“Capitalism Always Finds A Way” – How Texas Strip Clubs Are Surviving The Pandemic Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 23:45
Scott Gottlieb said over the weekend that encouraging signs that the outbreak may have “peaked” are beginning to emerge in some parts of the Sun Belt – though the US is still far from done with this yet, and Americans should take caution. A few hours later, Texas health officials reported the state’s lowest daily tally of new coronavirus cases in two weeks (as deaths in the state topped 5,000).
All the while, as volatile oil prices have whiplashed the state’s economy, heaping more pain on the state’s labor market, a group of strip club owners won a victory in Texas’s conservative courts allowing them to reopen as “restaurants with entertainment”, hosting what amounts to outdoor adult entertainment, mostly held in large tents set up outside.
Houston-based Vivid Gentleman’s Club became the first “drive-thru strip club” in the state when it reopened just last week. A reporter from the Houston Chronicle described “black metal barricades separate the dancers from the cars, and dollar bills litter the asphalt between the white siding of the tent walls. The purplish-blue lighting casts a familiar (to club-goers) ambience over the scene, but obvious reminders of the pandemic remain; some of the performers are in face masks.”
While restaurants are now allowed to operate at 50% capacity and bars are still currently shut down across Texas, strip clubs, which fall in a grey area, were forced to adapt.
Cars pull up under a white tent, order food, and while they wait, they can watch the girls – both masked and unmasked – dance. However, the experience comes with a limit that most customers probably find unappealing: There’s a two-song limit per customer.
Stories about these ‘drive thru’ clubs are starting to circulate on social media, inspiring a flood of commentary, with tweets ranging from humorous, to incredulous, to sarcastic.
Texas shut down strip clubs so the strip clubs started selling “food with live entertainment” in tents to get the restaurant classification and stay open, god bless america
As part of Washington’s increased military presence in Indo-Pacific, the month of July has seen a record number of aerial surveillance flights by US military aircraft in the South China Sea and near China’s coast. A Beijing-based think tank counted over 50 sorties by US military aircraft in the region in the first three weeks of July.
“At the moment the US military is sending three to five reconnaissance aircraft each day to the South China Sea,” the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI) said. While July saw record numbers, the increased flights started earlier this year with “much higher frequency, closer distance and more variety of missions,” SCSPI said.
US Air Force file image: B-52 Bombers and fighter escort over South China Sea.
The closest flight to China’s coast happened in May, when a US Navy plane almost flew within the 12 nautical mile zone of China’s Hainan Island. SCSPI statistics show that flights by US planes within 50 to 60 nautical miles of the Chinese Mainland were “frequent.”
With US-China relations rapidly deteriorating in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the South China Sea has seen massive US military exercises. Twice this month, two aircraft carrier strike groups led drills in the contested waters.
The Trump administration also formally rejected most of Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea, ratcheting up tensions even more.
Via Business Insider: The overlapping maritime claims in the South China Sea.
In 2001, a US reconnaissance plane collided with a Chinese military aircraft 59 nautical miles off the coast of Hainan Island. The collision killed the Chinese pilot and forced the US plane to land on Hainan.
The ramping up of US flights in the region increases the risk of accidents like the 2001 incident, and souring US-China relations makes solving future incidents diplomatically less likely.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2X1N0hw Tyler Durden
More Explosive Leaks From OPCW Show Trump Bombed Syria On False Grounds Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 23:05
As the ongoing increased sanctions regimen on Syria demonstrates, Washington’s pursuit of regime change against Assad is not over, despite Damascus clearly having won the war, and with the US having wisely ditched talk of some kind of overt major Iraq-style military intervention (as was the case under Obama in August 2013).
While mainstream media has largely “moved on” from coverage of Syria (so much for feigned humanitarian “concern” for millions of Syrians suffering under severe American-led sanctions!), some analysts like independent journalist Aaron Maté have been detailing damning leaks from the chemical weapons watchdog Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
“A series of leaked documents from the OPCW raise the possibility that the Trump administration bombed Syria on false grounds and pressured officials at the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog to cover it up,” Maté’s latest report in The Nation begins.
Guided-missile destroyer USS Porter during the first strikes on Syria in 2017 from the Mediterranean Sea, Us
“Two OPCW officials, highly regarded scientists with more than 25 years of combined experience at the organization, challenged the whitewash from inside. Yet unlike many whistle-blowers of the Trump era, they have found no champion, or even an audience, within establishment circles in the United States,” the report continues.
