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Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released a much-hyped, much-cited new report on “Foreign Threats to the 2020 Elections.” The key conclusion:

We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, [and] undermining public confidence in the electoral process…

The report added Ukrainian legislator Andrey Derkach, described as having “ties” to “Russia’s intelligence services,” and Konstantin Kilimnik, a “Russian influence agent” (whatever that means), used “prominent U.S. persons” and “media conduits” to “launder their narratives” to American audiences. The “narratives” included “misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden” (note they didn’t use the word “false”). They added a small caveat at the end: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

As Glenn Greenwald already pointed out, the “launder their narratives” passage was wolfed down by our intelligence services’ own “media conduits” here at home, and regurgitated as proof that the “Hunter Biden laptop story came from the Kremlin,” even though the report didn’t mention the laptop story at all. Exactly one prominent reporter, Chris Hayes, had the decency to admit this after advancing the claim initially.

With regard to the broader assessment: how many times are we going to do this? We’ve spent the last five years watching as anonymous officials make major Russia-related claims, only to have those evidence-free claims fizzle.

From the much-ballyhooed “changed RNC platform” story (Robert Mueller found no evidence the changed Republican platform was “undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia”), to the notion that Julian Assange was engaged in a conspiracy with the Russians (Mueller found no evidence for this either), to Michael Cohen’s alleged secret meetings in Prague with Russian conspirators (“not true,” the FBI flatly concluded) to the story that Trump directed Cohen to lie to Congress (“not accurate,” said Mueller), to wild stories about Paul Manafort meeting Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, to a “bombshell” tale about Trump foreknowledge of Wikileaks releases that blew up in CNN’s face in spectacular fashion, reporters for years chased unsubstantiated claims instead of waiting to see what they were based upon.

The latest report’s chief conclusions are assessments about Derkach and Kilimnik, information that the whole world knew before this report was released. Hell, even Rudy Giuliani, whose meeting with Derkach is supposedly the big scandal here, admitted there was a “50/50 chance” the guy was a Russian spy. Kilimnik meanwhile has now been characterized as having “ties” to Russian intelligence (Mueller), as a “Russian intelligence officer” (Senate Intelligence Committee), and is now back to being a mere “influence agent.” If he is Russian intelligence, then John McCain’s International Republican Institute (where Kilimnik worked), as well as embassies in Kiev and Moscow (where Kilimnik regularly gave information, according to the New York Times), have a lot of explaining to do.

No matter what, the clear aim of this report is to cast certain stories about Joe or Hunter Biden as misinformation, when the evidence more likely shows that material like the Hunter Biden emails is real, just delivered from a disreputable source. That makes such stories just like, say, the Joe Biden-Petro Poroshenko tapes, which were also pushed by Derkach and reported on uncontroversially by major media outlets like the Washington Post, before it became fashionable to denounce outlets reporting such leaks as Russian “proxies” and “conduits.”

I never thought the Hunter Biden laptop story was anywhere near as big of a deal as the efforts by platforms like Facebook and Twitter to block access to it, which seemed a historic and dangerous precedent. This new effort to cast the reporting of “allegations against President Biden” as participation in a foreign intelligence campaign is nearly as ominous. Even worse is the degree to which press figures are devouring the message. Will any bother to point out the huge quantity of recent official takes on the Russia story that went pear-shaped? A very, very brief sample:

1. All 17 U.S. intelligence agencies backed an assessment that cyberattacks in 2016 came from the “highest levels of the Kremlin.” That was later corrected in congressional testimony to four (it was actually three):

2. The Trump organization was communicating with Russia via a mysterious server tied to Russia’s Alfa Bank. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz noted the FBI concluded “by early February 2017 that there were no such links,” yet stories pegged to anonymous intel officials persisted for years after that.

