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Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,

The initial public offering (IPO) of Saudi Aramco that was heralded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) as being a showcase flotation for raising massive new capital for the Kingdom and anchoring a major expansion of its international equities market presence has proven only to put Aramco into a debt spiral and highlighted a myriad of problems in Saudi Arabia to international investors. Now, Aramco is digging itself further into serious debt through bond issuances simply to pay for the huge dividend payments promised by MbS that were absolutely required to persuade anyone to buy into the omni-toxic IPO.

At this rate, the debt taken on by Aramco and other Saudi bond offerings to pay for the dividends will be far more than the amount of money raised in the IPO. As a direct result of MbS deciding to go ahead with yet another oil price war at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic was gathering pace and destroying demand for oil, Aramco’s finances have suffered a massive hit. For the first half of this year, the company saw a 50 percent plunge in net profit and at the beginning of this month, it reported another massive drop in profits of 44.6 percent for the third quarter, falling to SAR44.21 billion (US$11.79 billion) from SAR79.84 billion in the same period last year. On the other side of the balance sheet, though, is the stark fact that because the company’s IPO was so toxic on so many levels that it was shunned by Western investors and had to be off-loaded to buyers who were either bullied or bribed into buying the stock Aramco is left having to pay massive guaranteed dividend payments for the foreseeable future to those shareholders.

This huge guaranteed dividend payment of US$18.75 billion per quarter – US$75 billion for a full year – will have to be paid for through budget cuts over and above the US$15 billion in Aramco’s annual capital spending alluded to by Aramco’s chief executive officer, Amin Nasser, just after the first half profits figures were unveiled. This will take the total down from around US$40 billion to around US$25 billion. Further reports have stated that even this US$25 billion figure is set to be reduced by another US$5 billion, taking the total capital spending in this year from US$25 billion to US$20 billion. 

Whatever the cuts, it remains the case that the first two dividends together for the first two quarters of this year – US$37.5 billion – far outstripped Aramco’s total free cash flow of US$21.1 billion for the same period. The latest profits number for the third quarter, meanwhile, covers just 62.88 percent of the dividend payment, never mind any other expenses or investment for projects ongoing or planned that Aramco may have had in mind. To put this even more clearly: Aramco’s entire profit for the third quarter cannot even cover the dividend it owes for the same quarter, not even two-thirds of it!

As a result so far of the slide in Aramco’s profits, the once much-vaunted flagship US$20 billion crude-to-chemicals plant at Yanbu on Saudi’s Red Sea coast has been indefinitely suspended, according to various reports. The similarly high-profile purchase of a 25 percent multi-billion-dollar stake in Sempra Energy’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Texas is also apparently under threat, although Sempra for its part has said that it continued to work with Aramco and others “to move our project at Port Arthur LNG forward.” In the same vein, according to various news sources, Aramco has suspended its key US$10 billion deal to expand into mainland China’s refining and petrochemicals sector, via a complex in the Northeastern province of Liaoning that would have seen Saudi supply up to 70 percent of the crude oil for the planned 300,000 barrels per day refinery. In sum, it appears that all of Aramco’s principal projects aimed at diversifying Saudi Arabia away from the relatively zero added-value pursuits of just pumping and selling crude oil are now subject to review and/or outright suspension.

The chances of these – and other stalled projects – being resuscitated with money from other Saudi government departments looks minimal, as MbS’s second oil price war has similarly decimated these finances too. Figures released at the end of September showed that Saudi Arabia’s economy contracted 7 percent year-on-year (y-o-y) in the second quarter of 2020, with the Kingdom’s private sector showing a negative growth rate of 10.1 percent, while the public sector recorded negative growth of 3.5 percent. Saudi’s oil revenue in the first half of the year was 35 percent lower than a year earlier, while non-oil revenue fell by 37 percent. Moreover, in the second quarter of 2020 alone, the Kingdom’s petroleum refining activities recorded a 14 percent y-o-y drop. All of this resulted in a current account deficit of SAR67.4 billion (US$18 billion), or 12 percent of GDP, in Q220 compared with a surplus of SAR42.9 billion, or 5.8 percent of GDP, a year earlier, according to Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Statistics. 