Recall that President Trump bombed Syria on two occasions. On the last occasion, in April 2018, Damascus was pummeled with a series of major tomahawk missile strikes ostensibly in response to claims by the primarily Saudi-backed jihadist group Jaysh al-Islam that the Syrian Army had carried out a chemical weapons attack on civilians. It was the all too familiar pattern which went back to 2013: “rebels” on the brink of being wiped out make a last ditch unverified claim in order to draw Western military support, then the mainstream media runs with it because it already fits the narrative of the “monster” Assad, and then right away it’s American and allied “bombs away” with no questions asked.
But Maté now documents an avalanche of leaks and internal dissent within the global chemical weapons watchdog group OPCW to say the US once again attacked a Middle East country based on lies (and just like in neighboring Iraq, don’t forget that some 1,000 or more American troops occupy the oil-rich northeast section of Syria).
My bad: Western state-funded Bellingcat “gathered evidence… long before the OPCW.”
Ignore then those “truthers/and or propagandists” who for some silly reason listen to actual OPCW scientists w/ actual credentials & who actually conducted the OPCW’s investigation in Syria. https://t.co/zjtDShQ2eL
Maté’s report finds that “Since May 2019, internal OPCW documents, including a trove published by WikiLeaks, reveal that the Douma investigators’ initial report reached different conclusions than their organization’s published version. They were overruled by senior officials who kept evidence from the public.”
The Nation report outlines leaks’ key revelations as follows:
Senior OPCW officials reedited the Douma investigators’ initial report to produce a version that sharply deviated from the original. Key facts were removed or misrepresented and conclusions were rewritten to support the allegation that a chlorine gas attack had occurred in Douma. Yet the team’s initial report did not conclude that a chemical attack occurred, and left open the possibility that victims were killed in a “non-chemical related” incident.
Four experts from a OPCW and NATO-member state conducted a toxicology review at the OPCW team’s request. They concluded that observed symptoms of the civilians in Douma, particularly the rapid onset of excessive frothing, as well as the concentration of victims filmed in the apartment building so close to fresh air, “were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine, and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified.”
Chemical tests of the samples collected in Douma showed that chlorine compounds were, in most cases, detected at what amounted to trace quantities in the parts-per-billion range. Yet this finding was not disclosed publicly. Furthermore, it later emerged that the chemicals themselves did not stand out as unique: According to the author of the initial report, the OPCW’s top expert in chemical weapons chemistry, they could have resulted from contact with household products such as bleach or come from chlorinated water or wood preservatives.
The author of the initial report protested the revisions in an e-mail expressing his “gravest concern.” The altered version “misrepresents the facts,” he wrote, thereby “undermining its credibility.”
Following the e-mail of protest over the manipulation of the team’s findings, the OPCW published a watered-down interim report in July 2018. Around that time, OPCW executives decreed that the probe would be handled by a so-called “core team,” which excluded all of the Douma investigators who had traveled to Syria, except for one paramedic. It was this core team—not the inspectors who had been deployed to Douma and signed off on the original document—that produced the final report of March 2019.
After the e-mail of protest, and just days before the interim report was published on July 6, a US government delegation met with members of the investigation team to try to convince them that the Syrian government had committed a chemical attack with chlorine. According to veteran reporter Jonathan Steele, who interviewed one of the whistle-blowers, the Douma team saw the meeting as “unacceptable pressure and a violation of the OPCW’s declared principles of independence and impartiality.” Interference by state parties is explicitly prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The inference drawn from the OPCW’s final report—widely disseminated, including by the Trump administration—was that gas cylinders found in Douma likely came from Syrian military aircraft. An unpublished engineering study reached the opposite conclusion. The study evaluated competing hypotheses: Either the cylinders were dropped from the sky or they were manually placed. There is “a higher probability,” it concluded, “that both cylinders were manually placed…rather than being delivered from aircraft.” At “Location 4,” where a cylinder was found on a bed, the study determined that the cylinder was too large to have penetrated the hole in the roof above; at the other site, “Location 2,” the observed damage to the cylinder and to the roof it allegedly penetrated were incompatible with an aircraft bombing. Ballistics experts also said it was more likely that the crater had been made by an explosion, probably from an artillery round, a rocket, or a mortar. With both cylinders, the study concluded, “the alternative hypothesis”—that the cylinders were manually placed and that the craters were caused by other means—”produced the only plausible explanation for observations at the scene.”
Of course, the media is seeking for these revelations to be memory-holed right way.
New WikiLeaks Bombshell: 20 Inspectors Dissent From Syria Chemical Attack Narrative https://t.co/vrQaBZIT7T
In an interview with Edward Griffith in 1984, former KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov outlined the playbook of the Soviet Union and the staged manner in which a communist apparatus takes over a country.