3. Russia “hacked a Vermont utility,” according to U.S. officials! Except, the next day:

   

4. Four “current and former American officials,” citing a “trove of information the FBI is sifting through,” said the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials.” Months later:

5. A “senior U.S. government official” characterized the ex-spy who claimed Russia had been cultivating Donald Trump for at least five years, and could “blackmail him,” was “a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.” But Christopher Steele was subsequently dismissed as an FBI source for his “completely untrustworthy” decision to talk to the media, and Horowitz not only discovered that both the FBI and the CIA (who dismissed his reports as “internet rumor”) had many reservations about his credibility, but that his famed “blackmail” claims about pee and prostitutes had been made in “jest,” over “beers.”

6. Former Trump adviser Carter Page was a “catalyst” for the FBI investigation into connections between Donald Trump and Russia, according to “current and former law enforcement and counterintelligence officials.” Similarly, the New York Times cited court documents in describing George Papadopoulos: “Trump Campaign Adviser Met With Russian to Discuss ‘Dirt’ on Clinton.”

   But Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe testified that as early as August of 2016, Page became the focus of secret surveillance because Papadopoulos had been deemed a dead end. This scarcely reported detail only rendered the entire predicate for the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation absurd:

7. Jeff Sessions did not disclose contacts with a Russian ambassador in a security clearance form, Justice Department sources told multiple outlets, in what became a major, front-page scandal. Except it came out later he didn’t have to make those disclosures, and as for the contacts themselves? “Brief, public, and non-substantive,” said Robert Mueller.

8. “Senior FBI and national intelligence officials” told the White House and major news outlets that releasing the name of an “informant” in the Trump-Russia investigation could “risk lives,” one of many such stories (we heard similar warnings before the release of the name of Christopher Steele, his source Igor Danchenko, the “exfiltrated spy” Oleg Smolenkov, the “anonymous” New York Times editorialist, the Ukraine “whistleblower,” and others). The “informant” Haspel warned about, Stefan Halper, turned out to have been a professor outed by name as an intelligence source in the New York Times all the way back in 1983:

9. “Current and former intelligence officers” told the New York Times that CIA director Gina Haspel showed Donald Trump pictures of British children sickened, as well as ducks killed, by a Russian assassination in England using the deadly nerve agent Novichok. It turns out there were no such sick children or dead ducks, and Haspel didn’t show such pictures, an error the Times chalked up to lack of research time:

10. According to “officials briefed on the matter,” New York Times reported, and the Washington Post “confirmed,” that “a Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan.” Two months later, an on-the-record military official was less certain:

One could go on and on with this list, from the bogus claims about Maria Butina that ended up as Times headlines (“Suspected Secret Agent Used Sex in Covert Plan”), to overhype of the Cambridge Analytica story (which turned out to have nothing to do with Brexit), to the bass-ackwards denunciations of the so-called “Nunes memo” (validated almost entirely by Horowitz), and on, and on.

Does this mean the Russians don’t meddle? Of course not. But we have to learn to separate real stories about foreign intelligence operations with posturing used to target domestic actors while suppressing criticism of domestic politicians. It’s only happened about a hundred times in the last five years — maybe it’s time to start asking for proof in these episodes?

A long-awaited show trial for one of two Canadians accused of espionage in China started Friday, as family members of the men say they are prepared for the worst, according to media reports. According to Bloomberg, a hearing was held at a local court in Dandong city (situated in the northeastern province of Liaoning) in the trial of Michael Spavor on allegations of spying. Spavor ran a business organizing tours of North Korea for mostly western clients before he was picked up by Chinese law enforcement back in late 2018.

Trials for both men are set to begin Friday (for Spavor) and Monday (for Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who has also been accused of spying). The two Canadians have been detained since December 2018 and were charged in June last year with spying. In a Thursday statement, Marc Garneau, Canada’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, said the country’s embassy in Beijing “has been notified that court hearings for Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig are scheduled to take place on March 19 and March 22, respectively.”

Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who worked for the International Crisis Group at the time of his arrest, has been accused of “stealing sensitive information and intelligence through contacts in China since 2017.” Spavor has been accused of providing intelligence to Kovrig. It’s not clear whether the two men knew each other prior to their arrests.

Chinese officials haven’t shared any of the “evidence” they have gathered against the two men, or information detailing their alleged crimes, though they insist that “the facts are clear and evidence is solid.”

Both men were arrested shortly after Canadian authorities arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou after she stepped off a plane in Vancouver. Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, a high-profile figure in China, was arrested at the behest of US authorities, who sought her extradition to the US to face charges that she violated US sanctions against Iran.

The arrests were widely seen as political retribution against Ottawa for cooperating with the US. However, while Meng has been allowed out on bail (she’s currently under house arrest in her opulent home) while she awaits the results of her extradition proceedings – which are still ongoing – both men have been detained in Chinese prisons, will little contact with their families or the outside world.

Family members and contacts of the two Canadian men have described them being held in poor conditions, and denied outside contact. Almost all in-person consular visits to foreign prisoners in China have been paused since last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, diplomats have only been allowed to speak to the men via phone.

Teng Biao, a lawyer who practiced human rights law in China for 10 years, and now lives in exile in New Jersey, told Canada’s the Toronto Star that the two men have almost no chance of being found innocent. They will face a “show trial” driven by political considerations, before being handed potentially lengthy prison sentences, to be served in China.

“In this kind of politically sensitive case the judges, the court, are not able to make the final decision,” Teng said. “We can say in these kinds of cases the court is only a political tool of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Criminal trials in China are generally very short, often lasting only a day or two, said Teng, and won’t be open to the public.

After Kovrig and Spavor were charged with espionage last year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced the “political” nature of their case, saying their detention was a “decision made by the Chinese government and we deplore it.” However, Beijing has held strong, continuing to insist that the charges against the men are legitimate, while denying Trudeau’s claims that the CCP is persecuting Canadian nationals for political purposes.

Authored by Pat Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Asked bluntly by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a killer,” Joe Biden answered, “Uh, I do.”

Biden added that he once told Putin to his face that he had “no soul.”

Biden also indicated that new sanctions would be imposed on Russia for the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny and for meddling in the 2020 U.S. election to allegedly help Donald Trump. Russia also faces U.S. sanctions for building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic to deliver natural gas to Germany.

With its president being called a “killer” by the U.S. president, Russia called Ambassador Anatoly Antonov home “for consultations.” In other times, such an exchange would bring the two nations to the brink of war.

What is Biden doing? Do we not have enough enemies? Does he not have enough problems on his plate?

The May 1 deadline for full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, negotiated a year ago with the Taliban, is just six weeks off. Do we stay and soldier on or depart? No decision has been announced.

If we stay, our forces in Afghanistan could, again, come under fire. If we leave, the Kabul regime could be shaken to its foundation and fall.

Leaving would be an admission that the U.S. failed, and the war is lost.

After the recent U.S.-South Korea military exercises, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s sister issued this threat to the Biden administration:

“We take this opportunity to warn the new U.S. administration trying hard to give off powdered smell in our land (that) if it wants to sleep in peace for the coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step.”

There is talk of new North Korean tests of missiles and nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Tokyo this week that the U.S. goal remains “the complete denuclearization of North Korea” But Presidents Bush II, Obama and Trump all failed to achieve that goal.

With national elections in June, the clock is also running on the Tehran regime that negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal. Does Biden intend to sign on again, as he indicated in the campaign he would, or walk away?

Biden also faces a new crisis of his own making. His “compassionate” policy on illegal immigration has been rewarded with scores of thousands of children, teenagers and families crossing our Southern border to be granted temporary residence while their cases await hearings.

With the border disintegrating, one would think the Biden administration would not be looking around for other crises.

