A superbug, first discovered in a hospital, is evolving to thrive on the sugar-rich diets common in the United States. Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile) is a bacterium that can cause a nasty spell of diarrhea and colitis for those unlucky enough to be infected by the superbug.
According to IFLScience, researchers analyzing the genomes of various strains in Nature Genetics have discovered it is a millennia-long process of evolution that will see it separate into two different species. One of those species is particularly adept at evading hospital disinfectants and thrives on a sugar-rich Western diet.
“This largest ever collection and analysis of C. difficile whole genomes, from 33 countries worldwide, gives us a whole new understanding of bacterial evolution,” author Brendan Wren, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Medicine, said in a statement.
“It reveals the importance of genomic surveillance of bacteria. Ultimately, this could help understand how other dangerous pathogens evolve by adapting to changes in human lifestyles and healthcare regimes which could then inform healthcare policies.”
In a healthy person, “good” gut bacteria will fend off the bad superbug while antibiotics extinguish the “good” gut bacteria, leaving the patient vulnerable to infection. Because of this, the bug is frequently found in hospital settings. C. difficile clade A)accounts for roughly 70 percent of the samples collected from hospital patients.
Noticing that it showed differences in genes associated with the metabolization of simple sugars, they monitored its effects in mice. Those given a sugar-rich diet appeared to provide a better host for the bacteria – it seemed to flourish in guts exposed to a high-sugar Western diet.
The team was able to calculate when this species of the C. difficile bacterium first appeared using dating analysis, pinpointing its origin to a time approximately 76,000 years ago. Yet, it was towards the end of the 16th century that things really began to take off, with the number of different strains of C. difficile clade Astarting to increase. –IFLScience
According to the study’s authors, this is the largest genomic study of C. difficile and shows that it is evolving in response to human behavior. “This particular bacteria was primed to take advantage of modern healthcare practices and human diets before hospitals even existed,” explained joint first author Nitin Kumar from the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
“Our study provides genome and laboratory-based evidence that human lifestyles can drive bacteria to form new species so they can spread more effectively,” saidsenior author Trevor Lawley from the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
This means focusing on one’s diet an improving the quality of food eaten could help stave off dangerous and potentially deadly superbugs like C. difficile.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2P2QD5s Tyler Durden
Apparently the month long saga of the Grace-1 is not at all over, and may now seriously escalate even after it was set free from custody. Just as the Iranian supertanker was released from custody off Gibraltar and is preparing to make its way into the Mediterranean, a seizure warrant filed by the US Department of Justice was unsealed in a US district court late Friday.
Documents allege “a scheme to unlawfully access the U.S. financial system to support illicit shipments to Syria from Iran by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” the DoJ said in a statement.
The seizure warrant and forfeiture complaint alleges the now Iranian-flagged tanker along with its over two million barrels of oil aboard it and $995,000 “are subject to forfeiture,” citing terrorism forfeiture statutes, and bank fraud and money laundering.
The Grace-1, now renamed by Iran the Adrian Darya. Image source: Reuters
“The scheme involves multiple parties affiliated with the IRGC and furthered by the deceptive voyages of the Grace 1,” US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jessie Liu said in a press release. “A network of front companies allegedly laundered millions of dollars in support of such shipments.”
The warrant is addressed to “the United States Marshal’s Service and/or any other duly authorized law enforcement officer.”
According to Reuters, the Grace 1 – now renamed the Adrian Darya after Iran began flying its flag over the previously Panamanian-flagged tanker – may not have made it far though it was filmed moving on Friday. “The tanker shifted its position on Friday, but its anchor was still down off Gibraltar and it was unclear if it was ready to set sail soon,” the report said.
Given that no doubt the US warrant means leaders in Tehran will be livid, and now with the possibility that American military assets could potentially make a move to actually board the vessel or perhaps even block its as yet unknown route, this puts the fate of the UK-flagged Stena Impero — still under IRGC control — in jeopardy.
A message to all mariners – if you crew an IRGC or other FTO-affiliated ship, you jeopardize future entry to the U.S. #NotWorthIthttps://t.co/v4bqu5SGSu
It’s expected that Iran will release the detained Stena Impero in a tit-for-tat gesture, as Tehran had initially expressed a desire for, possibly at some point this weekend. The US warrant will definitely delay this and quash any level of good faith signalling between Iran and the UK.
What’s more is it looks like the US is ready to pursue sanctions busting consequences to the max, down to ship owners and crew: “A message to all mariners – if you crew an IRGC or other FTO-affiliated ship, you jeopardize future entry to the U.S.,” Secretary Mike Pompeo said in a tweet Friday.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31JxV4a Tyler Durden
While searching for evidence the American economy is deteriorating, more or less, observing consumer trends, it appears that some are starting to pull back on travel.
A new report from the Bermuda Tourism Authority (BTA), first reported by The Royal Gazette, shows US air visitor arrivals slipped 5% YoY in 1H19, with the sharpest declines from millennials and arrivals from New York airports.
If you’ve ever been to Bermuda and or any country in the Caribbean, most economies are entirely based on tourism from the US, Canada, and Europe. So monitoring the tourism industry in these countries serves as alternative data on the health of consumers from developed economies.
BTA said while air travel from the US fell at an alarming rate, spending among tourist rose 7% more per person in 1H19.
Kevin Dallas, the chief executive of BTA, said: “In the hospitality business, visitor spending is a metric most closely tied to profitability.”
“We’re very pleased to see economic growth in the first half of the year. However, we remain concerned airlift challenges will continue to negatively affect air arrivals in 2019.”
“We raised this red flag at the start of the year, and since then, our team has closed the deal on big-brand event partnerships, including the US Open and the PGA Tour’s inaugural Bermuda Championship. These are purposeful steps that can help us offset the constraints on airlift.”