Therefore, Aramco has little choice but to continue to fund the dividend payments to its own shareholders by taking on more debt, in direct contrast to the influx of new money that MbS said would flow into Aramco and then more broadly into the Saudi Tadawul stock market following the ‘landmark IPO’. In essence, Aramco has been left to take on debt to pay the people who bought it shares, which is akin to a family who decides that it has to sell the precious family silver to pay off debts but then ending up having to take out more debts to pay people to buy the silver. 

Moreover, judging from last week’s bond sale by Aramco, it appears that even those investors who have been willing to buy the company’s paper – so increasing their risk exposure to not just to the omni-toxic Aramco but also to Saudi as a sovereign issuer – might be reaching the limit of their appetite for either. Saudi had been looking to raise US$8 billion from the five-part bond deal, which it did, but crucially it attracted just US$48.1 billion in orders for the debt sale, less than half of the amount that it received for its debut bond sale last year when it raised US$12 billion. Even more indicative of increasing investor caution in taking on more exposure to Saudi risk – especially that of the increasingly indebted (bonds plus dividend obligations plus revolving credit lines) Aramco – is that in last year’s bond sale Aramco was able to price the bonds at a tighter spread to the benchmark than Saudi sovereign debt but this time Aramco’s bonds were priced wider.  

What was that President Trump used to say about not letting the cure be more painful than the disease?

The latest group of intrepid scientists to test the boundaries of virology and medical ethics belongs to the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. A team of Dutch researchers has already recruited a team of more than 240 volunteers for what’s called a “human challenge” study.

For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, a “challenge” study involves deliberately exposing subjects – animals, or (in this case) human volunteers – to the virus to test the effectiveness of various vaccine candidates.

One could call it a ‘trial by fire’.

So far, Moderna and Pfizer have touted headline numbers claiming their vaccines are 95% effective. Only time will tell whether these vaccines actually prevent infection in 19 out of 20 recipients. Meanwhile, the “dosing error” that led AstraZenaca and Oxford to offer conflicting assessments of its adenovirus-vector vaccine depending on different dosing regimens is only the one of the trial’s shortcomings. It has also been revealed that the vaccine’s best data was gleaned from a group of exclusively younger patients, meaning older more vulnerable patients may be at risk of seeing serious infections develop anyway.

The plan for the “challenge study” is being championed by an organization called 1Day Sooner, which is dedicated – as its name suggests – to accelerating the quest for an effective COVID-19 vaccine. Quarantine facilities in London have already been reserved by the group, which said it expects the trials to begin in January – provided regulators grant their blessing.

With vaccine development and administration still a far-off prospect for millions of Americans, the Trump Administration has promised to start vaccinating health-care workers and the most vulnerable patients by mid-December.

Officials have said vaccines will begin to ship out hours after the FDA grants emergency use approval to Pfizer and/or Moderna. Markets appear to have already internalized this outcome, evidenced by the Dow’s record close yesterday.

1Day Sooner has allies in the biotech space that are willing to supply the equipment the company would need to conduct the study. One British biotech firm said last month that it was already in advanced talks with HMG over permission to create and provide strains of the virus for what would be a groundbreaking study.

Though Reuters didn’t name it in the version of its report published online, the biotech firm referenced above appears to be Open Orphan, a British firm that one Twitter user said “is the only company in the world with a commercial human challenge study model for Covid 19.”

According to a press release published in October, Open Orphan is already working with two British institutions on a “challenge” study using Orphan’s plan. Results are expect by May. At this point, with the biggest economies set to have a virtual monopoly on the first wave of vaccine product, a study like this that could accelerate development of other more traditional vaccine approaches could be enormously valuable.

Via AlMasdarNews.com,

The Turkish media published a video this week showing the interception and search of a Turkish cargo vessel by German forces which happened Sunday as part of the European Union’s “Irini” operation in the Mediterranean.

According to reports, the Turkish merchant ship was bound for the Libyan coast before it was stopped by the German naval forces in the eastern Mediterranean.

In the video shared by RT, the German forces can be seen approaching the vessel with its warship and helicopters, as they later entered the ship to search its contents.

On Monday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry condemned Germany’s attempted inspection, calling it a violation of international law.

