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Submitted by SouthFront,

Late on November 19, Azerbaijani troops started entering the district of Agdam in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Agdam is one of the districts surrounding the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic that Azerbaijan lost to Armenian forces after the collapse of the USSR, as a result of the First Karabkah War. On November 20, the district is set to be fully transfered to Azerbaijan under the peace deal reached by Baku and Yerevan to put an end to the Second Karabkah War earlier in November.

An overwhelming majority of Armenians living in Agdam have already left the area. Over the past days, authorities of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (also known as the Republic of Artsakh) were assisting in the evacuation. Many of the leaving Armenians were burning their homes in order to not allow the Azerbaijanis to seize them and use them in the future.

The next district, which is set to be transferred to Azerbaijani control, is Kalbajar. Originally, it had to be handed to Baku forces on November 15, but this development was rescheduled for November 25. The Armenians currently fleeing Kalbajar are burning their homes and properties that they cannot evacuate. If the control over Agdam and Kalbajar is transferred to Azerbaijan without major incidents, Lachin will become the next district that will face this fate. Nonetheless, the Lachin corridor linking Armenia with Stepanakert and other Karabakh territories that will remain in the hands of the Armenians will be secured by the Russian peacekeeping force. Currently, the Russian military has 23 checkpoints in the conflict zone. The Lachin-Stepanakert road was reopened and over 1235 displaced civilians have returned to Stepanakert.

Contrary to the situation within districts that would be transferred to the Azerbaijani forces, Armenians do not flee the areas that will remain in the zone of responsibility of the Russians. Instead, many people that fled the conflict have opted to return their homes. Nonetheless, the local humanitarian crisis can hardly be avoided. According to the 2015 census, the population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic was about 151,000. The conflict reportedly displaced about a half of them, somewhere between 75,000-80,000. Even more people are now fleeing districts that are set to be transferred to Azerbaijan under the fear of violence, ethnic cleansing and other kinds of threats from the Azerbaijani forces and authorities.

A part of the displaced people is now returning to Stepanakert and other nearby areas under Russian protection. However, even in the best case, the Armenian state will still have to deal with tens of thousands of displaced people in its territory. Yerevan already announced some financial help and economic support to these people, but the situation in Karabkah itself also requires attention. So far, the only side conducting humanitarian actions there has been Russia that created a special humanitarian center for this purpose.

The coming weeks will demonstrate the ability of the sides to compel each other to the reached ceasefire accords and, in the event of their implementation, a sufficient level of peace and security will finally be achieved in the region.

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

This article takes a tilt at increasing speculation about statist global resets, and why plans such as those promoted by the World Economic Forum will fail. Central bank digital currencies will simply run out of time.

Instead, the collapse of unbacked fiat currencies will end all supra-national government solutions to their policy failures. Already, there is mounting evidence of money beginning to flee bank accounts into stocks, commodities and even bitcoin. This is an early warning of a rapidly developing monetary collapse.

Moreover, nothing can now stop the collapse of fiat currencies, and with it schemes to control humanity for the convenience and ambitions of government planners. There can only be one statist solution and that is to mobilise gold reserves to back and save their currencies, which in order to succeed will have to be fully convertible into circulating gold coinage. It will also require the role of governments to be reset into a non-welfare, non-interventionist minimalist role, which can only be achieved after a complete collapse of the current fiat-financed system.

Anything less will fail.

The Deep State and The Blob fuel conspiracy theories

Increasingly, people are beginning to realise that their world is undergoing a period of rapid change, with the future of fiat money now uncertain. For most, it is too difficult to even contemplate. But growing uncertainties are driving wild speculation about what those in authority now have in store for the human race in the form of a global reset. It is a time for conspiracy theorists, aided and abetted by our politicians and central bankers who are being increasingly evasive, because events are spiralling out of their control.

Then there is America’s Deep State, or the British equivalent, the more recently christened Blob; an amorphous entity comprised of the permanent bureaucracy with its own agenda. These faceless planners have moved on from merely making ministers’ lives difficult if they deviate from the blob’s predetermined course — immortalised in “Yes Minister” and its sequel series “Yes Prime Minister”.

As we saw with Brexit, The Blob has been rigging political outcomes, even conniving in elections. Christopher Steele, an ex-MI6 officer produced a dodgy dossier on Trump to influence the American presidential election in 2016. But there is no such thing as an ex-MI6 Agent because of the Official Secrets Act, so we can only conclude that the intelligence arm of The Blob sanctioned it on a distanced basis. MI6 works with other intelligence agencies under the five-eyes agreement and is close to the CIA. Though they do not necessarily share intelligence, it is impossible to conceive of Steele’s role in influencing the outcome of a US presidential election without the CIA’s knowledge. Almost certainly, the fact that it was commissioned must have been with the CIA’s blessing.