Yet, in Tokyo, on the eve of his meeting with the Chinese in Anchorage, Blinken was playing the hawk:

“China uses coercion and aggression to systematically erode autonomy in Hong Kong, undercut democracy in Taiwan, abuse human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet, and assert maritime claims in the South China Sea that violate international law. … We will push back if necessary when China uses coercion or aggression to get its way.”

China has enacted a new law that authorizes its coast guard to use force to defend Chinese sovereignty. And among China’s claims to sovereign control are the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, claimed and controlled by Japan.

Blinken has warned the U.S. will fight to keep the Senkakus Japanese.

While in Tokyo, Blinken also denounced the generals’ coup in Myanmar, accusing Myanmar’s army of “attempting to overturn the results of a democratic election and … brutally repressing peaceful protesters.”

Former national security adviser to President Trump John Bolton has listed other areas where China is engaged in “unacceptable behavior.”

“A by-no-means-comprehensive list of Beijing’s transgressions that require U.S. attention would include: meddling, blatant and subtle, with U.S. public opinion; building military bases in the disputed South China Sea; menacing Taiwan, Vietnam and India; increasing strategic nuclear forces and egregious global cyberwarfare; empowering North Korea’s nuclear weapons program; concealing the origins of covid-19; stealing intellectual property and forcing technology transfers; and genocide against Uyghurs and the repression of Hong Kong.”

Perhaps the Anchorage talks can be extended to get all the items on Bolton’s agenda fully addressed.

Again, does not America have enough on her plate already?

Our national debt is now larger than our national economy. COVID-19 has killed half a million of us and is killing 1,000 a day more. We have a broken and bleeding Southern border being overrun with no end in sight.

Politically, our nation is divided as deeply as it was on the eve of the Civil War. We are caught up in a culture war, at the root of which is an irreconcilable conflict over whether America is a good and great country, perhaps the greatest — or a nation of whose history and founding we ought to be eternally ashamed.

If time is on America’s side in our cold wars with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, is not the wiser policy to maneuver to avoid any new hot wars?

Bill Gates took to Reddit for an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session on Friday, where he answered all sorts of questions about vaccines, fake meat, and his favorite Mortal Kombat fighter (he’s never played).

One question he completely ignored, however, concerned his relationship with notorious and now-dead pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein – who he met with at least six times, including visits to Epstein’s recently-sold Manhattan mansion on “multiple occasions,” staying at least once into the night, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Gates adviser Boris Nikolic (pictured below) was named as a fallback executor in an will Epstein amended days before his 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell. 

Several Redditors took this opportunity to ask Bill to explain himself.

“Thanks for doing this again. First of all – big fan of your humble rags-to-riches journey in which you rose against the odds from a rich, well-connected family and utilised predatory patenting to profit from publicly-funded work to sell back to the public. Very inspiring!” asks user proahteane, who followed up the complement with:

“Platitudes aside, my question is this: why were you meeting with Jeffrey Epstein after his first conviction? What could you possibly have to discuss with a prolific pedophile eugenicist?“

And while the question was the 12th most upvoted, Gates completely ignored it, while answering over two-dozen lower-ranked questions.

Were they both interested in eugenics?

— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) October 12, 2019

Meanwhile, employees of the Gates foundation also visited Epstein’s mansion on multiple occasions, while Epstein also “spoke with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan Chase about a proposed multibillion-dollar charitable fund — an arrangement that had the potential to generate enormous fees for Mr. Epstein,” according to the Times. 

In late 2011, at Mr. Gates’s instruction, the foundation sent a team to Mr. Epstein’s townhouse to have a preliminary talk about philanthropic fund-raising, according to three people who were there. Mr. Epstein told his guests that if they searched his name on the internet they might conclude he was a bad person but that what he had done — soliciting prostitution from an underage girl — was no worse than “stealing a bagel,” two of the people said. -NYT

How Gates and Epstein met, according to the New York Times; 

Two members of Mr. Gates’s inner circle — Boris Nikolic and Melanie Walker — were close to Mr. Epstein and at times functioned as intermediaries between the two men.

