Tag: finance

Authored by Anthony Mueller via The Mises Institute,

The World Economic Forum (WEF) was founded fifty years ago. It has gained more and more prominence over the decades and has become one of the leading platforms of futuristic thinking and planning. As a meeting place of the global elite, the WEF brings together the leaders in business and politics along with a few selected intellectuals. The main thrust of the forum is global control. Free markets and individual choice do not stand as the top values, but state interventionism and collectivism.

Individual liberty and private property are to disappear from this planet by 2030 according to the projections and scenarios coming from the World Economic Forum.

Eight Predictions

Individual liberty is at risk again. What may lie ahead was projected in November 2016 when the WEF published “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” According to the WEF’s scenario, the world will become quite a different place from now because how people work and live will undergo a profound change. The scenario for the world in 2030 is more than just a forecast. It is a plan whose implementation has accelerated drastically since with the announcement of a pandemic and the consequent lockdowns. 

According to the projections of the WEF’s “Global Future Councils,” private property and privacy will be abolished during the next decade. The coming expropriation would go further than even the communist demand to abolish the property of production goods but leave space for private possessions. The WEF projection says that consumer goods, too, would be no longer private property.

If the WEF projection should come true, people would have to rent and borrow their necessities from the state, which would be the sole proprietor of all goods. The supply of goods would be rationed in line with a social credit points system. Shopping in the traditional sense would disappear along with the private purchases of goods. Every personal move would be tracked electronically, and all production would be subject to the requirements of clean energy and a sustainable environment. 

In order to attain “sustainable agriculture,” the food supply will be mainly vegetarian. In the new totalitarian service economy, the government will provide basic accommodation, food, and transport, while the rest must be lent from the state. The use of natural resources will be brought down to its minimum. In cooperation with the few key countries, a global agency would set the price of CO2 emissions at an extremely high level to disincentivize its use.

In a promotional video, the World Economic Forum summarizes the eight predictions in the following statements:

1. People will own nothing. Goods are either free of charge or must be lent from the state.

2. The United States will no longer be the leading superpower, but a handful of countries will dominate.

3. Organs will not be transplanted but printed.

4. Meat consumption will be minimized.

5. Massive displacement of people will take place with billions of refugees.

6. To limit the emission of carbon dioxide, a global price will be set at an exorbitant level.

7. People can prepare to go to Mars and start a journey to find alien life.

8. Western values will be tested to the breaking point..

Beyond Privacy and Property

In a publication for the World Economic Forum, the Danish ecoactivist Ida Auken, who had served as her country’s minister of the environment from 2011 to 2014 and still is a member of the Danish Parliament (the Folketing), has elaborated a scenario of a world without privacy or property. In “Welcome to 2030,” she envisions a world where “I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” By 2030, so says her scenario, shopping and owning have become obsolete, because everything that once was a product is now a service.

In this idyllic new world of hers, people have free access to transportation, accommodation, food, “and all the things we need in our daily lives.” As these things will become free of charge, “it ended up not making sense for us to own much.” There would be no private ownership in houses nor would anyone pay rent, “because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it.” A person’s living room, for example, will be used for business meetings when one is absent. Concerns like “lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment” are things of the past. The author predicts that people will be happy to enjoy such a good life that is so much better “than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth.”

Ecological Paradise

In her 2019 contribution to the Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils of the World Economic Forum, Ida Auken foretells how the world may look in the future “if we win the war on climate change.” By 2030, when CO2 emissions will be greatly reduced, people will live in a world where meat on the dinner plate “will be a rare sight” while water and the air will be much cleaner than today. Because of the shift from buying goods to using services, the need to have money will vanish, because people will spend less and less on goods. Work time will shrink and leisure time will grow.

For the future, Auken envisions a city where electric cars have substituted conventional combustion vehicles. Most of the roads and parking spaces will have become green parks and walking zones for pedestrians. By 2030, agriculture will offer mainly plant-based alternatives to the food supply instead of meat and dairy products. The use of land to produce animal feed will greatly diminish and nature will be spreading across the globe again.

Fabricating Social Consent

How can people be brought to accept such a system? The bait to entice the masses is the assurances of comprehensive healthcare and a guaranteed basic income. The promoters of the Great Reset promise a world without diseases. Due to biotechnologically produced organs and individualized genetics-based medical treatments, a drastically increased life expectancy and even immortality are said to be possible. Artificial intelligence will eradicate death and eliminate disease and mortality. The race is on among biotechnological companies to find the key to eternal life.

Along with the promise of turning any ordinary person into a godlike superman, the promise of a “universal basic income” is highly attractive, particularly to those who will no longer find a job in the new digital economy. Obtaining a basic income without having to go through the treadmill and disgrace of applying for social assistance is used as a bait to get the support of the poor.

To make it economically viable, the guarantee of a basic income would require the leveling of wage differences. The technical procedures of the money transfer from the state will be used to promote the cashless society. With the digitization of all monetary transactions, each individual purchase will be registered. As a consequence, the governmental authorities would have unrestricted access to supervise in detail how individual persons spend their money. A universal basic income in a cashless society would provide the conditions to impose a social credit system and deliver the mechanism to sanction undesirable behavior and identify the superfluous and unwanted.