At the time of writing, we do not know the outcome of the current presidential election, but enough doubt has been thrown on the validity of the voting process to implicate unknown parties in managing the outcome. It can never be proved, but for increasing numbers of sceptics it looks like a Deep State operation. It is therefore hardly surprising that conspiracies abound.

The World Economic Forum

The most prominent of these conspiracies has hit the headlines in recent weeks. Its ambition is to take the lead in resetting the world by dismantling the capitalist system in favour of a greater technocratic rule — a fourth industrial revolution no less, even planting microchips in humans to read their brains and control them. The leader is one Klaus Schwab, whose World Economic Forum runs the annual Davos bunfight.

As leader of the Davos forum, Schwab probably sees himself as the coordinator of world government. If so, at 82 years old he is probably getting impatient about the progress towards his personal vision of ultimate power. The covid chaos and the success of his climate change agenda must be encouraging him to think he is very close to a breakthrough. Alternatively, we might consider Schwab as a latter-day Charles Fourier (1772—1837), the utopian socialist philosopher, whose forgotten ideals were only marginally more narcissistic and bizarre than Schwab’s.

While the great and the not so good love the annual Davos party as a networking venue for the politics industry, when it comes to transferring real power to Schwab, it’s a no-no. The only time a politician transfers power is when he is deposed by his or her electorate, colleagues, or the military. And history is littered with utopians, like Schwab, grasping for power over their fellow men. In addition to Charles Fourier, we can include Georg Hegel (1770—1831) and Auguste Comte (1798—1857), as well, of course, as Karl Marx. As thinkers or philosophers, they were all influential in their day and some of their ideas persist in the naïve.

So, while increasing numbers of well-informed people are beginning to sense the end of the current world order, to assume that this will hasten the WEF’s grab for world domination by influencing events is a mistake. All our deep states, blobs and their branches, particularly central banks, will want to hold onto and enhance their executive power with the political class increasingly cast as cover. The planners at national level are not going to submit to Mr Schwab’s plans for world domination. Instead, international relations involve mutual cooperation to secure purely domestic objectives, something President Trump was in the process of destroying. From the Deep State’s point of view, perhaps that’s why he had to be deposed in favour of Biden, who is a long-serving compliant figure.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)

There can be little doubt that central banks wish to increase their control over money and how it is used, cutting out the obstacle of commercial banks who produce most of the money in circulation through the expansion of bank credit. From a statist point of view, commercial banking is a dinosaur, an outdated remnant of free markets, perpetuating needless systemic risk and superseded by technology. Branch networks will disappear with cash, changing relationships between banks and the general public for ever.

By introducing direct central bank accounts for members of the public and every business, commercial banks become superfluous and can be allowed to die. And if one goes bust before commercial banking has ended, the facility to transfer all its loans and deposits onto a central bank’s books will then exist. The removal of systemic risk by the abolition of commercial banks is one of several likely long-term objectives of CBDCs. Commercial banks can be left with the role of investment banking activities in capital markets.

We can imagine the development of CBDCs going even further than just replacing cash. Stimulation by dropping money into personal accounts can be used to target increased spending by consumers, or even groups of consumers, sorted by wealth, location or other factors. Some consumers can be favoured relative to others, so in a swing state, for example, an incumbent administration might buy votes. While this would be strongly denied, as we have seen with unfettered fiat currency the state creeps incrementally towards unstated objectives, using every tool at its disposal. The election of Deep State-approved politicians then becomes possible.

Eventually, funding of all capital projects will come under the direct control of the central bank. And savings deposits, always seen to be a brake on consumption, can be banished. Capital can be made available for government schemes and favoured businesses on the say so of the central bank.

A future government statement might be issued on the following lines:

“Your Government is pleased to announce that the National Audit Office has approved a number of infrastructure projects targeted at improving communications between administrative centres. This investment over ten years will secure an estimated 500,000 jobs. The cost over the life of the project is XXX billion monetary units. The Central Bank has confirmed it will make funding for these projects available, both to your Government and approved private sector contractors.”

This would be a planners’ heaven. Furthermore, CBDC money can be withheld or frozen for anyone suspected of crimes and tax evasion, starving them into confessions of guilt. The justification is always that it is in the national interest to ensure that financial and tax crimes are eliminated — something commercial banks have singularly failed to do. Overseas payments can be routed through other CBDCs, giving the central banking network control over world trade. Just imagine foreign trade being conducted through a grander version of the Eurozone’s TARGET2 settlement system!