BTA figures show the number of air visitor arrivals declined from 66,604 to 64,175 in 2Q19, with the most significant loss in the millennial age bracket [25 to 24].
In the first six months of the year, total air visitor arrivals declined from 92,920 to 88,263, a 5% drop YoY.
The decline rippled through the tourism industry on the British island territory in the North Atlantic Ocean, sending the hotel occupancy rate down 4.4% in 1H19.
Air visitors who vacationed in Bermuda between April and June, spent a total of 2.4% more, $98.5 million compared with $96.2 million in the same period last year, an increase of $2.3 million.
For the 1H19, air visitors spent a total of $132 million.
Dallas explained: “After twelve consecutive quarters of leisure air arrival growth dating back to January 2016, the sharp increases Bermuda experienced over the past three years are leveling off.”
The deterioration in air visitors was also blamed on a drop in the number of seats available by airliners from New York to Bermuda in 1H19.
A BTA spokeswoman said: “At the BTA’s Outlook Forum back in February, officials warned that while 2018 leisure air arrival numbers had reached a 16-year high and third consecutive year of growth, business and visiting friends and relatives travel had declined sharply — down more than 30% since 2007.
However, baby boomers traveling by cruise ship was up 15% YoY in 1H19, up from 201,179 to 231,495 — 30,316 people. The increase was able to push total visits in 1H19 to 319,758, which was 25,659 people more than the same period last year.
While millennial travelers from New York airports scaled back their travels to Bermuda, baby boomers, on the other hand, are living the high life on cruise ships that eventually dock in the small island country.
We will continue to monitor tourism trends in Bermuda and countries in the Caribbean to see, if that in fact, American consumers are pulling back on their travels, which would only occur on the onset of a recession.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2z7uhoF Tyler Durden
All of a sudden, it seems like the mainstream media just can’t stop talking about “the coming recession”.
If you go to Google News and type in the word “recession”, you will literally get dozens of articles from the last couple of days with “recession” in the headline. And of course it is true that there are signs of global economic trouble all around us, and I have been documenting them on my website all throughout 2019. So we don’t want to criticize the mainstream media when they actually decide to tell the truth, because a recession is definitely coming, but could it be possible that there is also a hidden political agenda at work?
The economy is generally regarded to be one of the bright spots for President Trump, and political operatives on the left clearly understand that a major economic downturn now would spell almost certain doom for Trump’s chances of winning the 2020 election. And when mainstream reporters talk about the possibility of a recession as we approach the next election, many of them almost seem gleeful as they describe how it could hurt Trump politically. Ultimately, when things start to really get bad it is inevitable that the mainstream media will place the blame directly at the feet of Trump. It is easy to imagine a narrative along the lines of “Trump’s handling of the economy has plunged the nation into a recession” being relentlessly pounded into the heads of American voters over the next year. And if the end result is Trump being voted out of office, more than 90 percent of those that work for the big news companies will be just fine with that.
This week, we have seen an absolute explosion in the number of stories about the possibility of an imminent recession. The following are just a few of the stories I came across while doing research earlier today…
Of course many of these stories were sparked by a major event that we just witnessed on Wall Street. The following comes from Fox Business…
The yield curve is blaring a recession warning.
The spread between the U.S. 2-year and 10-year yields on Wednesday turned negative for the first time since 2007. Such a development has occurred ahead of each and every U.S. recession of the last 50 years, sometimes leading by as much as 24 months.
Yes, it is possible that the yield curve could be wrong this time, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
And the economic news that is coming in from all over the world just continues to confirm that conditions are deteriorating. On Thursday, we learned that U.S. manufacturing has slumped back into contraction territory, and earlier this week we got some really troubling news from Germany and China…
Germany – Europe’s largest economy – reported that its gross domestic product, a measure of an economy’s health, went negative in the second quarter.
In China, the country’s industrial output in July hit a 17-year low, Detrick said. Retail sales and investment in real estate and other fixed assets weakened, an indication the world’s second-biggest economy is feeling pressure.
So it isn’t as if the mainstream media is being dishonest with us in this case. Global economic activity is most definitely slowing down, and many believe that things will get much worse during the second half of this year.
And a global economic slowdown would be terrible news for the Trump campaign, because their entire narrative depends on President Trump making the economy great again. A substantial percentage of American voters are convinced that since he is a billionaire, Trump must really understand the economy very well. And according to a CNN poll from earlier this year, the performance of the economy is one of the main reasons for his current level of support…
Right now, the main reason voters approve of Trump’s job performance is the economy. A CNN poll from late Mayfound that 26% of those who approve of Trump’s job performance said it was mainly because of the economy. That was more than double the next most commonly given answer. Additionally, 8% said jobs/unemployment was the main reason for why they approved of Trump. Among those who disapproved, few said anything related to the economy was the main reason why they disapproved of Trump. For example, only 1% said the Trump tax cuts.
But if the U.S. economy plunges into a painful recession, the game completely changes.
For those on the left that would like to see Trump voted out in 2020, the timing of the next recession will be key. If the next recession doesn’t begin until the second half of 2020, there may not be enough economic pain before November to swing the election in the favor of the Democratic candidate. So what the left really needs is for a recession to begin during the second half of 2019 or the first half of 2020 so that Americans are really suffering by the time election day rolls around.
I know that is a very sick way to think, but these are the sorts of conversations that these people actually have. For example, on his own television show Bill Maher publicly stated that a recession would be “worth it” if Trump is voted out in 2020. As we approach the next election, many on the left will be so desperate to see Trump gone that they will be willing to pay just about any price to see that happen.
