The emergence of Tara Reade’s accusation of sexual assault against presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden has prompted the swift and sudden collapse of the #MeToo movement’s central tenet—that all women who come forward with such allegations deserve to be believed.
In fact, some who speak for the movement aren’t merely retreating on this point: They are pretending that feminists who wielded the #MeToo hashtag never claimed that all women should be believed. This is a transparent attempt to rewrite history and should be treated as such.
For a perfect example, see the journalist Susan Faludi in The New York Times: “‘Believe All Women’ Is a Right-Wing Trap,” reads the headline on her article. Faludi accuses conservatives of inventing the idea that feminists were demanding that all women be believed. According to her, “the preferred hashtag of the #MeToo movement is #BelieveWomen. It’s different without the ‘all.’ Believing women is simply the rejoinder to the ancient practice of #DoubtWomen.”
“Good luck finding any feminist who thinks we should believe everything all women say—even what they say about sexual assault,” Faludi continues. This directly contradicts her earlier admittal that she had in fact “encountered some feminists who seemed genuinely to subscribe” to the more extreme interpretation of the hashtag.
Faludi is narrowly right that “believe women” was the more popular phrasing among #MeToo activists, and that contrarians were more likely to introduce the word “all” as a means of pointing out how silly the concept was. But whether the phrase contains “all” is unimportant: It means the same thing, regardless. The command to believe group X is straightforwardly and obviously a plea to have faith in the entire collective entity. Faludi claims in her piece that “believe women” is actually the opposite of “believe all women,” but this is absurd. She is, to use a term beloved by victims’ rights advocates, gaslighting her readers.
One of Faludi’s examples of a sensible “believe women” statement getting twisted into a “believe all women” attack was Juanita Broaddrick—who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault—calling out Hillary Clinton for hypocrisy. Hillary had tweeted, “To every survivor of sexual assault … you have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed.” Faludi shames contrarians for cynically appending a “believe all victims” hashtag alongside a question mark, but it’s right there in Clinton’s initial tweet, between the words to and survivor. #MeToo advocates demanded a presumption of belief for every individual who claims to be a sexual misconduct victim: i.e., believe all women.
It was equally clear when Biden stated the mantra during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings: “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real—whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.” Biden was clearly instructing the public to believe even the allegations that seem doubtful or flawed: The all is unstated but quite implicit.
The problem, of course, is that the implication of this mantra is ridiculous. We know that some women lie—not because they are women but because they are human beings, and human beings are capable of all sorts of deceptions, large and small. It’s the task of journalists to consider claims, gather evidence, and help the public to make informed decisions. Belief is not really an aspect of this process.
In truth, believe-victims activists have been making generous use of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. This is a form of argument in which a person makes a strong, unreasonable, and indefensible claim—the bailey—and then falls back on an uncontroversial claim—the motte—when challenged. With “believe victims,” the bailey position was something like what Biden and Clinton said: Presume that each and every alleged victim is telling the truth. The motte position is closer to this: Respect and support alleged victims, and don’t automatically discount what they say. In the wake of Reade’s allegations against him, Biden has unsurprisingly retreated to the motte.
The “respect and support” position obviously enjoys broad support—only the crueler corners of the internet would profess that victims should be mistreated and rejected as a general rule. To the extent that the #MeToo movement encouraged people to be more supportive and more open-minded when women accuse men of sexual assault, it has helped fix a great injustice. But the movement’s sloganeering attracted well-deserved criticism, and the abandonment of the literal believe-victims standard is equally welcome and long overdue.
Let no one claim, however, that the mantra was some figment of the imagination, like the proverbial flickering gaslight.
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Cops warm to using the coronavirus as an excuse for aggressive behavior. At the start of pandemic-related orders to stay at home and shut down businesses, cops across the country kept insisting that we were all in this together and they were only out to educate. A couple of months in, that attitude has all but disappeared in many places. Even as state and local authorities continue to ease lockdown rules, police have been ramping up aggressive enforcement of the remaining restrictions, often with devastating results.
One of the worst recent examples comes from Jackson, Mississippi. At a press conference yesterday, police announced 146 arrests had been made as part of “Operation Safe Street,” an initiative allegedly aimed at social-distancing scofflaws.
But look closer and you’ll see that this was simply an excuse for police to pad their pockets by enforcing rules against the usual victimless crimes (things like marijuana possession or owning a weapon without paperwork from the right state).
Jackson police netted themselves $20,000 in seized cash while confiscating 500 pounds of marijuana and 60 firearms, according to Sam Brown, the department’s public information officer. The majority of those arrested—111 people—were charged with misdemeanors.
Police didn’t say how many of those people were crammed into unsanitary jails and then released back into the community in the name of stopping the spread of disease (not to mention how much unnecessary contact with potentially infected individuals this meant for law enforcement officers or how many community members cops may have spread germs to in the process of cracking down on these laws).
In New York City, authorities continued a crusade against Hasidic Jew communities for shunning certain shutdown orders. Yesterday, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) shut down a religious school in Bedford-Stuyvesant and sent approximately 60 children they found there home. The school’s administrator said no formal classes had been taking place, however, and policies were in place to protect students studying there independently.