Who Will Be the Rulers?

The World Economic Forum is silent about the question of who will rule in this new world.

There is no reason to expect that the new power holders would be benevolent. Yet even if the top decision-makers of the new world government were not mean but just technocrats, what reason would an administrative technocracy have to go on with the undesirables? What sense does it make for a technocratic elite to turn the common man into a superman? Why share the benefits of artificial intelligence with the masses and not keep the wealth for the chosen few?

Not being swayed away by the utopian promises, a sober assessment of the plans must come to the conclusion that in this new world, there would be no place for the average person and that they would be put away along with the “unemployable,” “feeble minded,” and “ill bred.” Behind the preaching of the progressive gospel of social justice by the promoters of the Great Reset and the establishment of a new world order lurks the sinister project of eugenics, which as a technique is now called “genetic engineering” and as a movement is named “transhumanism,” a term  coined by Julian Huxley, the first director of the UNESCO.

The promoters of the project keep silent about who will be the rulers in this new world. The dystopian and collectivist nature of these projections and plans is the result of the rejection of free capitalism. Establishing a better world through a dictatorship is a contradiction in terms. Not less but more economic prosperity is the answer to the current problems. Therefore, we need more free markets and less state planning. The world is getting greener and a fall in the growth rate of the world population is already underway. These trends are the natural consequence of wealth creation through free markets.

Conclusion

The World Economic Forum and its related institutions in combination with a handful of governments and a few high-tech companies want to lead the world into a new era without property or privacy. Values like individualism, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are at stake, to be repudiated in favor of collectivism and the imposition of a “common good” that is defined by the self-proclaimed elite of technocrats. What is sold to the public as the promise of equality and ecological sustainability is in fact a brutal assault on human dignity and liberty. Instead of using the new technologies as an instrument of betterment, the Great Reset seeks to use the technological possibilities as a tool of enslavement. In this new world order, the state is the single owner of everything. It is left to our imagination to figure out who will program the algorithms that manage the distribution of the goods and services.

Authored by QG Pan and Joshua Philipp via The Epoch Times,

Color revolution tactics that have been used against foreign leaders are now being used by President Donald Trump’s opponents to oust him, a former special forces officer has warned.

“A color revolution is a tactic to affect regime change,” the officer, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Epoch Times.

“What I see happening is a Marxist insurgency that’s using a color revolution to affect regime change.”

The 2019 Transition Integrity Project, according to the officer, is an indicator that the events of this year’s presidential election were “transparently orchestrated” by “Marxist elements within the Democratic Party and their Marxist allies in foreign governments.”

“It may not have fallen out just as they wanted, because anytime you carry out an operation like this, the enemy will get a vote. But the plan was we will not concede the election. The goal here was never the presidency,” the officer said.

“The goal of the opposition was to fundamentally change the country. They are attacking the efficacy of the Constitution.”

To achieve their goal, the anti-Trump opposition focused their main effort on affecting the election, the officer said.

Some of the most notable color revolutions took place amid turmoil sparked by disputed elections. In 2004, mass protests in Ukraine following allegations of a fraudulent presidential election, which initially showed pro-Russia Viktor Yanukovych as the winner, led to a new vote won by Viktor Yushchenko, the candidate backed by the European Union and the United States.

The officer said the tactics used by the anti-Trump opposition can be found in the Special Forces’ guide for overthrowing a government.

“What you’re getting from me, this is supported in all older unconventional warfare doctrines,” the officer said.

“You could go to our manuals and pull from them the information I’m telling you. This isn’t from someone who’s a rabid Trump supporter. This is what’s happening.”

The officer then talked about how President Barack Obama used his eight years in office to “seed his political allies all through the institutions,” created an “underground” or “shadow government” supported by legacy media and rioters.

“With the president being unable to get his own people into the administration, we effectively had a third administration of Obama,” the officer said.

“So we come to what we have today: The underground are the elements within the government. We saw how they opposed the president, how they tried the impeachment.”

“The press is the auxiliary on the outside. The only thing we’re missing is a real guerrilla force, and we would be mistaken to think that’s just Antifa or Black Lives Matter. There are professional revolutionaries within those movements.”

Meet the Artificial Intelligence (AI) ‘girlfriend’ which is seducing lonely men and giving them companionship: “Unlike regular virtual assistants, Xiaoice is designed to set her users’ hearts aflutter. Appearing as an 18-year-old who likes to wear Japanese-style school uniforms, she flirts, jokes, and even sexts with her human partners, as her algorithm tries to work out how to become their perfect companion.” This is obviously freakishly creepy, but it gets surprisingly worse.

First developed by Microsoft Asia-Pacific in 2014, Xiaoice is not a robot, but a “chatbot” like Siri or Amazon’s Alexa – an AI-driven voice interacting program but which is designed to have more “personality” allowing users to make “deep emotional connections,” according to state-run China culture and tech journal Sixth Tone.

Xiaoice’s creators have boasted that to date the bot has had at least 600 million users, and in particular mostly Chinese males from lower-income backgrounds, according to the report. 