And to be honest, the U.S. economy is definitely way overdue for a major downturn, and so it is only prudent to get prepared for rough times ahead. At this point, even USA Today is providing us with “recession survival tips”…
Do you really need that bundle package from your cable provider, or to pay a gardener to mow your lawn every week? Now might be a good time to figure out what’s an essential expense, and what you can let go.
“Review the family budget to see what could be reduced or cut if there was a sudden drop in monthly income,” says Richard Fleming, a certified financial planner based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “Be prepared to make those reductions (or) cuts as soon as it becomes necessary.”
That is actually really good advice.
Now is a time to cut costs, get out of debt and build up your emergency fund.
The coming year promises to be quite chaotic, and those that hate President Trump are likely to pull out all the stops in an all-out attempt to get him voted out in 2020.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HoSsDJ Tyler Durden
While the Class 8 heavy duty truck industry has been mired in recession and dragged down by a bloated backlog since 2018, the used truck market hasn’t seen the same collapse yet.
But the key word there, according to several experts, is yet. Brian Cota, vice president of national accounts at Daimler and Steve Tam, a vice president at ACT Research gave presentations that showed the used truck market under pressure and predicted that things could get worse.
Tam “presented a slide showing ACT Research’s most recent data on used Class 8 sales in June, showing an average price that month 2 percent higher than in May and 6 percent more than June 2018,” according to FreightWaves.
He also noted that “year-to-date, prices are up 10 percent. That is occurring against a backdrop of average miles on a used Class 8 truck flat to down 2 percent from used truck sales in earlier periods.”
Tam also shared a chart of the average sale price of a Class 8 used truck. Last year, these prices year-over-year were rising more than 15%. And although there was a solid increase in 2018 used truck demand he said that price increases would be flat to down 5% in 2020.
One silver lining has been the quality of the used vehicles coming to market. Cota said:
“The vehicles being traded out today are all good trucks. They are very reliable and fuel-efficient. They are highly desirable trucks.”
Earlier this month we noted that Class 8 orders for July had crashed 81% to their lowest monthly total since 2010. The industry booked 10,200 units in July, an astonishing 81% year over year fall, according to ACT Research.
This is also down 21% from June and marks the lowest monthly order tally since February 2010. Net trailer orders also continued to plunge, according to data released several weeks ago.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KBFJiI Tyler Durden
In 2003, Kim Dae-han, a middle-aged taxi driver, killed 192 people and left 151 others wounded, by setting a South Korean subway train on fire using paint cans filled with gasoline. In 2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Muslim terrorist, killed 86 people and wounded 458 others by ramming a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in France. In 2001, Muslim terrorists killed 2,977 people and injured 6,000 more, by using box cutters to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings.
Guns are a tool. There are a whole lot of other devastating ways to kill lots of people.
American mass killers often use guns because they’re convenient and available. There are plenty of alternatives like trucks, boxcutters, pressure cooker bombs and paint cans full of gasoline.
Mass murder isn’t caused by the tools you use. The Nazis were not inspired to kill Jews by the invention of Zyklon B. The Japanese did not decide to kill hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians because of the availability of airplanes. The Soviet Communists did not commit their acts of mass murder because their arms stockpiles didn’t need a waiting period to obtain machine guns for their mass shootings.
Murder is not a technical problem. It’s a moral problem. It happens because of internal decisions made in the mind, not external tools. The tools are used to implement the decisions of the mind.
A society with mass murder is experiencing a moral problem.
America’s moral problem is more complex than that of Nazi Germany or its Communist counterparts. We don’t have a government that is actively killing people. Instead we have a government that has made it easy for killers to operate by dismantling the criminal justice and immigration systems, making it very difficult to stop the three primary categories of killers, gang members, terrorists and the insane.
And media corporations have been allowed to glamorize killers who seek fame through massacres.
Gun controllers insist that the Founding Fathers never anticipated the problem of mass shooters. That’s probably true. But they would have also never tolerated the conditions that brought them into being, a permissive criminal justice system, a failure to institutionalize the mentally ill, and a media that promotes these acts of violence under the guise of condemning them and clamoring for gun control.
The America of the Bill of Rights could have had modern weapons without constant mass shootings.
The Founding Fathers understood that murder was not a technical problem, a matter of tools, but a moral problem. The Bill of Rights was meant for a moral society. It cannot function in an immoral one.
“Government would be defective in its principal purpose were it not to restrain such criminal acts, by inflicting due punishments on those who perpetrate them,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in a Virginia criminal justice bill submitted a few years after authoring the Declaration of Independence.
It is not the purpose of government to control weapons, but to control criminals.
Western countries have instead focused on controlling guns, while failing to control criminals. This has led to absurdities such as ‘knife control’ in the UK and public bollards to control car rammings. Flying has become an experience once relegated to traveling to Communist dictatorships. Gun control measures encourage doctors to inform on their patients. Schools implement zero tolerance for pocket knives.
When criminals aren’t locked up, then everyone ends up in jail.
When we fail to lock up criminals, society becomes a prison. When we don’t institutionalize the insane, then society becomes the insane asylum. When we don’t stop foreign gangs and terrorists from entering our country, then we wake up to realize that we are living in El Salvador, Mexico, Pakistan or Iraq.
A moral society locks up dangerous people while a progressive society locks up everyone.
Gun control is a sensible measure in a society where criminals, madmen and terrorists freely roam the streets. This attempt to turn society into a prison won’t work because of the problem of scale. You can prevent guns from entering a prison of thousands of people, but not a country of millions.
“We should be more like Europe,” the gun controllers say.
But then why are French and Belgian soldiers deployed across major cities after Islamic terrorists carried out attacks with heavy firepower that killed over a hundred people? You can get a ‘military weapon’ in the capital of the European Union for $1,000 in under an hour. Gun control doesn’t work there. Or here.
There are two ways to cope with mass shootings and killings.
