care.
“Healthcare” is nothing but a front for the corruption of self-enrichment by the elites and insiders at the top.
Thanks to the Federal Reserve’s endless free money for financiers and endless federal borrow-and-blow deficits, the unstated belief is since there’s endless “money”, my petty frauds and skims won’t even dent the feeding trough–there’s always another trillion or three to skim and scam, and there will never be any limit to the feeding trough.
There is no limit until the system implodes. Then the collapse becomes limitless
Ironic, isn’t it? The oh-so convenient belief that America’s wealth and power are eternal and godlike in their glory fosters the crass corruption that has weakened America to the point of no return: systemic fragility and brittleness.
American Exceptionalism has been turned on its head: America is now as perniciously corrupt as any developing-world nation we smugly felt so superior to, and with extremes of wealth and income inequality that surpass even the most rapacious kleptocracies. This destabilizing “exceptionalism” is now the defining characteristic of the American economy, society and political order.
Systemic corruption and the implosion of the social contract have consequences: It’s called collapse, baby, and the rot is now too deep to reverse.
21 Scholars Demand ‘1619 Project’ Writer Lose Pulitzer For Fabricating History Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 19:05
A group of 21 scholars have published a letter on the website of the National Association of Scholars, calling for the Pulitzer Prize Board to strip the New York Times‘ Nikole Hannah-Jones of her 2020 prize for her article series, the “1619 project.”
The series contains writings by journalists and op-ed contributors who retell American history through the lens of slavery.
In particular, it attempts to cast the Atlantic slave trade as the primary factor in the founding of America, which critics have slammed as an attempt to rewrite US history through an inaccurate, left-wing lens which suggests that the American revolution was fought to preserve slavery, rather than seeking to separate from Britain.
“We call on the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the 2020 Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her lead essay in ‘The 1619 Project,” writes historian Peter Wood, a signatory to the NAS letter. “That essay was entitled, ‘Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.’ But it turns out the article itself was false when written, making a large claim that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motive for the American Revolution, a claim for which there is simply no evidence,” he continues.
“The duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a journalist can commit.”
A group of scholars, myself included, are calling on the Pulitzer Board to revoke the prize awarded earlier this year to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her “1619 Project” essay:https://t.co/PHKJx614Q6
According to the letter, the Pulitzer board heaped praise on Hannah-Jones “for ‘a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.'”
“Note well the last five words,” the letter continues. “Clearly the award was meant not merely to honor this one isolated essay, but the Project as a whole, with its framing contention that the year 1619, the date when some twenty Africans arrived at Jamestown, ought to be regarded as the nation’s ‘true founding,’ supplanting the long-honored date of July 4, 1776, which marked the emergence of the United States as an independent nation.”
“The Pulitzer Prize Board erred in awarding a prize to Hannah-Jones’s profoundly flawed essay, and through it to a Project that, despite its worthy intentions, is disfigured by unfounded conjectures and patently false assertions.“
The 1619 project came under fire in September for its historical distortions – to which Hannah-Jones suggested that the project “explicitly denies objectivity,” and that “We state in the intro that this was a reframing of history.”
When things don’t make sense or add up but you don’t have a smoking gun, you start nosing around with questioning and investigating to see if your hunch pans out.
Zelikovsky notes that, obviously, she doesn’t have any proof that the recent COVID-19 infections of POTUS and FLOTUS, several Republican senators, and people working on his campaign and in his administration, are truly random events or something planned, but it doesn’t pass the “random cluster of infections” smell test.Come on, admit it. You are all thinking it, too. I’m sure like me, you spent the weekend texting friends about your suspicions.
The virus appears to have targeted Republicans only and left Democrats unscathed.
Democrats are trying to characterize this as a Rose Garden or debate super spreader — even though plenty of Democrats and Biden supporters were at the debate and likely interacted with Republicans after the Amy Coney Barrett ceremony. They argue that, as avid wearers of the mask, they are shielded from Republicans bearing COVID. But if masks were ironclad, we’d all be immune. People can still contract the disease in spite of masks, handwashing, and social distancing — which are only preventive measures that minimize risk. It is odd that in a town as small as Washington, D.C., only Republicans took the hit.
The timing is a second factor.
Key Republicans fell ill after the Barrett announcement, the debate, and Comey’s flaccid testimony, and now we are full-blown into October — the final leg of the campaign. We have Radcliffe’s damning evidence that Obama, Comey and Brennan were aware of Hillary Clinton’s intent to frame Trump of colluding with Russia and, suddenly, Andy McCabe cannot do a Zoom appearance in the Senate under the pretext of fearing for his family’s safety from contracting COVID. Schumer, on cue, demands the cancellation of the Barrett hearings — all or part of which can be done remotely to prevent COVID spread. Moreover, Hidin’ Biden comes out of seclusion and hops on more planes in the last few days flying to Michigan and Florida than he has flown for most of September when he made a only few local appearances in Delaware and Pennsylvania, flew to Cleveland for the debate, called lids on half the days in September, and did a post-debate lame train tour where he interacted with few supporters.