According to Deutsche Welle:

A diplomatic spat erupted between Turkey and Germany on Monday after Ankara accused German troops of carrying out a search of a freighter as part of the EU’s Irini mission to enforce the UN’s Libya arms embargo.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry said it had summoned the envoys to Ankara of Germany, the EU and Italy to protest the “unauthorized” operation.

“We protest this action, which was conducted without authority and with the use of force,” the ministry said.

The German army confirmed that Turkey prevented German forces operating within a military mission of the European Union from inspecting a Turkish cargo ship “believed to be transporting weapons to Libya.”

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

This past year in numerous countries the public is being bombarded with lessons in power and control that have been forgotten for generations. I think the majority of westerners in particular have long believed themselves “safe” from totalitarian government, from collectivist micro-management and from communistic cultism. They thought we had moved beyond the nightmares of the 20th century. They thought that the “new world” was going to be more Utopian, and that freedom would grace us naturally along with technological progress.

Sure, in the back of everyone’s subconscious there is the fear that the good times are an illusion and that dystopia is just behind a thin veneer of economic stability and false optimism, but most people do not really think such catastrophes will happen in their lifetime. We are now in the midst of a deliberately over-hyped pandemic, strict national lockdowns, civil unrest, riots, aggressive tech censorship, intrusive government censorship, unprecedented corporate and treasury debt, stagflationary central bank stimulus and the collapse of massive financial bubbles. Yet, I still don’t get the impression that many in the public really grasp the extent of the danger; they still believe that the situation is going to heal itself without any effort or much sacrifice on their part.

This is the first lesson of power: Entire societies can be easily influenced when they suffer from delusions that the bad times will be fleeting, and that governments will keep them safe no matter what.

It is a historically proven pattern that governments tend to CREATE problems instead of solving them, and this is because the power dynamic of government never changes. The politicians we “vote” for are not in control, rather, the elites who fund their campaigns and who permeate their cabinets are in control. Political representatives come and go, but the establishment elites never leave. Therefore, the problems our society faces will remain; they are a direct result of the subversive and perpetual power structure that serves the interest of a select minority rather than the public. The decline of our society into tyranny will not stop until this power structure and the people behind it are erased.

This would actually be a simple thing to achieve if enough people were to accept the truth and take action. The elites, the globalists, the establishment, the “new world order”, whatever you want to call this organization of power mongers, is but a collection of mostly weak and feeble psychopaths and parasites. They are completely out in the open; they proudly proclaim their affiliations and intentions on a regular basis through their host institutions, from the Council on Foreign Relations to Tavistock to Bilderberg to the World Economic Forum, the IMF, the Bank for International Settlements, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, etc. There is very little that is hidden about these people anymore.

But, it is also a sad reality that most people have to hit rock bottom before they embrace the idea that they cannot rely on the corrupt system to save them from harm. And as long as they continue to have blind faith that the system will self correct, they will never act. The elites operate in the open with impunity because they know that human beings are more likely to seek out help from the system than they are to fix a problem for themselves. If someone was to switch off that single mass fantasy, the elites would be gone tomorrow.

The second lesson of power is that perception of consent creates legitimate consent. To put it another way – When people believe that their peers and neighbors have accepted a certain level of tyranny, they too will often accept it so that they don’t stand out or draw attention to themselves as “aberrant”. People seeking power only need to create the illusion of mass consent. Even when the majority of people are against them, the perception of compliance can sometimes overwhelm logic.

Control is usually achieved passively without force. Sometimes you don’t even need the threat of force; sometimes you only need to inspire a fear of standing out among the crowd.

For example, the pandemic has been used the past six months as a tool for creating such a narrative. Mask wearing “rules” are particularly insidious as they conjure illusions of compliance and submission. “Everyone” is wearing a mask, therefore everyone must support medical tyranny. Mask wearing is a complete farce when it comes to the actual science of virology and viral spread. The CDC still does not recommend cloth masks to their own employees and only allows them to use N95 filtered masks. A recent and censored Danish study confirms the reality that masks are mostly useless.