“He said that individual students were studying together on their own accord, and with masks and extreme social distancing in place,” Avrohom Weinstock, associate director of education at the Agudath Israel of America, told The New York Times. “I can’t comment on the facts as we were not present, but felt it was important to convey another side to this story.”
Meanwhile, in Illinois, the state can now “cite nonessential businesses with a misdemeanor for opening up to customers in violation of [Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s] executive orders dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic,” The Chicago Tribunereports. More:
Among the businesses the new rule targets are restaurants, bars, gyms and fitness centers, salons and barbershops, which have been ordered closed to serving customers on-site since March.
Under Illinois law, a Class A misdemeanor can carry a fine of $75 to $2,500 and up to 364 days in jail.
Pritzker has repeatedly said he would largely rely on local jurisdictions to enforce the statewide stay-at-home order that took effect March 21, and leave it to people to police themselves. At his daily briefing on April 23, the governor said he wasn’t “encouraging police officers to stop people and arrest them, or take drastic action.”
But last week, he threatened to hold back federal dollars from communities that buck his order, and he said businesses that flout the restrictions would face enforcement measures by the state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation and licensing bodies.
As more and more people rebel against prolonged and extensive lockdown orders, police are going to have to start arresting a lot more people—and putting themselves and their communities in a lot more danger—or take a page from the Texas playbook. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm wrote here yesterday, “enforcement should be reserved for where it can actually work.”
• In France, the high court has ordered the government “to stop using camera drones to check if Paris residents are complying with deconfinement rules, condemning the practice as ‘illegal’ and ‘an attack on private life,'” reportsThe Connexion.
• “In the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, the content-sharing platform” OnlyFans has “exploded in popularity, seeing a 75 percent increase in sign-ups in recent weeks and garnering 170,000 new users per day.”
• President Donald Trump told America yesterday that he has been taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to ward off COVID-19, despite a lack of strong evidence that it helps fight against the novel coronavirus when it does exist, no evidence whatsoever that it helps prevent COVID-19, and an indisputable track record of it causing dangerous side effects.
Infectious disease doctor Tim Lahey says the president is taking hydroxychloroquine because he fell victim to a "common misconception" that a drug in testing can't hurt.@NoelKing: Is the president putting himself in danger? Lahey: Yes.@MorningEdition@NPR
Cops warm to using the coronavirus as an excuse for aggressive behavior. At the start of pandemic-related orders to stay at home and shut down businesses, cops across the country kept insisting that we were all in this together and they were only out to educate. A couple of months in, that attitude has all but disappeared in many places. Even as state and local authorities continue to ease lockdown rules, police have been ramping up aggressive enforcement of the remaining restrictions, often with devastating results.
One of the worst recent examples comes from Jackson, Mississippi. At a press conference yesterday, police announced 146 arrests had been made as part of “Operation Safe Street,” an initiative allegedly aimed at social-distancing scofflaws.
But look closer and you’ll see that this was simply an excuse for police to pad their pockets by enforcing rules against the usual victimless crimes (things like marijuana possession or owning a weapon without paperwork from the right state).
Jackson police netted themselves $20,000 in seized cash while confiscating 500 pounds of marijuana and 60 firearms, according to Sam Brown, the department’s public information officer. The majority of those arrested—111 people—were charged with misdemeanors.
Police didn’t say how many of those people were crammed into unsanitary jails and then released back into the community in the name of stopping the spread of disease (not to mention how much unnecessary contact with potentially infected individuals this meant for law enforcement officers or how many community members cops may have spread germs to in the process of cracking down on these laws).
In New York City, authorities continued a crusade against Hasidic Jew communities for shunning certain shutdown orders. Yesterday, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) shut down a religious school in Bedford-Stuyvesant and sent approximately 60 children they found there home. The school’s administrator said no formal classes had been taking place, however, and policies were in place to protect students studying there independently.
“He said that individual students were studying together on their own accord, and with masks and extreme social distancing in place,” Avrohom Weinstock, associate director of education at the Agudath Israel of America, told The New York Times. “I can’t comment on the facts as we were not present, but felt it was important to convey another side to this story.”
Meanwhile, in Illinois, the state can now “cite nonessential businesses with a misdemeanor for opening up to customers in violation of [Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s] executive orders dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic,” The Chicago Tribunereports. More:
Among the businesses the new rule targets are restaurants, bars, gyms and fitness centers, salons and barbershops, which have been ordered closed to serving customers on-site since March.
Under Illinois law, a Class A misdemeanor can carry a fine of $75 to $2,500 and up to 364 days in jail.
Pritzker has repeatedly said he would largely rely on local jurisdictions to enforce the statewide stay-at-home order that took effect March 21, and leave it to people to police themselves. At his daily briefing on April 23, the governor said he wasn’t “encouraging police officers to stop people and arrest them, or take drastic action.”
But last week, he threatened to hold back federal dollars from communities that buck his order, and he said businesses that flout the restrictions would face enforcement measures by the state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation and licensing bodies.
As more and more people rebel against prolonged and extensive lockdown orders, police are going to have to start arresting a lot more people—and putting themselves and their communities in a lot more danger—or take a page from the Texas playbook. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm wrote here yesterday, “enforcement should be reserved for where it can actually work.”