The ideal recruit for the KGB were rich filmmakers, academicians and cynically egocentric people. These people held the most potential what is required to destabilize a country are narcissistic, greedy and morally devoid people. He cites that KGB recruited Professors and civil right defenders to subvert and destabilize the country. He repeats again when these useful idiots serve their purpose they are to be killed or exiled. His disaffection with the KGB began after he understood what was to happen to the Pro Soviet Indian Journalists, but when he tried to get the message across, they did not believe him.
The ultimate objective of KGB was Ideological subversion which was supposed to be carried out by changing perception of reality, and not be bothered by what is true or false. But rather be driven by self-interest.
He lists down four phases as to how it happens:
Phase 1 – Demoralization
This is a process which can take about 15-30 years to perform . During this stage, the moral fibre and integrity of the country is put into question, thereby creating doubt in the minds of the people. To do so, manipulation of the media and academia is required to influence young people. As the younger generation embraces new values, such as Marxism and Leninism in newer and trendy Garbs , the older generation slowly loses control simply through attrition.
Phase 2 – Destabilization
The intent is to create a massive government permeating society and becoming intrusive in the lives of its citizens. This can take from two to five years to perform, again with the active support of academia pushing youth in this direction. Here, entitlements and benefits are promised to the populace to encourage their support. Basically, they are bribing the people to accept their programs.
Phase 3 – Crisis
This is a major step lasting up to six weeks and involves a revolutionary change of power. This is where an alarming event upsets and divides the country thereby creating panic among the citizens.
Phase 4 – Normalization
The final stage is where the populace finally acquiesces and begins to assimilate communism. This can take up to two decades to complete.
The List of Rules he cites for Revolution are:
Corrupt the young, get them interested in sex, take them away from religion. Make them superficial and snobbish in their understanding of the world.
Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial issues of less importance to create and compound a divide.
Destroy people’s faith in their national leaders by holding the latter up for contempt and ridicule.
Always preach democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.
Encourage government extravagances, destroy its credit system, which will produce years of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.
Incite unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of the government towards such disorders.
Breakdown the old moral virtues of honesty, sobriety, self-restraint, faith.
The Main point he makes it all starts by the act of trying to legislate equality rather than understanding the fundamental that not all are born equal. Once this process starts there has to be a third party who has to legislate this equality and that usually is the government. Once you create an atmosphere of information where people who are deemed unequal have to be made equal by law is where you lay the foundation of discontent. These negative feedback loops are taken advantage of by politicians and this ultimately leads to critical mass of discontent. Once a society is this fragile it takes one catalyst to spark the flame which starts engulfing the system.
This video was shot in 1984 but you can correlate to whats happening in western society today. The prophetic words about the moral decay of the society are so evident in US where riots have broken out on street, the educated majority has gone silent and hooligans getting free handouts have taken over. The free money is the opium of the people and Leninist Marxist ideology will be having the last laugh.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32Zv3nR Tyler Durden
ESPN Has Nearly $1 Billion In Ad Revenue Hanging In The Balance Of College Football Season Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 22:25
Disney’s ESPN has almost $1 billion in ads hinging on whether or not college football season is going to happen this year. The only question now is whether or not the season is going to take place.
ESPN owns two conference networks and has deals to televise every major bowl game. The network also owns many postseason games and commercial rights like sponsorships and naming rights, according to Sportico. ESPN’s networks televised 282 games and sold $792.5 million in ads – more than double the $314.8 million that the network’s NFL package generated. And that doesn’t even count the network’s digital service, ESPN+.
In other words, college football is the network’s major business. And the disruption of the season – which looks more and more to be a foregone conclusion – could create a very real top line problem for the network. The Big Ten and Pac 12 have already canceled some early season games and the NCAA’s board of governors will continue meeting to determine the fate of the rest of the season.
Ads that ran during bowl games last year averaged about $30,000 for a 30 second spot. For the semifinal and national title game, those numbers rose to $560,000 and $1 million. The national title game last year drew in 27.3 million viewers.
Dan Cohen, who leads Octagon’s media rights consulting division, said: “ESPN’s business in college sports, and primarily college football, is an actual ecosystem. And a lot of their business is organic, as opposed to inorganic. Buying rights to Major League Baseball, then selling ads and securing affiliate deals off that content is inorganic, it’s a transactional piece of business. When you own bowl games, and when you own networks, that becomes a business unit in and of itself.”