Worried yet? In the advanced economies Covid-19 has nearly eliminated cash, which doubtless is intended to be replaced entirely by CBDCs. The end of cash and bank deposits will allow the central bank to cap the amount of cash anyone can hold, and also ensure that everyone is paid a “living wage”. Already flagged, another intention is to eliminate the burden of interest rates and by controlling where money supply is expanded, manage the economy.

It is commonly assumed that those in charge of us know what they are doing — they don’t. They have become trapped at a socialist endpoint and are doubling down in their efforts towards greater socialism. But their dreams of future control are mere escapism. Individuals will lose yet more personal freedom, but ultimately the state cannot conquer human nature and the will of individuals to do what they want. The Soviets attempted it and failed, despite killing and starving many millions.

Central to the collapse of any state-directed reset will be the loss of faith in fiat currencies, and particularly that of the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar. This remains the case irrespective of whether circulating currency is in cash, bank deposits, or CBDCs. Indeed, the collapse could be hastened by CBDCs, because the intention is to increase the pace of injection of new money into the economy if it is required (it always is), and to impose deeper negative interest rates, which cannot be easily achieved under the current monetary system.

If these statist intentions are allowed to prevail, along with other agendas such as the elimination of cheap and effective fossil-based energy, the outlook for humanity is exceedingly grim. Like communism, the global reset into which the western world is drifting will destroy society. Those who believe in liberal values in the original sense of the term — not the modern socialist connotation — will find themselves welcoming the destruction of the current system before it is evolved any further.

The course of a currency collapse

The end of fiat currencies is likely to come sooner than later, from the consequences of today’s massive money-printing, particularly of dollars. Already, US government spending is financed substantially more by currency debasement than taxes, a condition that will almost certainly continue to deteriorate rapidly in the coming months. Furthermore, the global banking system, which is extremely thinly capitalised, faces a tsunami of bad debts which can only lead to a systemic failure — most likely in the Eurozone initially, but threatening all other jurisdictions through counterparty risks. It is coming to a head and is likely to happen soon, possibly triggered by the second covid wave.

Long before the two or three years required for any CBDC to be operational, the world’s reserve fiat currency, the US dollar, is already hyper-inflating. There are signs the markets are beginning to understand this. Bitcoin’s price has risen sharply, sending signals to everyone that the differential between its ultimately fixed quantity and the accelerating rates of fiat currency debasement is feeding dramatically into the price.

Despite the economic slump, equity markets are being driven to new highs as non-financial customers deem stocks to be preferable to bank deposits. It has not helped that the Fed reduced deposit rates to zero last March, well below everyone’s time preference. The Fed has also promised infinite QE in order to fund the fiscal deficit. Therefore, it is not surprising that individuals and corporations are shifting out of cash balances into financial and other assets, with the notable exception of fixed-interest bonds. Rising commodity and raw material prices are also telling us that dollars are been sold in those markets.

This is the point being missed in all commentaries: the mounting evidence that markets, being forward-looking, are beginning to abandon the dollar. And once it goes beyond a certain point, nothing will reverse a rapid loss of purchasing power to the point of worthlessness. To avoid this outcome central banks led by the Fed must immediately abandon inflationary financing of budget deficits.

That is not going to happen. In addition to the current hyperinflation must be added the inflationary cover for the costs and consequences of rescuing a failing global banking system. The costs are immediate, in that governments will take on their books everyone’s bad debts. The consequences are that through their central banks they will have no political alternative other than to counter the economic slump through yet more money printing.

US Treasury bond yields are already beginning to rise, perhaps reflecting this developing outcome as Figure 1 shows.

The up-arrow at the bottom-right of the chart shows that the downward momentum for the bond yield has reversed, forming a golden cross; that is to say the yield is above its two commonly followed moving averages which in turn are forming a cross with the 55–day moving average rising above the 200-day moving average, a strong indicator of a major turning point and of higher bond yields to come. The upward turn of bond yields is to be viewed in the context of the dollar’s trade weighted index, which is shown in Figure 2.

Currently standing at 92.40, if the dollar’s TWI breaks below 91.75 (the low on 1 September) it is likely to head significantly lower. With foreign holdings of dollars and dollar denominated financial securities totalling almost $27 trillion, the chances are that dumping of the dollar on the foreign exchanges will increase rapidly. That being the case, the Fed will not only be funding the unprecedentedly high (for peacetime) budget deficit but will have to absorb foreign sales of US Treasuries and dollars in order to keep the cost of government funding suppressed.