• In France, the high court has ordered the government “to stop using camera drones to check if Paris residents are complying with deconfinement rules, condemning the practice as ‘illegal’ and ‘an attack on private life,'” reportsThe Connexion.
• “In the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, the content-sharing platform” OnlyFans has “exploded in popularity, seeing a 75 percent increase in sign-ups in recent weeks and garnering 170,000 new users per day.”
• President Donald Trump told America yesterday that he has been taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to ward off COVID-19, despite a lack of strong evidence that it helps fight against the novel coronavirus when it does exist, no evidence whatsoever that it helps prevent COVID-19, and an indisputable track record of it causing dangerous side effects.
Infectious disease doctor Tim Lahey says the president is taking hydroxychloroquine because he fell victim to a "common misconception" that a drug in testing can't hurt.@NoelKing: Is the president putting himself in danger? Lahey: Yes.@MorningEdition@NPR
I have a new article posted for download. The article addresses the boooming literature on “administrative constitutionalism,” i.e., the role of administrative agencies in influencing, creating, and establishing constitutional rules and norms, and
governing based on those rules and norms.
Here is an execerpt:
Progressives such as Metzger, Ross, and Bagenstos seem drawn to broad versions of administrative constitutionalism to evade what some would argue is the inherent conservatism of the American constitutional system. Yet history does not support the assumption that administrative constitutionalism inherently promotes progressive values. This article has already discussed several examples where administrative flexibility in applying “constitutional principles,” particularly with regard to race and ethnicity, has led to illiberal policy.
Recall this article’s definition of shadow administrative constitutionalism-—”a process of agency-norm entrepreneurship and entrenchment that occurs without public consultation, deliberation, and accountability.” Other examples of illiberalism being the outcome of this sort of administrative constitutionalism are easy to come by. Consider, for example, local government administrators who vigorously enforced their states’ anti-miscegenation laws, including making their own innovations
regarding who was covered by such laws and how their race could be ascertained. Or consider the bureaucrats who put various procedural and other obstacles in the way of Jewish refugees seeking to flee Nazi-occupied areas in the late 1930s, ensuring that even meager immigration quotes would not be filled. Or consider southern voting registrars who took pains to limit or prevent African-American voter registration in the South, or zoning officials and road planners who tried to ensure that segregated housing patterns would be entrenched. Or consider the federal immigration officials who expelled tens of thousands of Mexicans from the United States in the early 1930s, including some who had America citizenship. Or consider federal Indian policy undertaken by executive branch bureaucrats in the nineteenth century, which involved “detention of Native peoples without any avenue for redress, forced separation of Native families, criminalization of religious beliefs, and a violent ‘civilizing’ process of Native adults and children.” For most of American history race-related administrative constitutionalism was mostly neglectful of, and
sometimes outright hostile to, the rights and interests of minorities.
The lesson of history is not that administrative constitutionalism leads to “good” or “bad” results from any given ideological perspective, but
that administrative agencies will, like other political/governmental actors, act according to circumstances and incentives.
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Psychotherapist Dr Hugh Willbourn says lockdown zealots are displaying all the classic signs of cult members by doubling down on their beliefs despite having been proven wrong.
In an article on his website, Willbourn highlights the work of respected social psychologist Leon Festinger, who analyzed the beliefs of a UFO cult in the 1950’s who believed that a flying saucer would rescue them from the apocalypse.
However, after the catastrophic earthquakes and floods they expected to hit the United States never arrived and their beliefs were totally disproved, “the cult members would become not less but more convinced of their beliefs.”
Festinger identified five conditions that needed to be met in order for the cult members to double down on their beliefs and avoid cognitive dissonance.
1. There must be conviction
2. There must be commitment to this conviction
3. The conviction must be amenable to unequivocal disconfirmation
4. Such unequivocal disconfirmation must occur
5. Social support must be available subsequent to the disconfirmation.
“Festinger’s five conditions and the behaviour of the cult believers correspond closely to the situation with Brexit, Climate Change and Covid-19: a prophecy is made, believers invest themselves, their time, money and prestige in it, the prophecy fails and the believers become more fervent,” writes Willbourn.
The doctor notes how terrifying predictions of how many people COVID-19 would kill have fallen massively short and the models that produced these numbers have been thoroughly debunked. Despite warnings that coronavirus would kill 500,000 in the UK alone, the disease has only claimed 318,000 worldwide.
“To put this figure into perspective, the number of people who have died of, or with, Covid-19 in about four and half months is the same as the number who die in five days from cardiovascular disease,” writes Willbourn.
The doctor notes how “experts” are still doubling down anyway, warning of mass death if lockdown is lifted too early and a second wave of infections.
In reality, research suggests that the lockdowns had a minimal impact on infection numbers, and Sweden’s per capita death toll is lower than the UK’s and numerous other countries despite the Scandinavian country having imposed no hard lockdown.
“Don’t expect an apology from our Government, or any other Government, any time soon,” writes Willbourn.
“The Festinger effect is far, far more prevalent than a clear-sighted view of reality and the tragedy is all the greater.”