Strictly enforced cloth mask rules have done nothing to stop renewed spikes in infections in multiple countries and US states. The fact that in many places masks are required OUTDOORS despite endless scientific evidence showing that UV light and open air kills microorganisms including viruses shows that the lockdown response has nothing to do with science or saving lives. It is about control.

We can take all logical factors into account, but, for a lot of people, if they see others wearing masks they too will wear a mask simply because they are afraid to be judged by what they perceive to be the majority. The reality is that a majority of people are wearing the masks grudgingly, and they would take them off tomorrow if they knew other people would do the same.

This is why the mainstream media pushes mask wearing propaganda everyday, 24/7. News journalists stand on street corners or in open air parks and wear masks on camera. Politicians wear masks even when on camera in their own homes. Celebrities and companies try to sell the idea that mask wearing is “cool”. Hey, if you don’t wear a mask you could be putting hundreds or thousands of other people at risk and killing their grandmas, right?

The masks do nothing. They achieve nothing in terms of stopping the virus spread or saving lives. This is a fact made obvious by the very infection numbers the establishment holds up as a rationale for the masks. But if the establishment elites through propaganda can convince you to wear a mask everyday, then this opens the door to them dictating many other aspects of your life. The masks are just a gateway into more destructive mandates.

The solution to this type of tyranny is to stop caring what other people think, especially when the facts are on your side. In the town where I live, the vast majority of people have said no to the mask restrictions. If someone wants to wear a mask because they believe it will protect them, that’s fine. But, no one is going to tell us we have to wear them “for our own good”. That said, even if I was the ONLY person not wearing a mask around town, I would not care if it bothered others. Your credo has to be “try and force me to wear a mask, and watch what happens…”

The third lesson of power is that force only leads to control if you respond with submission. A group of people can beat you or even kill you, but they can’t force you to comply if you do not fear for your own life.

I find that the use of force by tyrants is predicated on the assumption that the people they are seeking to control will not fight back effectively. As soon as people do fight back effectively, the tyrant is shocked. Most tyrants rise to power, not because they have won multiple battles and subdued their opponents, but because they never had to fight in the first place. Or, they win a handful of easy battles, often staged to look more victorious than they really were, and then use those mediocre wins as a means to terrify all future opposition into not fighting. The tyrants start to believe their own lies and presume their own invincibility.

Predators do not seek out hard targets, they seek out weak targets. The solution to tyrants is for the hard targets to seek them out and strike them in the midst of their confidence. When predators get hit back they have a habit of running away.

But, this requires people who do not live in fear of what might happen when they fight back. The concept of sacrificing comfort (or much worse) can’t be an issue. Fear fades away when a person fights for something more than himself. It’s not always about personal survival, sometimes it’s about the survival of future generations, or the survival of a set of principles. As that fear disappears, so does the illusion of control that tyrants rely on.

The fourth lesson of power is that ideals either stem from human conscience, or they do not. And if they do not, then they are not ideals worth adopting or fighting over. The conscience of the average person is not as ambiguous and changeable as the establishment would like you to believe. A lion’s share of human beings operate on a certain set of inherent morals and principles that are universally shared; they do not need to be taught these principles, they are born knowing them. If these rules were not ingrained into our psyches our species would have self destructed thousands of years ago.

Establishment elites would like you to believe that all ideals are a product of environment, and that those who control the environment control the morals of the people by extension. This is a lie. Values such as freedom exist even in the most oppressive environments, and people seek it out even when the risk is overwhelming. Empathy is also inherent for most of us, but a certain percentage of people are born without the capacity for it. The REAL fight in the middle of any power struggle is the fight between those who are born with conscience, values and empathy, and those who are born without these grounding characteristics.

Psychopathic tyrants desperately want to prove that all other people are just as devoid of humanity and soul as they are. They want to prove that the voice of conscience that guides us is a mask we wear to pretend that we are not evil at our core. Control comes from the fallacy that we are dependent on our environments to tell us who we are as individuals. Control comes from the notion that morals are relative, and that principles are social constructs.

Conscience is inherent, but it is also a choice. You have the free will to listen to it, or ignore it. If a tyrant can convince you to ignore the voice of your own conscience then the only other guide in life is your environment. And, if that tyrant dominates every aspect of your environment, then he now has the power to rewrite your moral code, at least temporarily. You can be made to do terrible things you would not otherwise do, or support destructive causes and ideologies you would not otherwise support.