We can work to turn our societies into giant prisons in the hopes of impeding that 0.1% of the population which is inclined to violence over drugs, deranged fantasies or the Koran from shooting up malls, ramming cars into crowds, setting off pressure cooker bombs or flying planes into skyscrapers.
Or we can get rid of that 0.1% and actually have a free and safe society.
We’ve tried turning our country into a giant prison while failing to protect our borders, crack down on gangs or stop the psychos. And the experiment has devastated virtually every major city, cost tens of thousands of lives, made flying miserable, and brought our country to the brink of destruction.
Maybe we ought to try common sense instead.
Either that or we can pass the latest raft of “common sense” gun control laws that haven’t worked before while letting every Islamic terrorist and Latin American gang member enter the country, while letting every Chicago gang continue fighting its feuds, and while letting every deranged monster plot an attack while ignoring the warning signs until it’s too late. Surely gun control will stop all of them.
Every single one.
Constitutional conservatives often echo, “Guns don’t kill people, people do.” But they neglect the obvious corollary. “Don’t lock up the guns, lock up the killers.”
Murder is a moral problem.
When societies such as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan kill, it’s everyone’s moral problem. But when societies such as ours enable killers by failing to restrain them, that’s also true. A society engaging in mass murder has to remove its leaders. But a society where mass killers operate has to restore its morality by removing those, as Jefferson put it, “whose existence is become inconsistent with the safety of their fellow citizens.” Their existence is physically inconsistent because it’s morally inconsistent.
What unites mass killers, the terrorists and the psychos, the Neo-Nazis and the Antifas, the gang members and the drug dealers, is that their moral outlook is completely incompatible with ours.
Some criminals don’t have a moral outlook at all. Mentally ill killers may be so out of contact with reality that they are incapable of having a moral outlook. And terrorists have their own moral outlook, but one which would turn our society into a killing field and prison overseen by Islamists, Nazis or Communists.
The Left insists that we ought to take away guns and other freedoms equally from everyone.
We all ought to live in prison. Or none of us should live in a prison.
And we’ve tried it their way for three generations. We’ve built walls everywhere except around our borders. We share our communities with criminals and the insane. Every house has an alarm system. There may be as many as a million law enforcement officers in the United States. Are we better off?
The first prerequisite to any morality is understanding that actions originate within individuals. The Left is hopelessly immoral because it believes that actions originate within external social conditions. It insists that murder is caused by the social conditions of capitalism, the gun industry or poverty. It justifies its own massacres as attempts to remedy the social conditions of capitalism by force.
That’s why murder thrives under leftist governments, whether in Venezuela or Chicago.
If we want to stop mass killings, we have to restore a moral society based on individual responsibility. The alternative is living in one giant progressive prison with the killers, the psychos and the terrorists.
Either we control the criminals or we lose all control over our own lives.
The moral equation of murder wasn’t altered by the technology of the automatic weapon. The most ancient societies in the world have known how to deal with it. We chose to forget.
When Cain slew his brother with a rock, G-d drove him out of the civilized lands.
G-d did not ban rocks. He banned murderers.
If we want to stop killings, mass or singular, we have to drive our own Cains out of our civilization. Or reconcile ourselves to living in a society where Cain has a gun and Abel is always on the run.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Z8BRtQ Tyler Durden
It seems like barely a quarter goes by without Wells Fargo being exposed for some abusive practices, like opening millions of fake credit card accounts, or selling customers of its auto loans insurance that they didn’t really need (but that the company insisted they did).
In the latest violation, the New York Times reports that Wells Fargo continued to charge overdraft and other charges to customers even after closing their accounts for one of a myriad reasons.
The paper used Xavier Einaudi, a small business owner who banked with Wells, as its primary example. A few months back, the bank informed Einaudi that it would be closing all 13 of the checking accounts he had with the bank related to his roofing company, CRV Construction. When asked why it was closing the accounts, it replied that the issue was “confidential”.
Anyway, Einaudi went to his local Wells branch and picked up a check compensating him for the contents of the accounts. One June 27, the bank said, the accounts would go defunct, and no more transactions would be allowed.
As it turns out, that wasn’t exactly the case.
Shortly after the closure date, Einaudi realized that Wells had kept some of the accounts active with a zero balance. Meaning that some of Einaudi’s payments to vendors like his insurer and his Google advertising accounts continued from the empty accounts. But this time, each transaction was accompanied by a $35 overdraft fee.
By the time Einaudi realized what was going on, he had wracked up thousands of dollars in overdraft fees.
Payments to his insurer, to Google for online advertising and to a provider of project management software were paid out of the empty accounts in July. Each time, the bank charged Mr. Einaudi a $35 overdraft fee
Mr. Einaudi called the bank’s customer service line. He went to his local branch. Nobody could help him. “They told me, ‘The accounts are closed out – we cannot do anything.'”
This left Einaudi in an untenable position: The accounts were technically closed, but he was still being hit with overdraft fees that nobody at the bank could make stop. By the middle of July, he owed the bank nearly $1,500.
Fortunately for him, Einaudi wasn’t alone with this problem.
Xavier Einaudi
As it turns out, Wells has failed to address these complaints from customers and employees, including one in the bank’s debt-collection department who grew concerned after being hit by an estimated $100,000 in overdraft fees over eight months. Customers say the bank should wipe these fees, since they were unfairly and arbitrarily charged on accounts that the bank had deliberately closed without its customers requests.
It’s not clear, exactly, how many customers have been affected by this glitch. But many angry customers have filed complaints with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Robust discussions about the issue have continued on websites like Reddit and Quora, while some have expressed their misgivings with Wells.
“I don’t even know what happened,” he said.
According to the NYT, Einaudi’s problem stems from the way Wells’ computer system processes closed accounts: Accounts that customers believe to be closed can, in fact, stay open for months past their closure date if there’s a balance, even if the balance is negative (from fees charged by the bank).