“Is this starting to sound familiar?” asks Toby Young. “As Willbourn points out, the sequence that Festinger wrote about more than 50 years ago is eerily reminiscent of what’s happening today: an apocalyptic prophecy was delivered from on high (“the science”), those who believed it radically altered their behaviour, the prophecy turned out not to be true, but instead of abandoning their doom-mongering the believers have become even more fervent, attacking anyone who points out the gap between fantasy and reality as dangerous heretics (“fake news”, “misinformation”, “conspiracy theories”, etc).”
“The difference, of course, is that Festinger’s UFO cult had a few dozen members, whereas the Covid cult seems to have infected half the world. If Festinger’s right, the bad news is we won’t be able to persuade people to stop social distancing if we prove that the danger posed by COVID-19 has been dramatically overstated. On the contrary, people’s opposition to returning to normal will intensify rather than diminish as the evidence mounts they were wrong.”
Meanwhile, Karens all over the world don’t show any signs of giving up on something that legitimizes their favorite thing in the world; Lecturing other people about their behavior.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/36fbI1x Tyler Durden
“You’ve Got 30 Days”: Trump Torches Tedros In Scathing Letter Slamming “Deadly” Failures Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/19/2020 – 09:04
President Trump fired off a scorching letter to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Monday night detailing 14 ways the WHO failed the world while kowtowing to China, and made clear that countless lives could have been saved had the organization refused to lie for Beijing.
“On April 14, 2020, I suspended United States contributions to the World Health Organization pending an investigation by my Administration of the organization’s failed response to the COVID-19 outbreak,” the letter begins.
“This review has confirmed many of the serious concerns I raised last month and identified others that the World Health Organization should have addressed, especially the World Health Organization’s alarming lack of independence from the People’s Republic of China.”
The letter lays out how the WHO and its director stood by while China lied, muzzled whistleblowers and destroyed samples – while ignoring evidence from Taiwan indicating “human-to-human transmission of a new virus,” after which the WHO “chose not to share any of this critical information with the rest of the world, probably for political reasons.“
This is the letter sent to Dr. Tedros of the World Health Organization. It is self-explanatory! pic.twitter.com/pF2kzPUpDv
Trump then lists several claims from the WHO about the coronavirus “that were either grossly inaccurate or misleading,” including:
• On January 14, 2020, the World Health Organization gratuitously reaffirmed China’s now-debunked claim that the coronavirus could not be transmitted between humans, stating: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) identified in Wuhan, China.” This assertion was in direct conflict with censored reports from Wuhan.
• On January 21, 2020, President Xi Jinping of China reportedly pressured you not to declare the corona virus outbreak an emergency. You gave in to this pressure the next day and told the world that the coronavirus did not pose a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Just over one week later, on January 30, 2020, overwhelming evidence to the contrary forced you to reverse course.
• On January 28, 2020, after meeting with President Xi in Beijing, you praised the Chinese government for its “transparency” with respect to the coronavirus, announcing that China had set a “new standard for outbreak control” and “bought the world time.” You did not mention that China had, by then, silenced or punished several doctors for speaking out about the virus and restricted Chinese
institutions from publishing information about it.
Travel ban double-standard
The letter points out that Tedros “strongly praised China’s strict domestic travel restrictions, but were inexplicably against my closing of the United States border, or the ban, with respect to people coming from China. I put the ban in place regardless of your wishes,” stating that the WHO director’s “political gamesmanship on this issue was deadly, as other governments, relying on your comments, delayed imposing life-saving restrictions on travel to and from China.”
Trump gets personal
Bringing it home, Trump slams Tedros as incompetent – writing that “Just a few years ago, under the direction of a different Director-General, the World Health Organization showed the world how much it has to offer. In 2003, in response to the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China, Director General Harlem Brundtland boldly declared the World Health Organization’s first emergency travel advisory in 55 years, recommending against travel to and from the disease epicenter in southern China.
“Many lives could have been saved had you followed Dr. Brundtland’s example,” said Trump.
In closing, Trump gave the WHO 30 days to commit to “substantive improvements” or he will make the temporary freeze of US funding to the organization permanent, as well as “reconsider our membership in the organization.”
* * *
Entire letter below:
• The World Health Organization consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical journal. The World Health Organization failed to independently investigate credible reports that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts, even those that came from sources within Wuhan itself.
• By no later than December 30, 2019, the World Health Organization office in Beijing knew that there was a “major public health” concern in Wuhan. Between December 26 and December 30, China’s media highlighted evidence of a new virus emerging from Wuhan, based on patient data sent to multiple Chinese genomics companies. Additionally, during this period, Dr. Zhang Jixian, a doctor from Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, told China’s health authorities that a new coronavirus was causing a novel disease that was, at the time, afflicting approximately 180 patients.
• By the next day, Taiwanese authorities had communicated information to the World Health Organization indicating human-to-human transmission of a new virus. Yet the World Health Organization chose not to share any of this critical information with the rest of the world, probably for political reasons.
• The International Health Regulations require countries to report the risk of a health emergency within 24 hours. But China did not inform the World Health Organization of Wuhan’s several cases of pneumonia, of unknown origin, until December 31, 2019, even though it likely had knowledge of these cases days or weeks earlier.