The ultimate totalitarian power is the power to make people forget their own inner voice. The ultimate tool against evil is to listen to that voice and to not be afraid of the supposed consequences.

The question of the facade of power is about to become the defining question of our epoch as the elitist establishment accelerates their agenda for greater centralized control of our lives. The truth they do not want you to understand is that they have no power. They have nothing. We could defy their mandates anytime we wish. We could do away with them tomorrow if we wanted. They are of no use to humanity, they serve no valuable purpose. They only seek to feed like vampires on the masses and fulfill their deranged fantasies of conquest. Sooner or later they will have to be dealt with – The sooner the better.

*  *  *

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Last week, the Solomon Islands government approved a temporary block of social media website Facebook across the tiny island nation of 650,000, a move that top government officials said would protect people from cyberbullying and online defamation, according to Australian ABC.

By Monday, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare doubled-down on his government’s temporary measure to block the social media website, “as it was a necessity to preserve national unity.” He said Facebook undermines social cohesion. 

“Cyberbullying on Facebook is widespread, people have been defamed by users who use fake names, and people’s reputations that have been built up over the years [are destroyed] in a matter of minutes.

“We have [a] duty to cultivate national unity and the happy coexistence of our people … [Facebook] is undermining efforts to unite this country,” he said. 

Australian ABC notes the ban has yet to go into effect, though the prospect of the ban has caused an uproar among younger people. Sogavare stands by the new measure, saying it was aimed at protecting the youth from “vile abusive language” and not a way to silence them. 

It’s still unclear how the temporary ban will be enforced. The government still needs to determine whether it will use a firewall or utilize some other technique to block Facebook. 

The move to ban the social media website comes as reports began to spread on the platform, accusing the government of misappropriating virus pandemic funds for social programs – prompting calls for an audit of the virus pandemic relief program.  

This isn’t the first time a Pacific government has mulled over the idea of blocking Facebook – leaders in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Samoa have all considered similar options. 

Besides Facebook, governments in Asia are also blocking Pornhub. Thailand’s government banned more than 190 porn sites, including Pornhub, earlier this month, prompting outrage among the younger generation. 

Submitted by Swiss Policy Research,

A Joe Biden presidency means a “return to normality” simply because it means a return of the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

 

In 2008, Barack Obama received the names of his entire future cabinet already one month prior to his election by CFR Senior Fellow (and Citigroup banker) Michael Froman, as a Wikileaks email later revealed. Consequently, the key posts in Obama’s cabinet were filled almost exclusively by CFR members, as was the case in most cabinets since World War II. To be sure, Obama’s 2008 Republican opponent, the late John McCain, was a CFR member, too. Michael Froman later negotiated the TPP and TTIP international trade agreements, before returning to the CFR as a Distinguished Fellow.

In 2017, CFR nightmare President Donald Trump immediately canceled these trade agreements – because he viewed them as detrimental to US domestic industry – which allowed China to conclude its own, recently announced RCEP free-trade area, encompassing 14 countries and a third of global trade. Trump also canceled other CFR achievements, like the multinational Iran nuclear deal and the UN climate and migration agreements, and he tried, but largely failed, to withdraw US troops from East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa, thus seriously endangering the global US empire built over decades by the CFR and its 5000 elite members.

Unsurprisingly, most of the US media, whose owners and editors are themselves members of the CFR, didn’t like President Trump. This was also true for most of the European media, whose owners and editors are members of international CFR affiliates like the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, founded by CFR directors after the conquest of Europe during World War II. Moreover, it was none other than the CFR which in 1996 advocated a closer cooperation between the CIA and the media, i.e. a restart of the famous CIA Operation Mockingbird. Historically, OSS and CIA directors since William Donovan and Allen Dulles have always been CFR members.

Joe Biden promised that he would form “the most diverse cabinet” in US history. This may be true in terms of skin color and gender, but almost all of his key future cabinet members have one thing in common: they are, indeed, members of the US Council on Foreign Relations.