And each time a transaction involving these accounts happens, the banks tacks on a fee.
Since the financial crisis, Wells has paid more than $15 billion in settlements to resolve investigations into its misdeeds, including the ones described above. With more of these scandals surfacing, who is going to step up and take the top job at Wells, particularly when you’d be liable to be blindsided by scandals like these, that hurt ordinary Americans.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31Tu19h Tyler Durden
This article contains content that some may find distressing.
Jeffrey Epstein “was” apparently a serial molester of children. He had manipulation down to an art form, as many molesters do. He seemed to be an expert at figuring out a girl’s weak point, whether it was poverty, a deceased family member, or feeling alienated from her peers.
This is a common ploy. Many molesters seek out children or teens who have lost a parent and use this as a way to build a friendship. Then, because children don’t think like adults, they are manipulated, coerced, or threatened into sexual activity.
The story below could be told a hundred thousand times with only tiny changes. The names and the faces would be different. The settings might not be a mansion in Manhattan or in Palm Beach but rather a quiet part of a church, a school, or some kind of activity for teens. The setting could be in the house next door to you, where someone with evil intent befriends a vulnerable young person with the stated goal of helping them, but an end result that couldn’t be further from reality.
How 14-year-old Jennifer Araoz met Jeffrey Epstein
Jennifer Araoz was 14 years old when she first met her future rapist, Jeffrey Epstein. She wrote about how she was manipulated, first by his recruiter, then by Epstein himself. There are many powerful lessons that we as parents can learn from her story.
During my freshman year, one of Epstein’s recruiters, a stranger, approached me on the sidewalk outside my high school. Epstein never operated alone. He had a ring of enablers and surrounded himself with influential people. I was attending a performing arts school on the Upper East Side, studying musical theater. I wanted to be an actress and a singer. (source)
Another report based on court documents says that the recruiter befriended Jennifer, took her out to eat after school a few times, and learned more about her, such as the fact that Jennifer’s father had died from an AIDs-related illness and her family could barely scrape by financially.
The recruiter told me about a wealthy man she knew named Jeffrey Epstein. Meeting him would be beneficial, and he could introduce me to the right people for my career, she said. When I confided that I had recently lost my father and that my family was living on food stamps, she told me he was very caring and wanted to help us financially. (source)
The recruiter finally got Jennifer to go with her to meet Epstein. Court documents say that they all three met together for the first month or so.
The visits during the first month felt benign, at least at the time. On my second visit, Epstein also gave me a digital camera as a gift. The visits were about one to two hours long and we would spend the time talking. After each visit, he or his secretary would hand me $300 in cash, supposedly to help my family. (source)
Epstein claimed he was ‘a big AIDS activist’ which you can imagine would mean a lot to a 14-year-old whose father died of the disease.
Soon the visits would take a dark turn.
By the second month of Jennifer’s visits to the mansion, the recruiter no longer attended the visits., the manipulation began in earnest.
But within about a month, he started asking me for massages and instructed me to take my top off. He said he would need to see my body if he was going to help me break into modeling. I felt uncomfortable and intimidated, but I did as he said. The assault escalated when, during these massages, he would flip over and sexually gratify himself and touch me inappropriately. For a little over a year, I went to Epstein’s home once or twice a week.
After that day, I never went back. I also quit the performing arts school — the one I had auditioned for and had wanted so badly to attend. It was too close to his house, the scene of so many crimes. I was too scared I would see him or his recruiter. So I transferred to another school in Queens close to my home. Since I was no longer able to pursue my dream of performing arts I eventually lost interest and dropped out. (source)
Sure, we can say that she knew things weren’t right when he asked her to take her top off. By this point, she was 15 years old. Old enough to know right from wrong. But if she was getting $300 twice a week and helping her family with it, it’s pretty easy to see how she would want to continue helping her family despite her discomfort. Epstein knew exactly what he was doing.
Epstein’s wealth, power, and connections would have made going against him seem like an insurmountable feat for a vulnerable 15-year-old girl who had recently lost her father. Who would have believed her word against that of this presumed philanthropist?
A few days ago, Jennifer, now 32, filed a massive lawsuit against Epstein’s estate, Ghislaine Maxwell, and 3 members of Epstein’s household staff. The complaint alleges that Maxwell and the staff “conspired with each other to make possible and otherwise facilitate the sexual abuse and rape of Plaintiff.”
Some of Epstein’s victims recruited new girls for him.
Epstein’s indictment explains how he manipulated some of the girls he sexually abused to bring other girls to him.
Prosecutors say he lured underage girls, some as young as 14, to his residences, promising them a cash payment in exchange for giving him a massage. Instead, he would sexually abuse them — groping them, making them touch him while he masturbated, and using sex toys on the minors. Then, he would allegedly ask them to recruit other girls. (source)
A detailed report in the Miami Herald referred to it as a “sexual pyramid scheme.” One of Epstein’s accusers, Courtney Wild, reiterates the theme of the story told by Jennifer Boaz.
“Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right,’’ said Courtney Wild, who was 14 when she met Epstein. (source)
Courtney’s time spent with Epstein nearly destroyed her.
Before she met Epstein, Courtney Wild was captain of the cheerleading squad, first trumpet in the band and an A-student at Lake Worth Middle School.
After she met Epstein, she was a stripper, a drug addict and an inmate at Gadsden Correctional Institution in Florida’s Panhandle.
Wild still had braces on her teeth when she was introduced to him in 2002 at the age of 14.
She was fair, petite and slender, blonde and blue-eyed. (source)
She began to recruit other girls for him in Palm Beach.