• According to Dr. Zhang Yongzhen of the Shanghai Public Health Clinic Center, he told Chinese authorities on January 5, 2020, that he had sequenced the genome of the virus. There was no publication of this information until six days later, on January 11, 2020, when Dr. Zhang self-posted it online. The next day, Chinese authorities closed his lab for “rectification.” As even the World Health Organization acknowledged, Dr. Zhang’s posting was a great act of “transparency.” But the World Health Organization has been conspicuously silent both with respect to the closure of Dr. Zhang’s lab and his assertion that he had notified Chinese authorities of his breakthrough six days earlier.
• The World Health Organization has repeatedly made claims about the coronavirus that were either grossly inaccurate or misleading.
• On January 14, 2020, the World Health Organization gratuitously reaffirmed China’s now-debunked claim that the coronavirus could not be transmitted between humans, stating: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) identified in Wuhan, China.” This assertion was in direct conflict with censored reports from Wuhan.
• On January 21, 2020, President Xi Jinping of China reportedly pressured you not to declare the corona virus outbreak an emergency. You gave in to this pressure the next day and told the world that the coronavirus did not pose a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Just over one week later, on January 30, 2020, overwhelming evidence to the contrary forced you to reverse course.
• On January 28, 2020, after meeting with President Xi in Beijing, you praised the Chinese government for its “transparency” with respect to the coronavirus, announcing that China had set a “new standard for outbreak control” and “bought the world time.” You did not mention that China had, by then, silenced or punished several doctors for speaking out about the virus and restricted Chinese
institutions from publishing information about it.
• Even after you belatedly declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020, you failed to press China for the timely admittance of a World Health Organization team of international medical experts. As a result, this critical team did not arrive in China until two weeks later, on February 16, 2020. And even then, the team was not allowed to visit Wuhan until the final days of their visit. Remarkably, the World Health Organization was silent when China denied the two American members of the team access to Wuhan entirely.
• You also strongly praised China’s strict domestic travel restrictions, but were inexplicably against my closing of the United States border, or the ban, with respect to people coming from China. I put the ban in place regardless of your wishes. Your political gamesmanship on this issue was deadly, as other governments, relying on your comments, delayed imposing life-saving restrictions on travel to and from China. Incredibly, on February 3, 2020, you reinforced your position, opining that because China was doing such a great job protecting the world from the virus, travel restrictions were “causing more harm than good.” Yet by then the world knew that, before locking down Wuhan, Chinese authorities had allowed more than five million people to leave the city and that many of these people were bound for international destinations all over the world.
• As of February 3, 2020, China was strongly pressuring countries to lift or forestall travel restrictions. This pressure campaign was bolstered by your incorrect statements on that day telling the world that the spread of the virus outside of China was “minimal and slow” and that “the chances of getting this going to anywhere outside China [were] very low.”
• On March 3, 2020, the World Health Organization cited official Chinese data to downplay the very serious risk of asymptomatic spread, telling the world that “COVID-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza” and that unlike influenza this disease was not primarily driven by “people who are infected but not yet sick.” China’s evidence, the World Health Organization told the world, “showed that only one percent of reported cases do not have symptoms, and most of those cases develop symptoms within two days.” Many experts, however, citing data from Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere, vigorously questioned these assertions. It is now clear that China’s assertions, repeated to the world by the World Health Organization, were wildly inaccurate.
• By the time you finally declared the virus a pandemic on March 11, 2020, it had killed more than 4,000 people and infected more than 100,000 people in at least 114 countries around the world.
• On April 11 , 2020, several African Ambassadors wrote to the Chinese Foreign Ministry about the discriminatory treatment of Africans related to the pandemic in Guangzhou and other cities in China. You were aware that Chinese authorities were carrying out a campaign of forced quarantines, evictions, and refusal of services against the nationals of these countries. You have not commented on China’s racially discriminatory actions. You have, however, baselessly labeled as racist Taiwan’s well-founded complaints about your mishandling of this pandemic.
• Throughout this crisis, the World Health Organization has been curiously insistent on praising China for its alleged “transparency.” You have consistently joined in these tributes, notwithstanding that China has been anything but transparent. In early January, for example, China ordered samples of the virus to be destroyed, depriving the world of critical information. Even now, China continues to undermine the International Health Regulations by refusing to share accurate and timely data, viral samples and isolates, and by withholding vital information about the virus and its origins. And, to this day, China continues to deny international access to their scientists and relevant facilities, all while casting blame widely and recklessly and censoring its own experts.
• The World Health Organization has failed to publicly call on China to allow for an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, despite the recent endorsement for doing so by its own Emergency Committee. The World Health Organization’s failure to
do so has prompted World Health Organization member states to adopt the “COYID-19 Response” Resolution at this year’s World Health Assembly, which echoes the call by the United States and so many others for an impartial, independent, and comprehensive review of how the World Health Organization handled the crisis. The resolution also calls for an investigation into the origins of the virus, which is necessary for the world to understand how best to counter the disease.
Perhaps worse than all these failings is that we know that the World Health Organization could have done so much better. Just a few years ago, under the direction of a different Director-General, the World Health Organization showed the world how much it has to offer. In 2003, in response to the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China, Director General Harlem Brundtland boldly declared the World Health Organization’s first emergency travel advisory in 55 years, recommending against travel to and from the disease epicenter in southern China. She also did not hesitate to criticize China for endangering global health by attempting to cover up the outbreak through its usual play book of arresting whistleblowers and censoring media. Many lives could have been saved had you followed Dr. Brundtland’s example.