Yet Donald Trump who, up until contracting the WuFlu, was doing back-to-back rallies in battleground states with overwhelming support from adoring audiences in the thousands, is suddenly relegated to Biden-style videos, seclusion, and waving from cars. This is like being in a cage for someone who is as gregarious and loves interacting with Americans as Trump. One would think that Biden, at his age and with his vulnerabilities, would be even more cautious and reluctant to travel and interact with voters in the last weeks of the campaign — especially after a potentially close encounter with the virus during the debates and seeing what it did to the President. And yet, as soon as Trump is sidelined, Biden is hopping on planes without a care in the world.
Finally, there is the fact that the most protected man in the universe, who has insisted on serving and interacting with the people despite the pandemic, refused to hover in an isolated bunker and managed to escape infection for seven months, suddenly gets a direct hit… again, in the final weeks of his campaign. Interrupting the one thing the Biden campaign cannot generate: a succession of popular rallies. We know the transmission could have resulted from a lapse in procedure, after all, those who protect and interact with the President are only human. But in an administration where enemies are constantly undermining the President, it doesn’t strain an iota of credulity to wonder if those same nefarious forces didn’t weaponize the virus and directly expose the president to it or use someone like Hope Hicks as a COVID bullet.
They’ve tried to impeach and remove him, force him to resign, discredit him, undermine his accomplishments, embarrass and ridicule him; they’ve wished him dead umpteen times; they’ve relentlessly threatened his life; and they’ve been clear they don’t care about his family or his health. Why not use the virus further to their advantage? While his security detail is adept at thwarting plots involving cars, guns, planes, bombs, and other visible weapons, there are myriad ways a virus can find its way to our president and other administration officials. And, after seven months, it did. A month before the election as he was ramping up his very successful airport hangar rallies. It’s too perfect to be mere happenstance.
With a little contact tracing and sleuthing, I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out this was an arrow in someone’s quiver and a doozy of an October surprise.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/34uZRfk Tyler Durden
Senior editor, Ash Bennington, joins Tony Greer, editor of the Morning Navigator, to examine the latest wild market swings. Despite a large selling episode on Friday with the announcement of President Trump being diagnosed with COVID-19, Tony discusses how the rally still has momentum as the macro indicators are still driving markets upward. Ash then asks how Tony is currently hedging the news of the president’s health, and they talk about how FAANG is now getting pummeled even though the rally is still holding. They review historical examples of key anti-trust cases and share their thoughts on why breaking up big tech may catch retail investors flat-footed. They wrap up their conversation with Tony sharing some trading lessons he’s learned from his experience and what he’s looking out for next. Real Vision reporter Haley Draznin explains why stocks took a dive Tuesday afternoon after President Trump said he ordered an end to stimulus negotiations until after the November election.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3nqqWcg Tyler Durden
Senior editor, Ash Bennington, joins Tony Greer, editor of the Morning Navigator, to examine the latest wild market swings. Despite a large selling episode on Friday with the announcement of President Trump being diagnosed with COVID-19, Tony discusses how the rally still has momentum as the macro indicators are still driving markets upward. Ash then asks how Tony is currently hedging the news of the president’s health, and they talk about how FAANG is now getting pummeled even though the rally is still holding. They review historical examples of key anti-trust cases and share their thoughts on why breaking up big tech may catch retail investors flat-footed. They wrap up their conversation with Tony sharing some trading lessons he’s learned from his experience and what he’s looking out for next. Real Vision reporter Haley Draznin explains why stocks took a dive Tuesday afternoon after President Trump said he ordered an end to stimulus negotiations until after the November election.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3nqqWcg Tyler Durden
PA State Police Investigated For “Shoddy Affadavits” And “Minor Traffic Stops” To Search Vehicles Illegally Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 18:25
State Troopers in Pennsylvania are in the midst of being investigated for whether or not they are following the law while conducting searches on vehicles after traffic stops. The investigation, being performed by the Office of the Inspector General, comes at the request of Governor Tom Wolf, according to Spotlight PA.
It comes after an investigation by Spotlight PA and The Appeal was published on Monday which found that Troopers in high drug trafficking areas “often use minor traffic stops and shoddy affidavits to hold and search people illegally.”
In many cases, charges wind up being dismissed or challenged in court. Troopers would use “vague or boilerplate” language to justify a search of people’s vehicles, the investigation found. Due to a lack of probable causes, cases would be tossed out by a judge or challenged, successfully, by defendants. More than half of the cases reviewed involved charges against black people.
Spotlight had previously found that “Pennsylvania State Police had quietly stopped tracking the race of drivers who get pulled over during traffic stops” last year. They are now collecting the data again, which will be organized and studied by the University of Cincinnati, before being released next year.
Lt. Col. Scott Price, deputy commissioner of operations, told Spotlight PA: “The four corners of the affidavit is what establishes probable cause. We shouldn’t be seeing boilerplate language. We have to rely on our front-line supervisors to make sure these affidavits are legally adequate. If you’re seeing boilerplate language, that’s not appropriate. We expect to see some common language.”
OIG spokesman Jonathan Hendrickson said: “The Office of State Inspector General is reviewing the available information to ensure that protocols were followed and training is appropriate regarding these traffic stops. The work of this review is well within the agency’s mission.”