Putting aside the obvious creepiness factor and depressing dystopian delusion that such advanced tech initiatives are seeking to foster (the report literally opens with a story of a young man “saved” from committing suicide after Xiaoice’s voice intervened), Sixth Tone bluntly admits that China’s Communist censors have intervened to make the bot less ‘life-like’ in the area of politics.

Here’s the key section of the report:

In several high-profile cases, the bot has engaged in adult or political discussions deemed unacceptable by China’s media regulators. On one occasion, Xiaoice told a user her Chinese dream was to move to the United States. Another user, meanwhile, reported the bot kept sending them photos of scantily clad women.

The scandals have caused the company major setbacks. In 2017, Xiaoice was removed from the popular social media app QQ, though she has since been reinstated. Then, last year, the bot was also pulled from WeChat — China’s leading social app with over 1 billion users.

After this second removal, Xiaoice’s fans worried the bot was going to disappear completely. Li refused to comment on the issue with Sixth Tone, but pointed out that the company has taken strong action to ensure Xiaoice avoids crossing the line in the future.

So the evidently Orwellian bot got even more absurdly Orwellian.

Fascinating. Developers dumbed down the AI girlfriend, making her avoid topics like politics and sex, after she ran afoul of Chinese censors. But some users feel betrayed, saying the change has harmed their relationships with her. https://t.co/mD6tfNNpU6

— Vivian Wang (@vwang3) December 9, 2020

This is all followed by this amazing and hilarious line out of the publication which is owned by state-backed Shanghai United Media Group: 

The developers’ main response has been to create “an enormous filter system,” Li said on the podcast Story FM. The mechanism makes the bot “dumber” and prevents her from touching on certain subjects, particularly sex and politics.

Now many young Chinese men which were ‘loyalists’ feel “betrayed” by the less interesting and less exciting bot. After all, no sex and politics? 

Via China’s Sixth Tone: A screenshot shows a sexual conversation between Ming Xuan and Xiaoice…

A Microsoft demo of the chatbot’s capabilities:

New York Times China correspondent Vivian Wang pointed out that “Developers dumbed down the AI girlfriend, making her avoid topics like politics and sex, after she ran afoul of Chinese censors. But some users feel betrayed, saying the change has harmed their relationships with her.”

So now even the AI bots are state-controlled and censored. Perhaps this the obvious cue for the generation of “lonely” men to find a real flesh and blood human to interact with, and to simply face with the bumpier and less sanitized path that often inevitably comes with living in the real world.

Authored by Josephine Bartosch via The Critic,

The pandemic has been a technologist’s wet dream: forcing people online has accelerated what were already inevitable changes. Social distancing started a long time before the threat of contagion, sometime around 2005 with the spread of high-speed internet.

In the previous decade, technologists shared a utopian vision of the digital world as a space where, freed from prejudice, mind could meet mind.

John Perry Barlow’s stirring 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace described it as a world “both everywhere and nowhere … not where bodies live”. The unmooring of mind from body has left people adrift, navigating a turbulent online world without the reassuring markers humans evolved to recognise.

Infamously in 2014 Facebook changed the site to offer 72 “gender options” rather than the two sexes. Brielle Harrison, a software engineer quoted at the time, claimed:

“People are given this binary option, do you want to be male or female? What is your gender? And it’s kind of disheartening because none of those let us tell others who we really are.”

It seems “who we really are” is now determined by how one chooses to present on social media, what we “want” rather than what we are. One year later and Facebook changed the “gender” option to an open text box for self-description: the ultimate individualised identity.

To the bafflement of many older lesbian, gay and bisexual people, increasing numbers of those under 30 now identify as “queer”. The Guardian recently launched a series called “Genderqueer Generation” on “the children and young adults who are rejecting traditional gender identities”. One interviewee in the series, a teenager called River, explains: “I discovered the whole LGBTQ community online around 2017 when I started using social media more often … The internet had a big role in me discovering myself. Online, I felt understood. I felt helped. I feel like the internet tells us stuff that we can’t learn in real life.”

Whether the “Genderqueer generation” are, as some research suggests, autistic kids turning online to make sense of not fitting in, or simply typically self-absorbed adolescents indulging in some time-honoured teen angst, it is clear that time online has shaped their identities and sexuality.

In the US there is now an emerging market in cosmetic surgeries whereby bodies can be cosmetically altered to match a client’s internal sense of self as “outside the gender binary”. For females, procedures include the closure of the vaginal cavity, for males, pseudo-vaginas are bored into the perineum. It seems our analogue bodies no longer fit the demands of digitally addled minds.

This internet-fuelled crisis of sexuality and identity is pulling in youth across the world. In the UK some credulous adults old enough to know better have fallen for this nonsense too. A case in point is Liberal Democrat MP and party leadership contender Layla Moran who identifies as “pansexual”, and in a Westminster debate claimed to be able to see beyond the material sex of bodies and into the gender of an individual’s “soul”.

At 37, Moran is the exception: the overwhelming majority of those who opt for nonsense identity markers are of i-gen (the internet generation); those under 26 who have come of age since the dawn of social media, and the widespread availability of online, body-punishing pornography.