Evidence is mounting that it cannot be done. And with the end of the suppression of interest rates comes the collapse of accumulated malinvestments, of government finances, and of the currency itself.

First the ashes, then, hopefully the phoenix

Elected in 1929, Hoover was the first US President who thought he could improve on the capitalist system of markets reforming themselves, and the results were a disaster. He was thrown out of office and replaced with another interventionist, Roosevelt, and the supremacy of the US Government over markets reforming themselves became established. The situation today is the logical destination of the fallacy that governments can run the economy.

It will end with the collapse and replacement of today’s unbacked fiat currencies — the ashes and then the phoenix. There is every indication that the time when all is rendered into ashes is rapidly approaching. People with fiat, earning fiat, relying on fiat will be impoverished. A currency collapse with no foreign currency to escape into is a cataclysmic event, the like of which we haven’t seen before, not even in Roman times. If it doesn’t buy you food and warmth a million bucks is worthless.

Governments will also have no means of collecting taxes, other than in their worthless currencies. They will be unable to pay their administrators, who cannot even afford to attend their offices. Their pensions and everybody else’s will be worthless. There will be no incentive for anyone in government without money. And without money there is no political power.

There can only be one solution, and that is a reset with gold. The slide in currencies can be stopped by making them exchangeable into gold. The reason for a gold-backed reset is not so much to stop a fiat currency from further collapse but to use it to ensure the widest distribution of the national gold reserves through a reformed gold-backed currency. The US Treasury claims it still has over 8,000 tonnes of gold, which assuming the Deep State hasn’t raided it, can ensure that a new dollar, convertible by everyone into gold, can circulate as money.

The same is true for other currencies, to greater or lesser degrees depending on their national gold reserves. But to be credible, gold coins must also circulate freely alongside readily convertible paper and digital substitutes. The banking system must also be reformed to do away with bank credit expansion, which creates deposits unbacked by gold. By then most of them may be in public ownership or protection, so a reform to abolish bank credit expansion should not be too difficult.

The mobilisation of central bank gold is the best outcome by far. It returns the choice of money to the people who use it for the intermediation between their production and consumption. But very few in government, their Deep States or The Blobs, have the intellectual capacity to understand what needs to be done. Their advisors are inflationists to a man or woman. Furthermore, the US’s Deep State is obsessed with the threat from China and Russia, which between them control international bullion markets (London and Comex are just paper), and have substantial declared and undeclared reserves. Legitimising gold will transfer enormous monetary and geopolitical power from America to the Asian hegemons, which is likely to be strongly resisted.

Furthermore, it will require governments to backtrack on the socialising process, whereby by providing welfare and regulating everything their budgets got out of hand. They must aim to reduce the full burden of their activities on the economy to under 20%.

Following a currency collapse, any central bank that thinks it can use a CBDC to manage market outcomes will undermine its own credibility. Other than issuers of gold-backed notes, they will have no role. In order for the necessary reforms to stick, flights of fancy such as the statist ambitions of planners and of the Klaus Schwabs of this world must be abandoned, along with all the false sciences adopted by statists. But on the positive side, a collapse of fiat currencies is required to sweep away the current failing system, and sooner or later that is what we are going to get.

Two Russian Pobeda Airlines pilots are under investigation after they “chose a ballsy flight path” to show their support for Russian footballer team captain Artem Dzyuba, by drawing a giant c*** and balls in the sky, reported RT News. 

Flightradar24 footage shows the Boeing 737-800 taking a quick detour from Moscow to Ekaterinburg on Nov. 11 to create a giant sky penis on flight radar maps. 

“We don’t know what you might see in our aircraft’s flightpath, but probably Pobeda captains decided to express their support for Artem Dzyuba, condemning the madness around him,” a Pobeda spokesperson said.

Dzyuba made headlines after a video of him pleasuring himself leaked online. The scandal has resulted in the footballer being suspended for three games. 

The Federal Air Transport Agency said it is investigating the incident to determine whether the pilots had clearance to conduct such maneuvers. 

While the pilot’s support for Dzyuba is rather strange, readers may recall US military pilots went on a sky penis drawing spree in the last couple of years. We’re not entirely sure why US pilots were drawing the penises (see: here & here & here), but it sure seemed as there was a competition of who could draw the biggest one.

Authored by Josh Hammer via The Epoch Times,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch: Spot Learns New Tricks On Oil Rig 

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

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

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

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics.com,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Searches for “panic attacks” have also surged. 

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

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