Ms. Walker met Mr. Epstein in 1992, six months after graduating from the University of Texas. Mr. Epstein, who was an adviser to Mr. Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret, told Ms. Walker that he could land her an audition for a modeling job there, according to Ms. Walker. She later moved to New York and stayed in a Manhattan apartment building that Mr. Epstein owned. After she graduated from medical school, she said, Mr. Epstein hired her as a science adviser in 1998.

Ms. Walker later met Steven Sinofsky, a senior executive at Microsoft who became president of its Windows division, and moved to Seattle to be with him. In 2006, she joined the Gates Foundation with the title of senior program officer.

At the foundation, Ms. Walker met and befriended Mr. Nikolic, a native of what is now Croatia and a former fellow at Harvard Medical School who was the foundation’s science adviser. Mr. Nikolic and Mr. Gates frequently traveled and socialized together.

Ms. Walker, who had remained in close touch with Mr. Epstein, introduced him to Mr. Nikolic, and the men became friendly.

Mr. Epstein and Mr. Gates first met face to face on the evening of Jan. 31, 2011, at Mr. Epstein’s townhouse on the Upper East Side. They were joined by Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, a former Miss Sweden whom Mr. Epstein had once dated, and her 15-year-old daughter. (Dr. Andersson-Dubin’s husband, the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, was a friend and business associate of Mr. Epstein’s. The Dubins declined to comment.)

The gathering started at 8 and lasted several hours, according to Ms. Arnold, Mr. Gates’s spokeswoman. Mr. Epstein subsequently boasted about the meeting in emails to friends and associates. “Bill’s great,” he wrote in one, reviewed by The Times.

“I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that,” claims Gates. “There were people around him who were saying, hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people.” 

And it looks like Gates was one of Epstein’s “rich people.” According to the report, Gates donated $2 million to MIT’s Media Lab, which university officials described as having been “directed” by Epstein. 

According to Arnold, Gates’ spokeswoman, “Over time, Gates and his team realized Epstein’s capabilities and ideas were not legitimate and all contact with Epstein was discontinued.” 

Perhaps ‘Gates and his team’ should have steered clear of the known pedophile in the first place?

*  *  *

More Gates answers, via Bloomberg:

Bill Gates is in favor of raising some taxes, but says some proposals seem to go too far. “Taxes are an important issue. Government has to do more -health costs, pandemic recovery, climate investments, foreign aid generosity… So I have pushed for some higher taxes. I have disagreed with some proposals that seem to go too far,” the billionaire said Friday during an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A session on Reddit. The commentary follows a recent proposed wealth tax from Senator Elizabeth Warren that called for a 2% annual tax on households and trusts valued at between $50 million and $1 billion. All net worth over $1 billion would be taxed at 3%. The Microsoft co-founder did not specifically mention any tax proposals during his Q&A. Gates, who is the third wealthiest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, also said a higher estate tax can be an effective tool for revenue and avoiding dynastic wealth.

More key quotes:

• On crypto mining:
  • “I have a lot of issues with anonymous money transfer compared to attributed systems where you can dispute and reverse transactions and make sure taxes are paid. The electricity use is just one issue. We do need digital money but without that overhead.”
• On universal basic income:
  • “Today we provide income to people who are disabled in many countries. The question is, can we afford to do this for everyone. We are getting richer as we innovate but I question if we are rich enough to discourage able people from working. Over time we have been more generous and we will be more generous. The discussion on this is very interesting but it does come down to numbers…”
• On misinformation, disinformation and fake news:
  • “Some false information is more interesting than the truth so digital channels seem to magnify echo chambers with bad facts. I haven’t seen as much creativity on how we solve this as we need.”
• On climate denial:
  • “The damage in the past was huge. Now the oil companies have stopped funding these things so I think climate denial will go down. There are issues about how we go about reducing emissions but I hope all young people agree that is a critical goal.”
• If nothing is done about climate change:
  • “It gets worse over time and natural ecosystems go away. The migration away from the unlivable areas around the equator will be massive. We won’t be able to support a large population if it gets a lot warmer.”
• On reaching net zero emissions by 2050:
  • “There’s more public support for taking big steps to avoid a climate disaster than ever before. It’s inspiring to see governments and companies around the world set ambitious goals for reducing emissions. The world’s power to invent makes me optimistic.”