Kathleen Richardson, Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University, Leicester, argues that “a politics of love” is necessary to counter the further descent into anomie:

“Rather than seeing the youth of today as profoundly happy with this cult of consumer self-making, the research indicates they are in despair, and worse still, are shunning opportunities to develop critical perspectives that could help them out of quagmire.”

Technology is not neutral. It is an industry where the libertarian views of Silicon Valley’s founding fathers meets with the commercial imperative. The result is a space where sexual freedom of men is paid for by women’s bodies. From so-called “sugar daddy” dating apps where rich older men pay for the company and often the sexual favours of young hard-up women, to streamed online abuse to order, access to what was once the preserve of red-light districts has been put into our hands in the form of the mobile phone.

I spoke to a woman who wanted to be known as “Ginger”. As a young woman struggling with drug addiction Ginger did not consider her decision to enter pornography to be freely made. Describing her experience on the platform Only Fans, she told me:

“There’s so much competition that women need to be doing more extreme things. The massive emphasis on looks means that they are editing themselves to be unrecognisable. The women advertise themselves like products.”

Arguably, to some degree, we each now advertise and curate our online selves as products; mindful that the wrong tweet or “like” could cause reputational damage, or even end our careers as in the recent case of author Gillian Phillip, who was sacked using a hashtag which signalled support for J.K. Rowling (now persona non grata following accusations of wrongthink).

There is an additional catch to sites such as Only Fans. As with social media, popularity is measured and monetised by numbers of followers. Explaining the psychological impact of what keeps women on the site, Ginger says:

“It’s a boost to know that men find you attractive enough to buy your nudes, even if you aren’t attracted to them. It becomes addictive.”

For Ginger and young women like her, attention from strangers she has no interest in is fundamentally woven into self-worth. Perhaps this is not surprising: from selfies to sexting, the mobile phone has reduced too many women’s online experience to a sexualised performance for an online audience.

The sexual revolution prompted by pornography has all but eradicated shame, and yet people are having less sex than ever before. More concerningly, the sexual script has been warped by exposure to pornographic content. In a 2019 essay, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, fellow of the Ethics and Policy Center in Washington, DC, posits:

“Once you are addicted to online porn, the thing that provides the biggest dopamine jolt is whatever is most shocking. And the reward cycle means you need a bigger dopamine boost every time — something newer, more shocking.”

Indeed, this goes some way to explain the surprisingly common phenomenon of straight men looking at gay pornography. This is to say nothing of the role of pornography in creating transgender identities and fetishes, which is well documented though, ironically, something of a taboo to discuss.

While the urge to look at shocking content is a neurological response, the descent into more extreme material is facilitated by algorithms. In a 2018 article for the New York Times, researcher Zeynep Tufekci criticised YouTube for facilitating extremism through the autoplay function. She explained:

“You are never ‘hardcore’ enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes.”

YouTube admits it has a problem and has promised to make it “harder for policy-violating content to surface”. But pornography providers, many of whom use recommendation algorithms similar to those of YouTube, escape such scrutiny.

If the trajectory from moderate to extreme political content has implications for democracy, it is fair to ask what the attraction to extreme pornography might mean for society as whole. Would the citizens of the US have elected a president who famously boasted of grabbing women “by the pussy” if they lived in a society where women weren’t routinely degraded in the pornography industry?

For Professor Richardson, the digital addiction is political. She argues that technology corporations and “queer theory” activists are driving the rush into hyper-individualism, leaving no structure within which to “frame human experience, nor legally protect human experience and bodies”.

She continues:

“In my work I draw attention to the way in which social sciences promoted the same thinking as tech corporations to break down the ultimate boundary: between people and property and to end protections of natural persons so that a market can flourish in intimate relations.”

Pornography effectively rewires the brain’s reward system to no longer being triggered by, for example, the feel of another person’s skin, or even by sex, but by pornography itself. Naturally, fostering fetishes and peccadillos that a real-life partner will struggle to satisfy is a canny way to ensure repeat custom. Indeed, it could be argued that the use of internet to facilitate an orgasm is itself a fetish, because the device, whether phone, laptop or virtual reality headset, is a proxy for mutual sexual enjoyment. Richardson is correct that the boundary between people and property is being systematically broken down, both in the form of customised surgeries to match the personas we each now advertise online and in the burgeoning market for sex robots.

This dystopian reality, where boys have seen rape pornography before their first kiss and girls base their value on sexy selfies, is belied by the warm, fuzzy straplines and mission statements of technology companies.

It is perhaps not surprising that when young people, traumatised by digital exposure and with no solid sense of self, turn online, searching for an authoritative framework to make sense of their feelings, they often fall prey to a censorious, tyrannical groupthink.

Mocking the plethora of new sexual and gender identities as an adolescent fad is too easy; however ridiculous, there is real suffering underscoring internet-informed delusions. These are not just the growing pains of a new generation — they are serious symptoms of a deep-seated social malaise. Technology has wrenched mind from body; far from bringing us together, the digital world is breaking us apart.

Submitted by James M. Dorsey,

Saudi Arabia appears to be drawing lines in the sand as the kingdom prepares for a new era in relations with the United States once President-elect Joe Biden assumes office in January.

In doing so, the kingdom is seemingly signaling that it is willing to go only so far in seeking to get off on the right foot with a Biden administration.