This is the case for Anthony Blinken (State), Alejandro Mayorkas (Homeland Security), Janet Yellen (Treasury), Michele Flournoy and Jeh Johnson (candidates for Defense), Linda Thomas-Greenfield (Ambassador to the UN), Richard Stengel (US Agency for Global Media; Stengel famously called propaganda “a good thing” at a 2018 CFR session), John Kerry (Special Envoy for Climate), Nelson Cunningham (candidate for Trade), and Thomas Donilon (candidate for CIA Director).

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor, is not (yet) a CFR member, but Sullivan has been a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (a think tank “promoting active international engagement by the United States”) and a member of the US German Marshall Fund’s “Alliance For Securing Democracy” (a major promoter of the “Russiagate” disinformation campaign to restrain the Trump presidency), both of which are run by senior CFR members.

Most of Biden’s CFR-vetted nominees supported recent US wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen as well as the 2014 regime change in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, neoconservative Max Boot, the CFR Senior Fellow in National Security Studies and one of the most vocal opponents of the Trump administration, has called Biden’s future cabinet “America’s A-Team”.

Thus, after four years of “populism” and “isolationism”, a Biden presidency will mean the return of the Council on Foreign Relations and the continuation of a tradition of more than 70 years. Indeed, the CFR was founded in 1921 in response to the “trauma of 1920”, when US President Warren Harding and the US Senate turned isolationist and renounced US global leadership after World War I. In 2016, Donald Trump’s “America First” campaign reactivated this 100 year old foreign policy trauma.

Was the 2020 presidential election “stolen”, as some allege? There are certainly indications of significant statistical anomalies in key Democrat-run swing states. Whether these were decisive for the election outcome may be up to courts to decide. At any rate, Joe Biden may well be the first US President known to be involved in international corruption before even entering office.

Why are most US and international media hardly interested in this? Well, why should they?

Spot, the autonomous robot dog, from Boston Dynamics, was equipped with radiation sensors to create a map of the radiation coming out of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, according to news agency Ukrinform.  

Researchers at the University of Bristol and nuclear experts from the State Specialized Enterprise “Central Enterprise for Radioactive Waste Management” recently deployed the four-legged robot to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone that has been abandoned since the catastrophic meltdown in 1986. The site has since been covered up with layers of steel and concrete to keep nuclear material from escaping into the atmosphere. 

Weekly measurements around the Chernobyl site are mainly done by humans, which puts them at risk, unlike Spot, a robot who could do so without putting humans in grave danger of radiation poisoning. 

Dr. Dave Megson-Smith, a researcher at the University of Bristol, was one of the scientists aiding Spot on its nuclear power plant adventure. Megson-Smith specializes in sensor development and equipped Spot with a collimated radiation sensor. 

“We built a map of the radiation coming out of the front wall of Chernobyl power plant as we were in there with it,” Megson-Smith told IEEE Spectrum. 

Spot was able to wander around the Chernobyl nuclear site, as well as into the New Safe Confinement structure, which is a steel dome that contains hazardous radioactivity. The robot surveyed radiation levels in the area, creating a 3D map of the distribution. 

According to Megson-Smith, there’s a lot of uncertainty on how much radiation Spot is capable of handling. He said Spot is a “system that we can send into places where humans already can go, but where we just don’t want to send humans.”

Video: Spot’s Chernobyl Adventure 

Engineering a completely radiation-proof robot is challenging – as was seen after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 when robots were sent to die as they surveyed the damaged nuclear power plant. 

The future purpose of Spot at Chernobyl could be autonomous radiation mapping to detect radiation leaks. 

Not too long ago, a different Spot was assigned to a BP Plc oil rig to “read gauges, look for corrosion, map out the facility, and even sniff out methane.” 

While Spot conveniently completes tasks that may endanger humans – the most important takeaway is that robots will displace millions of jobs over this decade. 

Authored by Jim Bovard via The Libertarian Institute,

Politicians and petty czars have canceled Thanksgiving across the nation.  What have government health departments offered in lieu of a family gathering? Endless idiotic advice for “safe sex” during COVID.