Authored by Micha Gartz via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Before Covid, an American youth died by suicide every six hours. Suicide is a major public health threat and a leading cause of death for those aged under 25 — one far bigger than Covid. And it is something that we have only made worse as we, led by politicians and ‘the science,’ deprived our youngest members of society — who constitute one-third of the US population — of educational, emotional and social development without their permission or consent for over a year. 

And why? For what?

We were scared. We were scared for our lives and those of people we love. And, like your average German-on-the-street in the 1930s and 40s, we believed that doing what we were told and supporting the national cause would save us and our families.

The reality is we sacrificed others without a second thought. We have sacrificed our youths’ lives and future livelihoods in a desperate attempt to save a slim minority of the elderly population who have surpassed the average US life expectancy of 78.8 years and those who were already on their way out. 

Source: Data from “NC-EST2019-SYASEXN: Annual Estimates of the Resident Population by Single Year of Age and Sex for the United States: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2019.” 2020 Census.

The median age — not the average, but the middle — of Covid-deaths is 80. Covid poses minimal risk to healthy individuals under 65, and is even less of a threat to youths (those aged under 25). In fact, preliminary data suggest Covid accounted for barely 1.2% of all deaths in the under-25 age group. Graphically, that’s the solid red line along the bottom of the graph below — the one you would probably miss if I didn’t draw attention to it. The distance between that and the solid pink line across the top that caught your eye? That represents the other 98.8% of deaths that had nothing to do with Covid. 

Source: Data from “Provisional COVID-19 Death Counts by Sex, Age, and Week.” CDC 2020. As data is provisional it may not include complete data for the final 8 weeks (the time period with large decline on the graph) and is subject to change.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that, compared to 2018 and 2019 deaths per 100k, 2020 saw one extra death among those under age five, an additional 1.5 deaths among those aged 5 to 14, and a whopping 23 additional deaths among those aged 15 to 24. Overall, deaths per 100k in this age group jumped from 106.4 per 100k in 2019 to 131.7 per 100k during 2020. That’s an increase of 23% — and Covid only accounts for 1.2% of total deaths in ages 0–24 years.

All-Cause Deaths per 100,000 of US population under 25 years

Source: 2018/2019 data from “Mortality in the United States, 2019,” Figure 3: Death rates for ages 1 year and over: United States, 2018 and 2019; and 2020 data drawn from “Provisional COVID-19 Death Counts by Sex, Age, and Week.” 2020 data is an estimate based on the CDC’s provisional death count – which may not include complete data for the previous 8 weeks and is subject to change.

The biggest increase in youth deaths occurred in the 15-24 age bracket — the age group most susceptible to committing suicide, and which constitutes 91% of youth suicides. Indeed, as early as July 2020 — just four months into the pandemic — CDC Director Robert Redfield remarked that there has been another cost that we’ve seen, particularly in high schools. We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose.

Although complete national suicide data for 2020 likely won’t be publicly available until 2022, Redfield’s claim is supported by the increase in calls and emails witnessed by mental illness hotlines. 

Between March and August the National Alliance on Mental Illness HelpLine reported a 65% increase in calls and emails. The Trevor Project — which targets suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth — saw double its usual call volume. The jump in helpline calls hadn’t let up by the end of 2020: in November Crisis Text Line received 180,000 calls — its highest volume ever, and an increase of 30,000 from the previous month. Over 90% of those were from people under 35. 