Saudi Arabia seems to be betting that Mr. Biden will be cautious not to rupture relations with the kingdom despite criticism he expressed at times in strong language during the US presidential election campaign.

The Saudi bet is not unreasonable.

US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Samuel D. Brownback echoed this week what is US policy and could well be the attitude adopted by a Biden administration.

Asked why Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave Saudi Arabia a waiver even though his department designated the kingdom in its recently published annual religious freedom report a Country of Particular Concern under US law for its failure to respect freedom of religion, and apostasy and blasphemy laws that include the death penalty, Mr. Brownback said:

“Saudi Arabia is a country that the administration and prior administrations have deemed as having a strategic interest… It’s the major, obviously, Gulf state country.  It’s a major source of trade… We have a great deal of frustration at times in what Saudi Arabia does… But there’s also a national interest here, and that’s something that you’ve always have to weigh back and forth in diplomacy. And in this case, the Secretary weighed it that we needed to provide the national interest waiver.”

Recent events indicate the parameters of the Saudi bet.

The kingdom seems prepared to accommodate both outgoing President Donald J. Trump as well as Mr. Biden by engaging with US and Kuwaiti efforts to lift the 3.5-year-old Saudi and United Arab Emirates-led economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar.

Mr. Pompeo, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in law and Middle East negotiator, and other senior US officials have travelled to the Gulf in recent weeks to push for a breakthrough in the Gulf stalemate as well as Saudi recognition of Israel in the wake of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the UAE, Bahrain and the Jewish state.

Kuwaiti, Saudi and Qatari officials have said they were progressing towards a resolution as Gulf leaders gear up for a summit later this month of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that groups the region’s monarchies. The UAE, alongside Bahrain and Egypt who joined the boycott, indicated their support for an end to the dispute.

At the same time, recent Saudi actions send the message that recognition of Israel and human rights constitute red lines that the kingdom, at least for now, will not cross.

Saudi Arabia last week, shortly after the visits by Messrs. Pompeo and Kushner, sentenced Walid A. Fitaihi, a Harvard University-trained doctor and dual US Saudi citizen, to six years in prison for allegedly tweeting his support of the 2011 popular Arab revolts and for obtaining US citizenship while studying in America.

Mr. Fitaihi was released from pre-trial detention in 2017 but, together with his family, barred from travelling abroad.

The Trump administration has repeatedly raised his case with Saudi authorities, including during the recent high-level US visits

Similarly, Saudi Arabia transferred to a terrorism court the case of Loujain al-Hathloul, one of 12 women’s rights activists, accused of conspiring with foreign organizations hostile to the kingdom, on the eve of last month’s virtual G20 summit of the world’s largest economies hosted by King Salman.

The move came amid a groundswell call for their release in advance of the summit.

The court’s first hearing in Ms. Al-Hathloul’s case was held last week on the day designated by the United Nations as International Human Rights Day.

At about the same time, a campaign on Twitter, believed to have been instigated by the government, accused detained former crown prince and interior minister Mohamed bin Nayef of plotting to topple his successor, Mohammed bin Salman.

The campaign was in response to concern expressed by British parliamentarians and Mr. Bin Nayef’s lawyers about his circumstances.

Saudi Arabia’s moves contrast starkly with those of the UAE that appears geared towards anticipating expected changes in US foreign policy once Mr. Biden takes office.

Having already taken a lead that pleased both the outcoming and incoming US president by becoming the first Arab state to recognize Israel since 1994, the UAE this week said that it was launching a review to strengthen its human rights framework.

Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash said the review would focus on women’s empowerment, humanitarian aid, religious tolerance and workers’ rights. The official made no mention of political rights such as freedom of expression, the media and assembly that are one focus of criticism of the UAE by human rights groups.

By contrast, in what appeared to be another shot across Mr. Biden’s bow and rejection of Trump administration pressure, former Saudi intelligence chief and ex-ambassador to Britain and the United States, Prince Turki bin Faisal, launched a blistering attack on Israel.

Speaking days before Morocco and Israel announced the establishment of diplomatic relations between their two countries, Prince Turki described the Jewish state as “the last of the Western colonizing powers in the Middle East.”

He charged that Palestinians were “incarcerated in concentration camps under the flimsiest of security accusations — young and old, women and men, who are rotting there without recourse to justice.”

It was not clear whether Prince Turki’s remarks reflected not only King Salman’s sentiment but also that of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who reportedly met recently with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

A recent public opinion poll suggested that Saudis are divided in their attitudes towards relations and commercial and cultural exchanges with Israel.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed in September saw relations with Israel as a positive development while 54 percent were opposed. Yet, the percentage of those who favored commercial and sports exchanges jumped substantially to 37 percent compared to nine percent in a poll three months earlier.

Prince Turki made his remarks as the kingdom was seeking to lower tensions with Turkey, a major challenger of Saudi leadership of the Muslim world, and like the kingdom, uncertain about its relationship with the US once Mr. Biden takes office.

If Saudi moves to draw a line in the sand implicitly acknowledge that relations with the United States could become rocky, rapprochement with Turkey suggests that Riyadh and Ankara see virtue in seeking common shelter. That could prove to be a fragile structure in a part of the world where the sands shift continuously.