The Vermont Department of Health captured the ethos of many health departments across the nation: “Decisions about sex and sexuality need to be balanced with personal and public health.” COVID Federal Superstar Anthony Fauci reflected that judgment when he declared in April that those who meet strangers for sex via Tinder or other dating apps are entitled to make their “choice regarding a risk.” Many government officials have been far more tolerant or even encouraging of risky sexual relations during the pandemic while mercilessly suppressing other social and economic relations.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is an Emmy-award winning hero of the COVID pandemic, regardless of the ten thousand elderly New Yorkers who died after he ordered nursing homes to admit COVID patients. Cuomo’s endless restrictions have been spurred by his view that “government can be a force for good,” as a New Yorker profile recently noted.

While Cuomo has vehemently condemned synagogues that disobeyed his orders to disperse, other officials in New York give their blessings to behavior which is reckless even by “woke” standards. The New York City Health Department recommended that people who organize orgies should “Limit the size of your guest list. Keep it intimate.” The guidance does not quite specify “rooftop” but it is clearly implied: “Pick larger, more open, and well-ventilated spaces.”

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, New York City’s deputy health commissioner, boasts, “Our health department has a really strong record of being very sex positive.” At the same time that New York cops have violently assaulted people for not wearing face masks, the city government officially sanctioned “glory holes.” The Big Apple’s health department urged people to “be creative with… physical barriers, like walls, that allow sexual contact while preventing close face-to-face contact.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom has become infamous for his bizarre list of Thanksgiving prohibitions to fight COVID. But the pandemic has uncorked other official weirdness in the Golden State.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health took preemptive action to re-define “premature” out of existence. The local bureaucrats advised: “Quicker can be better. The longer we are within 6 feet of someone, the greater the risk.” Will health departments take the next step, promoting Revolutionary Era imagery celebrating the return of the “Minute Man”?

As part of its recommendations for “navigating the landscape of love,” San Francisco bureaucrats urged to “embrace dirty thoughts. And clean surfaces.” The guidance stresses the importance of cleaning “shared toys,” especially when switching “collars” and similar items from one body to another. The department also noted: “When it comes to COVID-19 risk, outdoors is better than indoors.” Considering that the local government already permits homeless people to perform any other bodily function on Market Street, adding copulation might not be that much of a change in the local scenery.

The Fenway Health Center, a “Federally Qualified Community Health Center,” served up bad news to spatially-challenged Bostonians: “Using the social distancing recommendation of 6 feet, oral sex may still put you at risk of COVID.” Bizarrely, the Fenway Center urges people NOT to wear masks during hook-ups: “Leave the protective gear to the medical professionals and those who have the virus.”

The Austin, Texas Health Department alerted local residents: “COVID-19 has been found in fecal matter. Avoid activity that could allow virus from feces to enter your mouth.” In the COVID era, “Eat shit and die” has gone from being a juvenile taunt to being an ominous government health warning. Similar warnings on the dangers of “rimming” occurred in other health department recommendations.

The City of Milwaukee Health Department advises, “Masturbation will not spread COVID-19, especially if you wash your hands (and any sex toys) with soap and water for at least 20 seconds before and after sex.” But if you wash your hands for only 15 seconds afterwards, then ‘Rona wins. Actually, if people need to be told to wash their hands after taking their pleasure, they are probably beyond redemption. Besides, do post-game prophylactics make any sense after a solo performance?

Many other government agencies have become cheerleaders for self-reliance, as if there was a dire need for officialdom to specify how hundreds of millions of Americans should let off steam. At last report, the World Health Organization had not yet added masturbation to its Five Heroic Act list though it may soon qualify for a #ThanksHealthHeroes honorable mention.

In the same way that politicians focused myopically on COVID transmission risks to justify inflicting vast collateral damage on the economy, health departments offer recommendations that might avoid COVID transmission but could be otherwise ruinous.  Instead of meeting sex partners online, the New York City Health Department recommends, “Video dates, sexting, subscription-based fan platforms, sexy ‘Zoom parties’ or chat rooms may be options for you.” Other health departments made similar recommendations.