It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world. The only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China. My Administration has already started discussions with you on how to reform the organization. But action is needed quickly. We do not have time to waste. That is why it is my duty, as President of the United States, to inform you that, if the World Health Organization does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization. I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America’s interests.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3bKX2rZ Tyler Durden
“I don’t think I could stand another ten years of this fighting…”
Yesterday afternoon I set out to cure Coronavirus. I set up a new company, Splurgeldrug.Com, issuing our first press release about promising new drug trials, followed by another reporting how lab rats responded favourably to the first press release, and how confident of a vaccine in the near future we are. Splugeldrug.com stock went to $600 by teatime, and I currently negotiating the leveraged acquisition of a drug major…
It’s that kind of market. Rumour and sigh abounds..
As a wiser heads than I have noted… most drugs take years to get to market, and less than 1% are ever approved. We still don’t have an effective vaccine for the constantly evolving and mutating annual flu. To bet the farm on a successful vaccine would seem reckless…
Let’s be honest.. if we get a successful vaccine it will help speed global recovery, but it won’t undo the brutal economic damage that’s already been done. A vaccine will simply flatten the depth of the recession – not reverse it, and certainly not magically convert Q2 Earnings into positive numbers…
Markets are not thriving because they expect a vaccine miracle. They are simply arbing governments and central banks. When Powell says he’s “not out of ammunition by a long-shot”, that’s a massive buy signal. Any positive news helps.. and as the central banks have got out backs, just ignore the bad stuff…
(Oh dear… I suspect this will end badly…)
Yoorp – The Decline of the West, part 5826
Thankfully, I have something more significant and real(ish) to write about this morning… Yet again, for all the wrong reasons, it’s time to buy European distressed European Sovereign bonds. Wait for the them to tighten. Sell, then wait for the next crisis.
First, I have to say how hilarious I find it that Bloomberg insists on calling yesterday’s BIG EUROPEAN DEAL a $546 bln rescue package. Apparently, their American readers won’t have a clue what €500 bln means. (Confirmation that Yankee Cultural Imperialism doesn’t make them any smarter perhaps?)
Yesterday’s big moment was France and Germany announcing plans for a European Union Euro 500 bln Recovery Fund… Yawn… I struggled to contain my excitement… What is it?
Yet another solution that isn’t!
Yet again, we have the grand launch of more political mumbleswerve, cobbled together to extend the illusion Europe is a functional polity.
Yet again, a fudge allows Merkel to look like Germany gives a fig for the crisis across the rest of Europe, while simultaneously allowing Macron to look like the statesman he imagines himself to be.
Yet again, Europe remains a case of Eat, Sleep, Repeat…
All the above sound like bad things, but from a market perspective, they are good enough to put on your buying boots for peripheral European Sovereign Debt…
The latest Franco-German grand construction, announced with such Fanfare, is so embarrassingly trite the Europhile FT kept it off the front page and buried it in the international news section.
The proposal manages to neatly fly-tip the concepts of joint and several liability Eurobonds or Coronabonds. The fund, to be run by the EU – which has limited background of borrowing massive amounts – will borrow massive amounts to directly lend to stressed economies despite its dismal past lending record, failure to get its’ accounts signed off, and lack of agreement on a new post Brexit budget.
The whole thing screams…. FUDGE!
But this is Europe.. Fudge works… it comes in conveniently sized cans that are easily and repeatedly kicked down the road…
This can of fudge will allow Ms Merkel to grandstand to her electorate… telling them that backstopping an EU Euro 500 bln lending programme to struggling EU members is so obviously not the same as joint and several lending to struggling EU members. She will be able to tell German workers and savers that Euro 500 bln is a trifling matter compared to the importance of Germany remaining at the top part of Europe.. (It also conveniently glosses over the current ructions about the German constitutional court declaring itself superior to the European Court of Justice, but that’s a story for another day.)
What the agreement is…. is a commitment by France and Germany to allocate the European Union budget in the form of grants to the “worst-hit regions and sectors.” What Euro 500 bln of budget looks like – is a significant underspend. If the US is spending upwards of $3 trillion, then the years of austerity damage to Europe’s soft underbelly require a similar, if not greater amount.
The embattled new girl at the helm of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, is a key figure behind the plan. She hasn’t been having an easy time of it in Brussels. She’s not an insider and she is a German. If the plan is unanimously approved, it will see the role of the EU elevated to effectively setting European industrial and regional policy as it distributes what amounts to a sticky-plaster aid fund.
Its bureaucracy cubed. The aim is to drive growth to countries devasted by the Coronavirus crisis. That requires money yesterday… not at some point in the future after all 27 member states have agreed the programme (which, incidentally, also requires them to approve the contentious post Brexit (no UK money) budget). (One could almost suspect the EU’s nomenklatura of bureaucrats have hatched up the whole thing to ensure their long-term security…?)
The last thing Europe needs is yet another round of EU infrastructure spending and motorways-to-nowhere proudly announcing they were paid for by the EU. Certain Italians will love it. Yet another EU grants package they can…. game and milk.