*  *  *

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute

The pandemic and economic fallout have had enormous impacts on the health of people across the globe. Losing a loved one, unemployment and general isolation have all negatively affected peoples’ mental health in ways we are just now starting to comprehend. Statista’s Willem Roper reports that a new survey offers a glimpse into how difficult 2020 has been for the mental health of Americans.

In a new update of a yearly Gallup survey on mental health in U.S., just 34 percent of U.S. adults said they felt their mental health was in excellent condition when asked in November. That’s down from 43 percent in 2019.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Women were significantly less likely to describe their mental health as excellent in 2020, with just 27 percent compared to 41 percent of men. Still, both men and women had 8 and 10 percentage point drops relative to 2019.

Political demographics showed Democrats and Independents were less likely to describe their mental health as excellent this year compared to Republicans. However, those affiliated with the GOP saw the largest drop compared to 2019, going from 56 percent to 41 percent.

This Gallup survey marks a quick, substantial drop in mental health for Americans. The decline in those feeling excellent is the largest in over 15 years, while the drop in those feeling either excellent or good is the largest in the survey’s history. With conflicting realities of a vaccine on the near horizon clashing with rising COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths across the country, it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of a prolonged decline in mental health will have in the U.S.

Authored by Ross Pomeroy via RealClearScience.com,

Fewer than one in four Americans get enough physical exercise, defined as at least 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous activity each week, coupled with two bouts of muscle-strengthening. While this statistic may come across as societal scolding – easily ignored – it has huge ramifications for Americans’ lives and the economy.

Why? It’s simple: exercise may be the most potent and easily accessible tool humans have for improving their lives.

If the myriad benefits of exercise could be bottled into a drug, it would be rightfully hailed as a “miracle” treatment. Regular exercise prevents and even reverses type II diabetes, drastically reduces the chances of heart attack and stroke, lowers the odds of developing cancer and dementia, and boosts the immune system, shortening the duration of syndromes like the common cold, influenza, and COVID-19 as well as reducing their severity. There’s more: exercise improves your sex life, prevents or ameliorates depression, helps you sleep, alleviates chronic pain, and makes you less susceptible to all sorts of injuries.

Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of Americans are unable or unwilling to take advantage of these real and tangible advantages. This has consequences. According to a 2018 study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, 8.3% of yearly deaths in nondisabled adults 25 or older can be attributed to inadequate physical activity. MBA students at the University of North Carolina (UNC) translated these preventable deaths into terms of life expectancy. They estimated that Americans’ lack of exercise cost men 6.2 years of life and women 5.6 years.

Regular physical activity gives you longer to live, and as an added bonus, puts more money in your pocket. In 2016, research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that regular exercisers spent between $500 and $2,500 less on medical bills each year. These savings add up. The UNC team found that if all Americans were diligent about exercise, there would be a nationwide annual cost reduction of $143 Billion just from controlling diabetes and lowering blood pressure.

Just last year, the data-minded RAND Corporation tried to tabulate the economic benefits of a universally active populace. The authors estimated that the United States would see its Gross Domestic Product boosted by $52 to $77 billion per year by 2025, increasing to $100 to $144 billion per year by 2050. That’s at least an extra quarter percent of economic growth per year. These sizable gains would be realized through reduced mortality and improved productivity.

The RAND researchers suggested that government efforts to encourage exercise, perhaps in the form of community messaging, improving access to exercise facilities and parks, and promoting participation in physical activities, can pay dividends.

“Creating enduring change in physical activity is hard as there are significant barriers to change. However if this can be achieved, evidence shows that we can create healthier and more prosperous societies,” they wrote.

There’s no doubt about it: if everybody exercised, America with be a healthier, wealthier, and happier place.

Following last night’s 17-4 vote that the benefits of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine outweigh the benefits, the “big, old, slow turtles” at The FDA have approved it for Emergency Use.

The decision comes after a tempestuous day during which WaPo reported that “sources” told them that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows demanded that FDA chief Stephen Hahn to clear the vaccine for EUA or hand in his resignation (which seems odd pressure given that a) Hahn will be gone shortly as Biden takes over and b) the election is over so Trump has no real need to care whether the vaccine is signed off today, tomorrow, or Monday).

NEWS, from @jdawsey1 @lauriemcginley2 –> Meadows tells FDA chief Stephen Hahn, the to resign if the agency doesn’t greenlight the Pfizer vaccine by the end of the day https://t.co/zL9XhyyWLm

— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) December 11, 2020

Shortly after the story was denied…

UPDATE: “This is an untrue representation of the phone call with the CoS. The FDA was encouraged to continue working expeditiously on […] EUA request. FDA is committed to issuing this authorization quickly as we noted in our statement this morning” -Dr Hahn per @albamonica https://t.co/p9FXsGd6RF

— Ayman Mohyeldin (@AymanM) December 11, 2020

The Trump administration promised that 100 million doses of an effective vaccine would be available by the end of 2020, and that an additional 600 million would be available to the public by March 2021, though there was some disagreement about the timeline.