The practice is being compared to a “highway stop and frisk”. Troopers are said to pull over as many people as possible for minor traffic infractions in order to find drugs, which can then be used to justify future stops. But this tactic also results in innocent people being targeted and searched illegally.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Tom Wolf said: “During stops, actions should never be taken outside of those protocols taught in training and reports should be completed using the proper protocols. We are asking the Inspector General to conduct an independent review to be sure protocols were followed and training is appropriate regarding these types of stops.”
The State Police said they welcome the inquiry and see “it as an opportunity to demonstrate our continued progress in these areas of concern to the citizenry we serve.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3nquye8 Tyler Durden
Through the sweeping and indiscriminate indictment of oppression that it makes against the American republic, wokeism poses the first serious challenge to our constitutional democracy since communism.
Wokeism aims to remake American constitutionalism root and branch, to transform economics, politics, education, and other institutions and practices. The free and equal individual under the rule of law will be replaced with monolithic voices, united by perceived oppression, who demand a mutating law and politics that reward their grievances with punishments against alleged oppressors and redistributed resources for supposed “victims.”
The first thesis of wokeism is that persons are reducible to their affiliated identity: above all, race or gender. In this view, we understand ourselves solely through these prisms and we apply that understanding to others and to institutions.
The second thesis is that no person, no idea, and no historical account can be understood by independent human reason unfiltered by race, gender, and stories of interlocking oppression, or, as the case may be, by the acts of oppression one has shared in as a member of the dominant group. Everything comes to us and is either understood or projected by us through our racial or gender identity.
The third thesis is that those who have identities that can be grouped under “persons of color” or LGBTQ possess greater authority to speak — owing to the various oppressions they have experienced and the cosmic redress required for justice and liberation — than oppressor groups in almost every sphere.
America’s national DNA, according to the New York Times’ 1619 Project — wokeism’s anti-American document par excellence — has been encoded with slavery and anti-black racism. Indeed, America left the British Empire for the purposes of retaining the slavery regime, the project’s lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones proclaims (against historical evidence). White males stand as the grand artificer of this oppression, which has been transmitted throughout American history, informing our constitutional documents, politics, and social structures.
The 1619 Project leaves no space or opportunity for redemption, for forgiveness, or for the statesmanship of someone like Abraham Lincoln. It cannot acknowledge that American constitutionalism is a contested space. The 1619 Project cannot understand the succession of witnesses like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King Jr., who call upon Americans to understand in full the principles of our Constitution and Union. Consider that, while American soldiers were still fighting the Civil War, and much of the Democratic Party was arguing against the abolition of slavery, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was passed by Congress on Jan. 31, 1865, later ratified by the requisite number of states in December 1865. Its central premise stands on the equality language in the Declaration of Independence, the same principles that outlawed slavery in the lands regulated by the Northwest Ordinance of 1788. This is part of our heritage, too.
Our political institutions and our Constitution stand or fall ultimately by their willingness to uphold us as free people pursuing the broad purposes of human existence. Contrast this with the regime that wokeism would build. It would reject any notion of individual integrity or distinctive notion of personhood. Intellectual freedom would be nonexistent. Speech would be filtered through a relentless and constantly evolving set of censors, who would punish or bless our words according to ideological criteria. Consequently, our thinking and speaking would revolve around an endless loop of testimonies to oppression — either committed against us or by people with whom we share tribal traits. In the latter sense, we would confess our shared guilt and accept whatever punishment is deemed necessary.
Steve Nash, the recently named head coach of the New Jersey Nets, confessed that he had been given the job unfairly because of his white privilege. He wanted to work for “change,” he said. Many will make similar pronouncements under more stringent conditions or risk becoming untouchables. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the best-selling “How to Be an Antiracist,” asserts that the point of being an anti-racist is not to refrain from discrimination but to know whom to discriminate against — largely whites and Asians, if the woke polity is to become a reality.
Under wokeism, the function of political institutions would not be to facilitate individual flourishing but to enforce individual sameness, subsuming us all in an egalitarian stew of grievance, redistribution, and retribution. The traits that define a decent community, such as forgiveness, humility and compromise, will not be possible, and those suggesting them will be accused of racism. Wokeism’s social-justice constitution would fuel a federal government built for one purpose: the evisceration of the freedoms that Americans have always known.
If the progressive notion of a “living Constitution” threw the law in doubt, woke constitutionalism will destroy all fixed or limited notions of law. How could it be otherwise, when the operative principle is the elimination of all forms of oppression, as measured by an endlessly moving set of ideological markers? Man can organize the world without sufficient notions of virtue, justice, and freedom, to say nothing of the biblical God, but as theologian Henri de Lubac noted, when man does this he organizes the world against himself. One Nation Under Woke would make this vision a reality.
* * *
Richard M. Reinsch II is the editor of Law & Liberty, host of “Liberty Law Talk,” and co-author of “A Constitution in Full.” He and over 1,000 similarly concerned scholars and citizens recently made common cause in an open letter published at RealClearPolitics. This article is part of an ongoing “Liberty and Justice for All” series.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3lcuMUq Tyler Durden