The very last way for Europe to recover from 10-years of misguided monetary policy and austerity budgets is through yet more centralised lending from Brussels. The best solution would be to magically undo the whole Euro construct, let countries run their own regional and industrial policy, and determine their own social polices within the single market of Europe. That would encourage nations to compete and optimise their economies within the single market. At some point – when nations were aligned – a common currency might even work. Instead, locking them into the Euro too early ensured European nations are increasingly beholden to Brussels.
European unity is no bad thing – but it’s how you arrive there that matters. The problem with the Euro is coercion – it traps and forces weaker members into increasingly onerous deals to remain members. Is there a workable solution for Europe? One that would allow Italy to restructure, reform and relaunch? Probably not.. which is why the next crisis is already coming just down the road (when are the next Italian elections?)
There are still risks with the Recovery Fund concept. It might not happen. Most commentators are looking at the Austrians or the Dutch throwing a spanner in the works. I’m wondering about the Italians themselves.. Why support a scheme that clearly demotes them to client state dependent on Brussels charity, and means Italy isn’t solving Italy’s problems itself, but has to beg the EU?
[ZH: Sure enough, as Bill projected above, European sentiment slumped after French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said that the European recovery fund proposed by France and Germany won’t be available until 2021 and still faces hurdles in “difficult” negotiations in coming weeks.
“It probably couldn’t be available before the start of 2021,” Le Maire says speaking at the National Assembly finance committee.
Le Maire says it will take time because procedures still need to be finalized and the fund will be linked to the EU budget. The finance minister also said Franco-German agreement on the fund was necessary but not sufficient and the two countries must still convince reluctant countries including Austria, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands.]
Whatever.. it has a long way to go, but today it’s a buy signal for Italian bonds.. (Just make sure you get short before the EU actually votes on it… )
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US Housing Starts, Permits Plunge To 5 Year Lows Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/19/2020 – 08:40
Having already collapsed in March, analysts expected further terrible weakness in both housing starts and building permits in April as the impact of lockdowns really escalated, and the data did indeed come in ugly.
Housing Starts fell 30.2% MoM in April (worse than the 26.0% drop expected and accelerating considerably from the 22.3% drop in March). This is a record drop.
Building Permits fell 20.8% MoM in April (better than the 25.9% expected)
Source: Bloomberg
The SAAR chart is a bloodbath with Starts at their lowest since Feb 2015 and Permits lowest since Jan 2015
Source: Bloomberg
Multi-family Starts dominated the drop… down over 40% to the lowest since April 2013, single family starts were down 25.4% to 650K, lowest since March 2015
Single-family permits plunged 24.3% to 669K, lowest since March 2015, and multi-unit permits dropped 12.4% to 373K, lowest since Feb 2017.
As a reminder, applications to build are a proxy for future construction, and the biggest drops were in the Northeast (-45.5% for single-family) and West (-33.2% for single-family).
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I have a new article posted for download. The article addresses the boooming literature on “administrative constitutionalism,” i.e., the role of administrative agencies in influencing, creating, and establishing constitutional rules and norms, and
governing based on those rules and norms.
Here is an execerpt:
Progressives such as Metzger, Ross, and Bagenstos seem drawn to broad versions of administrative constitutionalism to evade what some would argue is the inherent conservatism of the American constitutional system. Yet history does not support the assumption that administrative constitutionalism inherently promotes progressive values. This article has already discussed several examples where administrative flexibility in applying “constitutional principles,” particularly with regard to race and ethnicity, has led to illiberal policy.
Recall this article’s definition of shadow administrative constitutionalism-—”a process of agency-norm entrepreneurship and entrenchment that occurs without public consultation, deliberation, and accountability.” Other examples of illiberalism being the outcome of this sort of administrative constitutionalism are easy to come by. Consider, for example, local government administrators who vigorously enforced their states’ anti-miscegenation laws, including making their own innovations
regarding who was covered by such laws and how their race could be ascertained. Or consider the bureaucrats who put various procedural and other obstacles in the way of Jewish refugees seeking to flee Nazi-occupied areas in the late 1930s, ensuring that even meager immigration quotes would not be filled. Or consider southern voting registrars who took pains to limit or prevent African-American voter registration in the South, or zoning officials and road planners who tried to ensure that segregated housing patterns would be entrenched. Or consider the federal immigration officials who expelled tens of thousands of Mexicans from the United States in the early 1930s, including some who had America citizenship. Or consider federal Indian policy undertaken by executive branch bureaucrats in the nineteenth century, which involved “detention of Native peoples without any avenue for redress, forced separation of Native families, criminalization of religious beliefs, and a violent ‘civilizing’ process of Native adults and children.” For most of American history race-related administrative constitutionalism was mostly neglectful of, and
sometimes outright hostile to, the rights and interests of minorities.
The lesson of history is not that administrative constitutionalism leads to “good” or “bad” results from any given ideological perspective, but
that administrative agencies will, like other political/governmental actors, act according to circumstances and incentives.
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Is remote work the future? Many think so, but the companies that build the tools to allow remote work did not have their own robust capabilities for off-site employment until a pandemic forced their hand. Isn’t that interesting?
It’s true that Silicon Valley firms were among the first to take the big leap. While the leaders of major East Coast metropolises were telling city dwellers to live, laugh, and take the subways to jam-packed events, tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce were telling employees to start working from home and cancel conferences and non-essential travel in early March.