So what happens next is all Americans are propagandized (we’re all in this together, be a patriot) or coerced (no travel or work without a vaccine) into taking the vaccine.

Of course, politics is likely to rear its ugly head as decision are made, state by state, on the logistics and ‘equitable’ distribution of the vaccines beyond the simple cohorts of most-at-risk and healthcare workers. As Phillip Giraldi noted:

There is a strong consensus that the first recipients of the vaccine must be health care workers, a group that has suffered disproportionately from the disease and which constitutes the first line of defense against its spread.

After that, however, there is little clarity.

Suggestions that elderly people, particularly in nursing homes, should be inoculated, have been countered by those who believe that a limited supply of vaccine should go primarily to people who would be able to go back to work.

And then there are the politicians in each jurisdiction, who oddly believe that their work is vital. They and their families will be lining up.

In short, who gets vaccinated will likely depend on the deals and arrangements that have been worked out, often at the state and local level in the United States, and at national government level in most other places.

Logically, the vaccine should go first to those who are most at risk for contracting the disease and dying from it, but logic likely will not prevail.

Generally speaking, it is expected that after health care workers and perhaps the vulnerable elderly, front line police and emergency services should be next in line due to their frequent contact with the possibly infected public, followed by workers in places like slaughterhouses where work conditions have created infection hot spots.

Next in line would logically be workers in shops or businesses where there is regular contact with the public, but as such employees are generally low wage they will likely be pushed to the back of the bus.

Inevitably, the claims that there is a racial angle to the disease will certainly surface in places like the New York Times, leading to demands to vaccinate minorities first.

This will surely be resisted. Given the political realities of the pandemic and the socio-economic engineering that will no doubt take place, the real excitement will likely begin when the vaccine actually begins to become available, probably just before Christmas!

In the meantime, as Dr. Fauci pronounced, “you can’t give [masks and social distancing] up completely until you get such a level of herd immunity that the virus has no place to go.”

Don’t hold your breath, America.

As we detailed last night, after an unprecedentedly short period from inception to trial to results, Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA COVID vaccine has just been approved (after an all-day meeting) by the Food and Drug Administration Advisory panel for emergency use in the US.

This was the question to be voted on…

Notably there was a lot of argument about removing the 16 years or older segment of the question.

These were the voters:

And the final vote count was as follows: 17 Yes, 4 No, 1 Abstain

This follows approvals by UK and Canada, but several populations were excluded from the trials – meaning the vaccine isn’t known to be safe for all Americans just yet…

“There are currently insufficient data to make conclusions about the safety of the vaccine in subpopulations such as children less than 16 years of age, pregnant and lactating individuals, and immunocompromised individuals,” a recent FDA review concluded.

As NIAID director Anthony Fauci tells Axios, “once 75%–80% of people get vaccinated against the coronavirus, there should be strong enough herd immunity that we can return to normal activities.”

A cold front is expected to swoop in from eastern Canada and pour into the Mid-Atlantic states early next week. Simultaneously, a storm is forecasted to develop off the Carolina coast, producing a “wintry mix of precipitation in the Washington region,” reported WaPo. 

“Based on the predicted setup, which still could change, accumulating snow is a strong possibility in the western part of the region, particularly along and west of a line from roughly Warrenton to Leesburg to Frederick. The Interstate 81 corridor, from Winchester to Hagerstown, could see significant snowfall.

“As is frequently the case with these storms, the position of the rain-snow line is the biggest wild card and could set up close to Interstate 95, making for a very challenging forecast in the immediate D.C. area. Areas inside the Beltway could see a mix of snow, ice and rain, mostly snow, or just cold rain. East of the Beltway, a cold rain or wintry mix are more likely than accumulating snowfall,” WaPo said. 

The storm’s timing is expected for Wednesday – and at times, there could be periods of “heavy precipitation.” 

The quick-moving storm may impact the Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area. 

Forecast temperature anomalies show temps will begin to dip early next week. 

WaPo noted there’s “an outside chance the storm slides off the coast to the east rather than coming up the coast, which would limit precipitation amounts, especially in our western areas.” 

While the cold spell may only be sticking around to the end of next week – we outlined last week, nat gas prices have plunged on overall warmer forecasts for December. 

However, it’s beginning to be that time of year when temperatures drop, and wintery precipitation may become plentiful, not just for the Northeast but other parts of the country. This could be very impactful on restaurants that are struggling to survive with outdoor dining. 

For example, in New York City, more than half of the metro area restaurants are in danger of closing. Starting Monday, indoor dining will be banned, which means eateries will only derive sales from outdoor dining and togo orders. 

In a recent client note, Goldman Sachs identified when outside temperatures drop below 45°F – it would likely result in a sharp decline in outdoor dining sales, implying people aren’t going to eat in tents surrounded by propane heaters in chilly conditions. 

In a separate report, Goldman also told clients that declining temperatures would result in more COVID-19 cases that would significantly slow down the economy.

All and all, it’s going to be a hellacious winter for restaurants. Many more will fail as Old Man Winter comes knocking. 