Wild…said Epstein preferred girls who were white, appeared prepubescent and those who were easy to manipulate into going further each time…
…“By the time I was 16, I had probably brought him 70 to 80 girls who were all 14 and 15 years old. He was involved in my life for years,” said Wild, who was released from prison in October after serving three years on drug charges.
The girls — mostly 13 to 16 — were lured to his pink waterfront mansion by Wild and other girls, who went to malls, house parties and other places where girls congregated, and told recruits that they could earn $200 to $300 to give a man — Epstein — a massage, according to an unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation obtained by the Herald. (source)
Epstein had it down to an art form.
Palm Beach police detective Joseph Recarey explains how Epstein insinuated himself into the girls’ lives.
“The common interview with a girl went like this: ‘I was brought there by so and so. I didn’t feel comfortable with what happened, but I got paid well, so I was told if I didn’t feel comfortable, I could bring someone else and still get paid,’ ’’ Recarey said.
During the massage sessions, Recarey said Epstein would molest the girls, paying them premiums for engaging in oral sex and intercourse, and offering them a further bounty to find him more girls…
…Epstein could be a generous benefactor, Recarey said, buying his favored girls gifts. He might rent a car for a young girl to make it more convenient for her to stop by and cater to him. Once, he sent a bucket of roses to the local high school after one of his girls starred in a stage production. The floral-delivery instructions and a report card for one of the girls were discovered in a search of his mansion and trash. Police also obtained receipts for the rental cars and gifts, Recarey said.
Epstein counseled the girls about their schooling, and told them he would help them get into college, modeling school, fashion design or acting. At least two of Epstein’s victims told police that they were in love with him, according to the police report. (source)
You may look at these stories and scorn the victims. After all, they kept going back, didn’t they? They liked the money, didn’t they?
But they were children. Many of them were isolated, vulnerable, and without support systems. Many of them felt ashamed but didn’t know how to extricate themselves. They were confused and scared, and Epstein was a pro at taking advantage of these emotions and doubts.
The girls are not to blame here. The adults are.
Epstein is not the only predator out there.
While this article focuses on how Epstein was able to lure so many victims, as Dagny Taggert recently wrote, there are many more people in power out there preying on children. Clergy, priests, teachers, neighbors, musicians, and random people on the internet are out there preying on and trafficking children.
Dagny wrote:
According to The National Center for Victims of Crime, the prevalence of child sexual abuse (CSA) is difficult to determine because it is often not reported. Experts agree that the incidence is far greater than what is reported to authorities.
Statistics below represent some of the research done on child sexual abuse.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau report Child Maltreatment 2010 found that 9.2% of victimized children were sexually assaulted (page 24).
1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse;
Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident;
During a one-year period in the U.S., 16% of youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
Children are most vulnerable to CSA between the ages of 7 and 13.
According to Darkness to Light, a non-profit committed to empowering adults to prevent child sexual abuse, only about one-third of child sexual abuse incidents are identified, and even fewer are reported.
When my children’s father passed away, it wasn’t too long afterward that I left my corporate job. I volunteered when the company began layoffs and took a small payment and my retirement fund to start a new life writing freelance. It wasn’t long after that when I started this website.
I wanted to be home when they got back from school every day. I didn’t want them to seem like prey to those looking for children with weak support systems. My own daughters could so easily have had a story like the one Jennifer has told.
I know that what I did is not possible for every family that suffers a loss. I was pretty fortunate to be able to find work from home that paid enough to allow me to be there.
What you, as a parent, must understand are the things that make your child seem vulnerable.
Loneliness
Social isolation and few, if any, friends
Lack of a support system from parents and caregivers
Spending too much time on their own
Alienation from parents
Some signs that your child could be getting abused or groomed.
Sudden secretiveness regarding their phone or computer (a lot of grooming happens online
Spending a great deal of time alone with another adult
Signs of increased anger or fear
Lack of participation in things that used to bring them happiness
Withdrawal from family and friends
Obviously, these lists are not comprehensive, nor are they sure signs of abuse. What teenager doesn’t seem angry and withdrawn from time to time? But it’s vital, no matter how hard they push you away, to stay involved, particularly after a traumatic event.
Teach your kids that some secrets should not be kept.
Predators manipulate children in all sorts of ways. One of the biggest ways is warning them to keep their “relationship” a secret or else.
Or else what?
They’ll hurt Mom or Dad
They’ll hurt the child’s pet
They’ll hurt the child’s siblings
They’ll cause extreme financial problems for the family
Predators often put a burden on a child where they feel as though they must stay silent to protect the people they love.
Kids need to know that if anyone threatens them if they tell a secret, then they absolutely must tell that secret. Mom and Dad will be safe and will protect them. People who ask children to keep their presence in their lives a secret are never to be trusted.
And finally, make sure your children know that whatever they tell you, you will believe them and you know it’s not their fault.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31MByXo Tyler Durden
South Bend, Indiana Mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg recently put forward a proposal for “placed based visas” for immigrant workers, based in large part on a similar idea advanced by economists Adam Ozimek, Keenan Fikri, and John Lettieri (Buttigieg refers to them as “community renewal visas”). Matthew Yglesias of Vox has a helpful summary of the plan, and some of its potential advantages:
Many struggling American communities are, among other things, losing people. Meanwhile, many millions more people would like to move to the United States of America than the country is prepared to allow in.
Three economists have called for leveraging the latter into a solution for the former, allowing both communities and immigrants to opt into a special program that would allow communities experiencing population loss to issue temporary visas to skilled foreigners that would allow them to live and work in places that want more workers.
Part of the tragedy of the situation is that in global terms, Akron is one of the very best places in the whole world to live. Declining Midwestern cities tend to have bad weather, but so do thriving Northeastern ones. And while the city’s median household income of $36,000 is on the low side for the United States, it compares favorably to what you’d find in Poland, Hungary, Greece, Croatia, or Chile — to say nothing of India, Bangladesh, or Vietnam.