Such “deaths of despair” tend to be higher among youths, particularly for those about to graduate or enter the workforce. With economic shrinkage due to lockdowns and forced closures of universities, youths face both less economic opportunity and limited social support — which plays an important role in reporting and preventing self-harm — through social networks. “We know that participation in sports and a connection to school can have a profound protective effect,” says Pittsburgh psychiatry professor David Brent. But “the stressor that COVID represents,” says University of Oregon clinical psychology professor Nick Allen, 

takes away [the] good things [in life]. You can’t go to sporting events, you can’t see your friends, you can’t go to parties. […] we’re taking away high points in people’s lives that give them reward and meaning. […] over time, the anhedonia, the loss of pleasure, is going to drive you down a lot more.

And, “while adults have had multiple years to practice stress management and build skills around that,” says YouthLine program director, Emily Moser, “young people haven’t had that.” Many of YouthLine’s callers grieved not being able to do things they normally could — from after-school activities, to spending time with friends and missing milestones such as graduations. Many of these mental health problems and suicidal behaviour created by lockdowns, “are likely to be present for longer and peak later than the actual pandemic,” according to University of Bristol suicidology expert David J. Gunnell.

Generally suicides decrease in the immediate aftermath of short-term local or national emergencies (such as hurricanes) because, as the University of Kentucky’s director of the Suicide Prevention and Exposure Laboratory, Julie Cerel, explained, “[p]eople have [a] pull-together mentality.” However, this effect appears to disintegrate over longer periods of crisis, such as in the aftermath of financial crises. Between 2008 and 2012, in the wake of the financial crisis, suicide was the second (ages 15-19) and third leading cause of youth deaths (ages 10-14 and 20-24). 

In August 2020, FAIR Health found a 334% spike in intentional self-harm claims among 13–18 year olds in the Northeast compared to the same month in 2019. Nationally self-harm medical claim lines nearly doubled for this group in both March and April, while claim lines for overdoses as a percentage of all medical claim lines increased 95% and 119% percent respectively.

Indeed, during the first eight months of 2020, suicides in Los Alamos (NM) tripled while Fresno (CA) numbers jumped 70% in June 2020 compared to the same month the previous year. Even the CDC acknowledges a 31% increase in the proportion of mental health-related ER visits for 12 to 17 year olds between March and October last year compared to the previous year.

Suicide is already the 10th leading cause of death in the US, with one death for every 24 attempts. Yet we continue to sacrifice the well-being of 103.3 million youths — equivalent to roughly 31.5% of the US population — out of fear for a fraction of the 4% that live past the average life expectancy of 78.8 years. 

Why are we even attempting to subject the entirety of the US population to isolation and ineffectual mask-wearing, instead of supporting voluntary focused protection for those who actually need it? And why do we continue to deny all groups the opportunity to enjoy and celebrate life when, after one year, deaths from and with Covid — number 520,000 — and are barely equivalent to 0.16% of the population?

Society needs to remember that the stolen Covid generation will one day run the country. Teachers resisting returning to class should recognize that this generation currently locked-in to bedroom Zoom classes will one day care for us in our old age. And politicians should remember that this generation whose rights have so blatantly been violated will soon be able to vote.

*  *  *

If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255

Despite today’s head fake in bonds (yields surged but quickly retreated from their peaks), this Friday marks the seventh consecutive week in which the U.S. 10 year Treasury yield has risen. Real Vision senior editor Ash Bennington hosts managing editor Ed Harrison and editor Jack Farley to analyze how the continued sell-off in bonds is impacting bank stocks, tech equities, and the U.S. dollar. They explore how the Fed’s decision to let the SLR exemption expire will impact the bond market and banks. Ed updates viewers on Europe’s economic woes, and Jack gives a quick rundown of the wild gyrations in the oil market. The three also look at the rate hikes by the central banks of Turkey, Brazil, Norway, and Russia.