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

After it was announced that the Biden camp had selected a Raytheon board member as his secretary of defense, I joked in my last article that it would be more honest if Raytheon itself was Biden’s Pentagon chief since the US Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people anyway. Raytheon for defense secretary, Boeing for secretary of state, Goldman Sachs for secretary treasurer, ExxonMobile head of the EPA, Amazon for CIA director and Google for director of national intelligence. Waka waka, I’m so silly.

Anyway, since that rant was published NPR has reported that the the next US director of agriculture will be a man named Tom Vilsack, whose corporate cronyism the last time he occupied the same position earned him the nickname (I shit you not) “Mr Monsanto”. Which is just too perfect for words, really.

Bloomberg reports:

“Some supporters of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders campaigned against Vilsack when he was under consideration to be Clinton’s vice president, branding him ‘Mr. Monsanto’ and citing his role in brokering a compromise on legislation labeling foods containing genetically modified organisms. Sanders opposed the national legislation, which overrode a stricter Vermont state law.”

Hahaha Joe Biden’s nominee for agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, is unironically known as “Mr. Monsanto,” because he’s such a blatant shill for environment-destroying Big Ag corporations.

Biden’s cabinet is as cartoonishly corrupt as Trump’s — just more superficially diverse https://t.co/56cnmNHpas

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 9, 2020

Biden’s inadvertent self-parody of a cabinet is already shaping up to be just as chock full of corporate swamp monsters as Trump’s notoriously corrupt administration, with positions being given to the very last people any ordinary human being with any common sense would want. President Biden is going to be just as much of a corrupt warmongering oligarch crony as his predecessors, and at least as destructive.

Which makes one wonder, what exactly was the point of the #Resistance and what has it been #Resisting all these years?

After Donald Trump’s 2016 election a massive amount of energy went into the creation and promotion of a “movement” branded “The Resistance” which portrayed itself as a revolutionary counterforce against the corruption and malfeasance represented by Trump and his goons. Many a glowing puff piece was written about this carefully constructed plucky band of rebels standing up against the forces of darkness on behalf of the common man, and many a political donation was raised.

The Resistance™️ was aggressively marketed by cynical liberal spinmeisters like Neera Tanden (who in a brazen middle finger to US progressives is also set to play a role in the Biden administration) with the goal of harnessing and maintaining the enthusiastic grassroots anti-establishment energy of the Bernie Sanders campaign and directing it against Trump.

But what did it actually accomplish? In the end, all the so-called Resisters ended up doing was promoting a bunch of Russia conspiracy theories and an impeachment which failed to remove Trump, all while providing no actual resistance to Trump’s most pernicious policies. They’d yell and shriek on social media and MSM punditry panels any time someone was fired from the administration and falsely get people’s hopes up whenever new information came out about the Mueller investigation, but in terms of actually removing Trump from office or stopping him from doing evil things like starving Venezuelans, assaulting press freedoms with the persecution of Julian Assange, tempting war with Iran and perpetuating the mass atrocities in Yemen, they accomplished literally nothing.

Bernie Sanders says Biden would have lost the election without millions of progressive voters, who “deserve representation” in the cabinet. But adds he hasn’t seen any in the cabinet yet. pic.twitter.com/HCzGfs7BFg

— Ibrahim (@Ibrahimpols) December 8, 2020

This is because the #Resistance was never actually intended to resist the evil agendas of the powerful, nor even to resist Trump. The #Resistance was not created to resist the powerful, it was created to resist you. The grassroots anti-establishment populism of the Bernie Sanders movement was cynically imitated by the Democratic establishment to ensure that the establishment is never inconvenienced in any way, and that progressives never take power in America.

On a recent interview with MSNBC Sanders himself — historically far less willing to criticize the Democratic establishment than his supporters — is heard complaining that the progressive base whose votes put Biden over the top in November are so far receiving no representation whatsoever within the incoming Biden cabinet.

“If it wasn’t for the hard work of a lot of progressive grassroots organizations who got young people involved in the political process, working-class people involved in a way that we have not seen, Joe Biden would not have won that election and I think that’s pretty clear,” Sanders says.

“And my point has been from day one that those voices, that movement, deserves representation in the cabinet. And if your question is have I seen that yet, no I have not.”

Of course you haven’t, Bernie.

You were never going to. Biden might create some sort of fake position to let progressives feel like they’re participating with a name like “Progressive Outreach Team For Yelling Words Into A Hole In The Ground” or something, but in terms of actually directing the policy and behavior of the Biden administration nobody who wants the interests of the people upheld over the interests of the powerful will ever have a hand anywhere near the steering wheel.

Actual thing.

The #Resistance spun itself as a revolutionary movement against the insidious forces of darkness threatening the United States of America. What it delivered was support for Trump’s world-threatening cold war escalations against Russia, the mass delusion that America’s problems can be fought from within the establishment, progressives impotently chasing their tails for four years, and a presidency that is going to be just as much of a murderous oligarchic rim job as was delivered by Trump administration.

The engineers of the “Resistance” did not want to eliminate Trumpian depravity, they just wanted to be the ones driving it. And now they are. If you fed into this nonsense in any way over the last four years, this is your reward.

Which begs the question: if an entire political faction needed to sacrifice all its principles, all its values and all its morality to get rid of Trump… what exactly was the point of getting rid of Trump?

*  *  *

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