So maybe invite Jeffrey Toobin to your Zoom party? (Toobin was fired after masturbating during a New Yorker zoom call.)  Many of the “chat rooms” that bureaucrats recommend are stockful of jailbait, police and FBI agents masquerading and looking to entrap people for underage sex or other offenses.  Maybe someone should ask Jeff Bezos about his billion dollar emailed pictures of his private parts? The National Security Agency and foreign governments vacuum up a huge amount of online activity; anything that people reveal to a group of people online could easily turn up in their dossier.

Since the pandemic began, politicians have claimed a prerogative to micro-manage citizens’ lives with one harebrained edict after another. For instance, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf decreed on November 17 that people must wear masks in their own homes whenever someone visits who does not live in that household. On Monday, Gov. Wolf banned all alcohol sales in bars and restaurants on Thanksgiving Eve – a completely arbitrary edict that sows havoc and will do nothing to make COVID vanish.

Wolf would never dare to outlaw sex outside of wedlock but somehow politicians captured the right to throttle almost every other aspect of people’s lives. But a “copulation exemption” to the de facto COVID cancellation of the Bill of Rights makes no sense. People deserve as much freedom to drink rancid Rolling Rock beer on Thanksgiving Eve as they do to throw the Philly dice for a Tinder Thanksgiving treat. When politicians are permitted to selectively nullify freedom, the injustices will be exceeded only by the absurdities.

Real Vision managing editor Ed Harrison welcomes Jack Farley for a Thanksgiving “Ask Me Anything” special edition of the Daily Briefing. Sourcing questions from the Real Vision Exchange, Jack asks Ed questions about whether the U.S. will enter a second round of lockdowns, and whether the equity market could once again undergo a major crash. Ed shares his views on the future of debt, deflation, and commodities, over the next 30 years, as well as his technique learning new languages. Jack and Ed share the ways in which they follow market news, as well as their views on the difference between accounting antics and downright fraud. Lastly, Jack and Ed give an inside look at Real Vision’s ongoing mission to democratize finance.

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the shortcomings of the global health-care system, while also exposing how developed and developing world economies could demonstrate such unexpected responses. Tiny South Korea has managed to suppress the virus with mass testing and tracing. The US, meanwhile, has recorded the most deaths, while China has already vaccinated more than 1 million people before its leading vaccine effort has even been approved.

With so many variables at play, Bloomberg has tried to develop a ranking for which countries fared the best during the coronavirus outbreak. While crunching the numbers, reporters asked questions like ‘where were the best places to be during the coronavirus pandemic’? and ‘where was the virus handled most effectively?’

The rankings were based on two broad categories, COVID status and quality of life.  Additionally, Bloomberg introduced what it called the “Covid Resilience Ranking scores” for the economies, which purported to measure how resistant a given economy was to the disruptions caused by the coronavirus. There were 10 key metrics: from growth in virus cases to the overall mortality rate, testing capabilities and – importantly – whether the country had managed to secure any supply agreements for the COVID-19 vaccines that are about to hit the market in the west.

Unsurprisingly (this is Bloomberg, after all), the top three finishers were New Zealand in first place (the country used a massively costly economic lockdown to quash a few mild flareups), Japan in second (the country has seen remarkably few cases and deaths despite Japan’s perceived slowness in implementing measures to prevent the virus from spreading, and finally Taiwan, which has been hailed as having one of the most successful approaches to combating the virus.

To try and simplify things, Bloomberg kept the ranking to economies with a GDP of at least $200 billion. According to Bloomberg, the three top performers all took early concrete steps to stanch the spread of the virus.

Ironically, Bloomberg noted that border control was a critical component of the most successful countries’ strategies, beginning with Beijing’s decision to cordon off Hubei Province and the city of Wuhan.

Here are the complete rankings, courtesy of Bloomberg:

Finally, Bloomberg pointed out that authoritarian countries generally outperformed democracies like the US and UK. And while lockdowns have been deployed around the world with mixed results, Bloomberg claimed that there’s nothing more effective than when citizens have faith in the authorities and their guidance. When that happens – and Bloomberg cites Japan and Sweden as examples – lockdowns aren’t necessary to stanch the surge in cases.

But while the US has lagged in several aspects of its response to the virus, it holds the lead in the number of vaccine agreements it has forged.

In the end, whoever has the vaccines will likely be in the best position moving forward.