Lots of people, in other words, might jump at the chance to move to Akron if they were given the opportunity. And we know from the lottery for H1-B visas that American companies would like to import many more foreign-born workers with technical skills than they are currently allowed to hire.
Instead of giving work permits to skilled workers that tie them to a specific company, as the US does now, a new category of visas would tie them to a specific place.
A certain number of place-based visas would be allocated to a city — Akron, say — that wants to opt into the program. And then foreigners with skills who want to take a chance on Akron can apply for an Akron Visa. If you live in the specified city for a certain period of time — Buttigieg’s implementation sets it at three years — you can convert to a regular green card. The lure of the permanent green card, among other things, is supposed to create a strong incentive to comply with the terms of the program.
The theory is that the presence of a pool of skilled workers in a given city would be a lure for companies to start investing there to hire them. This in turn would have a series of related benefits…
A reasonably large share of Akron visa holders would end up moving elsewhere after their initial three-year stint, especially at first. But it’s also the case that people have a tendency to stick around a place once they’ve put some roots down there. And once an immigrant community is established somewhere, its very existence becomes a draw for other people with similar cultural roots.
Place-based visas would be a significant improvement over the current system of H-1B visas that tie immigrant workers to a specific employer. They would enable workers to switch jobs (so long as they stayed in the same locality). That is good for both economic efficiency (enabling workers to go where they are likely to be more productive) and for avoiding mistreatment of workers by employers. In the H-1B system, workers who leave an abusive employer risk deportation. I also agree with many of the other points Yglesias makes in favor of this proposal.
The main shortcoming of the idea is that, by confining eligible workers to a single community, it severely limits their options. That’s a flaw from the standpoint of both liberty and efficiency. In some smaller communities, they might even be limited to just one or a small handful of employers (depending on how many local businesses employ workers with their particular skills). Another limitation of Buttigieg’s version of the plan is that it would be restricted to “counties that have lost prime-working-age population over the last 10 years, and smaller cities that are struggling to keep pace economically with larger cities.” Other communities should also be allowed to participate.
These are the main reason why the plan deserves only two cheers, instead of three. On the other hand, the prospect of getting a green card within 3 years significantly mitigates these problems, as it makes the location restriction temporary and gives employers some incentive to avoid abusive behavior (lest the most productive workers leave as soon as their three year term is up).
The Buttigieg proposal for place-based visas has much in common with a proposal for state-based visas offered by Republican members of Congress Senator Ron Johnson and Rep. Ken Buck in 2017, which I analyzed here. The big advantage of the Johnson-Buck proposal over Buttigieg’s is that a state-based visa gives immigrants far more options than one confined to a single city. On the other hand, their plan—unlike Buttigieg’s—would not grant a green card after three years. So the locational constraint would continue indefinitely. The Johnson-Buck plan provides for three year visas, which can be extended at the option of the state government in question.
There is, potentially, some conflict between giving immigrants a choice and promoting development of depressed communities, as many would prefer to move to areas with more vibrant economies, if given the option. But immigrants have diverse preferences, and many might well be willing to move to less successful areas, so long as there are jobs available, and the cost of living is relatively low compared to the big cities of the East and West Coast. Even today, a good many immigrants do in fact move to less-affluent parts of the United States, as shown by such examples as the fact that immigrant doctors service many poor rural areas.
Many of the points I made in my assessment of the Johnson-Buck proposal apply to this one, as well:
For the last century or more, immigration policy has been dominated by the federal government. That’s an inversion of what most of the Founding Fathers expected. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, among many others, objected to the Alien Acts of 1798 in large part because the original meaning of the Constitution did not give Congress any general power to restrict immigration, but rather largely left the issue to the states.
We are unlikely to fully restore the original meaning of the Constitution. But [the Johnson-Buck proposal would move us some degree in that direction]….
If the bill passes, the guest workers admitted by the states would be among the biggest beneficiaries. Many thousands would get freedom and economic opportunity, and escape having to languish in poverty and oppression…. But American citizens also stand to gain, because immigrant workers make major contributions to the American economy. By channeling immigrants into legal employment, this program could also diminish deportations, which come at a high cost to taxpayers….
It is worth noting that Jason Kennedy, the new United Conservative Party premier of Alberta (Canada’s most conservative province) has recently proposed a plan similar to Buttigieg’s in an attempt to attract immigrant workers to rural parts of his province, which currently suffer from declining population.
The above analysis assumes that the Buttigieg plan or the Johnson-Buck proposal would expand the total number of immigrants allowed in the US, without diminishing numbers admitted under other categories. The proposals are in fact currently structured that way. If they are altered to cut immigrant admissions elsewhere, that greatly reduces the good they might do (though it might still be net beneficial if community or state-based visas replace H-1B visas).
My post on the Johnson-Buck plan also describes some of the political obstacles it faces, many of which would also apply to the Buttigieg proposal. Those obstacles likely account for its failure to get much traction in Congress. But the endorsement of similar ideas by prominent liberal Democrats might increase the chance of building a bipartisan coalition over time.
It may well be too much to hope for. But perhaps at some point in the future, we could get a bipartisan proposal that combines the best features of both plans, while mitigating their respective downsides.
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via IFTTT
South Bend, Indiana Mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg recently put forward a proposal for “placed based visas” for immigrant workers, based in large part on a similar idea advanced by economists Adam Ozimek, Keenan Fikri, and John Lettieri. Matthew Yglesias of Vox has a helpful summary of the plan, and some of its potential advantages:
Many struggling American communities are, among other things, losing people. Meanwhile, many millions more people would like to move to the United States of America than the country is prepared to allow in.