The tech industry’s short-term experiment in remote work may extend to the indefinite future. Facebook and Google, for instance, recently announced that their originally months-long remote work plans will go on until the end of the year. Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, ever the dark horse, doubled down and announced last week that the company will permanently transition to a remote-first workplace.
This is big deal, though it got little attention in the mainstream news. Twitter is a huge company, and should its foray into an almost completely remote-first tech company prove successful, others will surely follow.
This has some people very excited. The dream of remote work never really panned out the way many in Silicon Valley might have hoped. The technologies that they developed would in theory allow employees to work from anywhere in the world. This would sever the need for people to uproot from preferred locations just to commute to an office every day, thereby expanding the possible pool of talent that any company could attract. Maybe COVID-19 will be just the kick in the rear that tech firms need to put their employees where their cloud is—everywhere.
Many implications follow. For starters, this would free tech workers from the expensive shackles of San Francisco real estate. No longer would young computer science grads be forced to pay several thousand dollars a month to have the privilege to live in a shoebox and ride company buses into luxurious campuses just to sit in front of a computer.
They could move to cheaper areas or even stay in their hometowns, keeping the bonds of family-of-origin and friendships intact, and remain a part of the fabric of these communities. The combination of stronger communities and lower cost of living could make it much easier for younger folks to affordably form their own families. Or maybe they would decide to strike it out as digital nomads, converting a van or a boat to live in exotic locales, or just flying about every few months. Whether attracted to roots or rootlessness, remote work gives employees more freedom and perhaps more dignity.
It might give a certain kind of employee just as much productivity, too, with a better quality of life. Salesforce recently surveyed a sample of the roughly 30 percent of the workforce that is currently working from home. Most people reported that they were about as productive as usual, and some even felt they were more productive. (As a longtime remote worker, I remember fondly those early days of hyper-productivity when I was released from the burden of constant meetings for the first time.)
Of course, this survey measures self-reporting. Without the risk of a colleague catching a glimpse of our multiple screens far down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, spending time understanding the contours of the Spanish claims to Alaska under the papal bull of 1493 may appear more directly justifiable in one’s role as, say, a technology analyst. As more companies invest in remote productivity surveillance technologies, employers will get a better idea of whether their employees’ perceptions match their own expectations.
Bigger cities could theoretically become more affordable. If knowledge workers are no longer forced to live in one of five big cities to make the big bucks, the political quagmire that prevents new housing supply could naturally become moot. With lower demand comes lower prices, assuming a fixed supply. Service and retail workers who saw much of their paychecks go to insane rental prices might get a little more breathing room (although this assumes their own employment is not jeopardized by a flight from the cities). Residential and commercial property owners who bought at the top of the market, on the other hand, would be clear losers.
Companies stand to benefit too. They might get away with paying new employees less since they would no longer need to subsidize the San Francisco area’s insane housing restrictions. Businesses could furthermore save money by not having to pay the full army of office managers, janitors, chefs, and other support staff that currently keep these palatial office parks running smoothly. Of course, this is bad news for the hardworking support staff that could find themselves out of work.
Remote also provides a way around immigration barriers. No longer would tech firms need to spend time and money lobbying Congress to protect or expand programs like H1-B that fast-track lower cost foreign programmers to move to the United States. They could simply hire them as remote workers—at least until this practice too became another political issue.
So why has it taken so long for Silicon Valley to use the tools they developed for others? It’s not because they’re stupid.
The financial analyst Byrne Hobart has a great run-down of the many reasons why firms have balked at a remote-first future despite the many apparent benefits. In addition to the distractability problem, there are obvious culture benefits to working in a physical office. People just like to feel like they are part of a team. It’s easier to build team morale with the kinds of spontaneous office hijinks and conversations that just can’t be scheduled through Zoom.
My husband and I are both remote workers: I started in the office for many years and moved off-site later, while my husband was hired by a remote-first company from the start. We both have different experiences with the comradery issue: I knew my team well at the time when I first moved, but it’s more difficult (though not impossible) to form relationships with new hires whom I have yet to meet—so I travel to the home office every so often mostly for socializing purposes. My husband’s company builds team spirit with quarterly retreats that pack in months’ worth of socializing into a week-long extravaganza. This works well in our experiences, and we are happy and productive in our remote-work world, but it might be more difficult to scale such scheduled socializing for a Google or a Facebook.
More cynically, the notoriously opulent campuses of big tech fixtures serve as a kind of golden spider’s web to keep employees clocking in for longer than they otherwise would because everything they need is already right there in Mountain View.
For these reasons, the future of remote work may only be quasi-remote—at least for major employers. Yes, knowledge economy workers who can do their job just as well at home may be free to live “anywhere.” But they might find that this “anywhere” is still pretty close to top tier American cities because they will be regularly called upon to visit satellite offices for some real life facetime.
The pandemic has already forced many firms to join the remote work revolution whether they liked it or not. This will undoubtedly create inertia and many businesses will find it makes more sense to keep some staff remote rather than expand their office footprints. Yet culture bonds are sticky and (for now) fairly physically-dependent.
The Silicon Valley dream of a fully decentralized workspace won’t come in the near future, as admirable as Twitter’s foray may be. No wonder virtual reality is the Next Big Thing in tech.
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