Three economists have called for leveraging the latter into a solution for the former, allowing both communities and immigrants to opt into a special program that would allow communities experiencing population loss to issue temporary visas to skilled foreigners that would allow them to live and work in places that want more workers.
Part of the tragedy of the situation is that in global terms, Akron is one of the very best places in the whole world to live. Declining Midwestern cities tend to have bad weather, but so do thriving Northeastern ones. And while the city’s median household income of $36,000 is on the low side for the United States, it compares favorably to what you’d find in Poland, Hungary, Greece, Croatia, or Chile — to say nothing of India, Bangladesh, or Vietnam.
Lots of people, in other words, might jump at the chance to move to Akron if they were given the opportunity. And we know from the lottery for H1-B visas that American companies would like to import many more foreign-born workers with technical skills than they are currently allowed to hire.
Instead of giving work permits to skilled workers that tie them to a specific company, as the US does now, a new category of visas would tie them to a specific place.
A certain number of place-based visas would be allocated to a city — Akron, say — that wants to opt into the program. And then foreigners with skills who want to take a chance on Akron can apply for an Akron Visa. If you live in the specified city for a certain period of time — Buttigieg’s implementation sets it at three years — you can convert to a regular green card. The lure of the permanent green card, among other things, is supposed to create a strong incentive to comply with the terms of the program.
The theory is that the presence of a pool of skilled workers in a given city would be a lure for companies to start investing there to hire them. This in turn would have a series of related benefits…
A reasonably large share of Akron visa holders would end up moving elsewhere after their initial three-year stint, especially at first. But it’s also the case that people have a tendency to stick around a place once they’ve put some roots down there. And once an immigrant community is established somewhere, its very existence becomes a draw for other people with similar cultural roots.
Place-based visas would be a significant improvement over the current system of H-1B visas that tie immigrant workers to a specific employer. Among other things, they would enable workers to switch jobs (so long as they stayed in the same locality). That is good for both economic efficiency (enabling workers to go where they are likely to be more productive) and for avoiding mistreatment of workers by employers. In the H-1B system, workers who leave an abusive employer risk deportation. I also agree with many of the points Yglesias makes in favor of this proposal.
The main shortcoming of the proposal is that, by confining workers to a single community, it severely limits their options. That’s a flaw from the standpoint of both liberty and efficiency. In some smaller communities, they might even be limited to just one or a small handful of employers (depending on how many local businesses employ workers with their particular skills). Another limitation of Buttigieg’s version of the plan is that it would be limited to “counties that have lost prime-working-age population over the last 10 years, and smaller cities that are struggling to keep pace economically with larger cities.” Other communities should also be allowed to participate.
These are the main reason why the plan deserves only two cheers, instead of three. On the other hand, the prospect of getting a green card within 3 years significantly mitigates these problems, as it makes the location restriction temporary and gives employers some incentive to avoid abusive behavior (lest the most productive workers leave as soon as their three year term is up).
The Buttigieg proposal for place-based visas has much in common with a proposal for state-based visas offered by Republican members of Congress Senator Ron Johnson and Rep. Joe Buck in 2017, which I analyzed here. The big advantage of the Johnson-Buck proposal over Buttigieg’s is that a state-based visa gives immigrants far more options than one confined to a single city. On the other hand, their plan—unlike Buttigieg’s—would not grant a green card after three years. So the locational constraint would continue indefinitely. The Johnson-Buck plan provides for three year visas, which can be extended at the option of the state government in question.
There is, potentially, some conflict between giving immigrants a choice and promoting development of depressed communities, as many would prefer to move to areas with more vibrant economies, if given the option. But immigrants have diverse preferences, and many might well be willing to move to less successful areas, so long as there are jobs available, and the cost of living is relatively low compared to the big cities of the East and West Coast. Even today, a good many immigrants do in fact move to less-affluent parts of the United States, as shown by such examples as the fact that immigrant doctors service many poor rural areas.
Many of the points I made in my assessment of the Johnson-Buck proposal apply to this one, as well:
For the last century or more, immigration policy has been dominated by the federal government. That’s an inversion of what most of the Founding Fathers expected. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, among many others, objected to the Alien Acts of 1798 in large part because the original meaning of the Constitution did not give Congress any general power to restrict immigration, but rather largely left the issue to the states.
We are unlikely to fully restore the original meaning of the Constitution. But [the Johnson-Buck proposal would move us some degree in that direction]….
If the bill passes, the guest workers admitted by the states would be among the biggest beneficiaries. Many thousands would get freedom and economic opportunity, and escape having to languish in poverty and oppression…. But American citizens also stand to gain, because immigrant workers make major contributions to the American economy. By channeling immigrants into legal employment, this program could also diminish deportations, which come at a high cost to taxpayers….
It is worth noting that Jason Kennedy, the new United Conservative Party premier of Alberta (Canada’s most conservative province) has recently proposed a plan similar to Buttigieg’s in an attempt to attract immigrant workers to rural parts of his province, which currently suffer from declining population.
The above analysis assumes that the Buttigieg plan or the Johnson-Buck proposal would expand the total number of immigrants allowed in the US, without diminishing numbers admitted under other categories. The proposals are in fact currently structured that way. If they are altered to cut immigrant admissions elsewhere, that greatly reduces the good they might do (though it might still be net beneficial if community or state-based visas replace H-1B visas).
My post on the Johnson-Buck plan also describes some of the political obstacles it faces, many of which would also apply to the Buttigieg proposal. Those obstacles likely account for its failure to get much traction in Congress. But the endorsement of similar ideas by prominent liberal Democrats might increase the chance of building a bipartisan coalition over time.
It may well be too much to hope for. But perhaps at some point in the future, we could get a bipartisan proposal that combines the best features of both plans, while mitigating their respective downsides.
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