The network does have some security, however, due to its long-term sponsorship deals with names like Allstate and Dr. Pepper. Smaller advertisers, however, could come calling for refunds. The network’s affiliate fees will also help offset some of the turmoil. Sportico writes:
“Each month, the network receives $9.06 for every household that subscribes to its linear TV feed, a premium rate—the industry average is around 40¢ per sub per month—that this year will pump some $8.8 billion into ESPN’s coffers. That’s just for keeping its signal turned on, and the loss of marquee programming won’t put ESPN in default with the operators.”
One media consultant commented: “The cable guys may be justified in not wanting to pay those fees [if there’s no football]. But they don’t have much recourse one way or the other. The force majeure language in most affiliate contracts says the programmer has up to a year to deliver the goods.”
The report says it is “unclear” how far along the network is in selling ads for the upcoming season.
Cohen concluded by noting that ESPN does have some leverage from having all of its eggs in one basket:
“From an economic perspective, you take a bigger hit because you have a bigger piece of the pie, but it also might be easier to manage because you have more control and more flexibility. Let’s say it’s a bowl game that ESPN owns. If they need to create new sponsorship assets that are digital or virtual in nature, they don’t need to work with another entity to figure that out. If they want to re-price or discount ad rates or entitlements, they can make that decision themselves; they don’t need to work with another broadcaster or property owner.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/39x0h73 Tyler Durden
One Professor’s Reaction To Loyola Students Petitioning To Fire Him Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 22:05
Submitted by Walter E. Block, Ph.D., Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University in New Orleans
My Reaction to Loyola Students Petitioning to Fire Me
I was horrified to learn that a large group of Loyola students wished me to be fired from my tenured position as Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics. They set up a petition to this effect claiming I was a racist, a sexist and an anti-disablist.
“Morality” is too loose a term to condemn slavery. It is akin to giving a surgeon a bludgeon instead of a scalpel. It is immoral to gossip, to disrespect your parents, to tell white lies, to be lazy, to drink too much, etc. This does not even begin to get to the core of why slavery is an egregious evil. It is akin to damning with faint praise, saying that Martin Luther King, Adolf Hitler, John F. Kennedy, were “pretty good” public speakers, only in the opposite direction. Slavery is an abomination because it violates rights; this “curious institution” is incompatible with the non-aggression principle of libertarianism; yet it also violates morality, but that is a relative minor transgression. Imagine wanting me to be fired because I oppose slavery for this “wrong” reason.
A racist is someone who hates and reviles the targeted race (black people in this case), wishes them ill, does everything he can to undermine them, impoverish them, initiate violence against them. I have a long paper trail, and numerous public speeches, which attests to the very opposite. For example, I favor reparations for slavery!
Other attempts of mine to improve the lot of African-Americans is to legalize all victimless crimes, particularly for addictive drugs, since a lot of black on black murder emanates from this source (this would also free a disproportionate number of young black males now improperly imprisoned); to abolish our pernicious welfare system, which has broken up the black family (something slavery was unable to do), and to eliminate the minimum wage law, which is responsible for a disproportionate unemployment rate particularly for, again, young black males.
What about my support for paying men more than women? Sexism was another charge made against me by these students. This too, sounds exquisitely offensive to modern ears. However, it is black letter economic law that wages tend to equal marginal revenue product, or, productivity for short. Winfrey, Gates and Milken earn so much money because they raise the profit levels of their employers by gargantuan amounts. Ordinary doctors, lawyers, college professors register middle class salaries since our productivity is more moderate. The pay scales of people who push brooms, are even lower, based, again, on their ability to enhance the bottom line.
A century ago, men on average were paid more than women because most jobs required upper body strength. Physical labor was required to saw down trees, dig holes for building’s foundations, etc., and, on average, men are stronger than women. But nowadays, thanks to mechanization, there are very few jobs to which this applies. Women can operate buzz saws, steam-shovels and bulldozers just as well as men. Why, then, the persistence of a wage gap of some 25%? It is due not to discrimination, but to marital asymmetry. Wives do the lion’s share of household tasks: cooking, cleaning, shopping, child-care, etc. Whenever you do more of any one thing, you tend to do other things less well. Females specialize in jobs in the home, and thus do more poorly than would otherwise be the case in the labor market.
Evidence? First, while there is a rough 25% salary gap between all men and all women, the divergence between the ever marrieds (married, widowed, divorced, separated) is much higher, some 60%. The discrepancy between males and females who have never been touched by the institution of marriage? Zero! Second, if men and women really had equal productivities at work, any pay-gap would engender gigantic profit opportunities for employers to fire males and hire females. But higher profits are not garnered in industries that employ more members of the distaff side.
Happily, I am unlikely to be fired as a result of these efforts of Loyola students. For one thing, I have tenure. For another, their petition has garnered far fewer signatures than one inaugurated in support of me, calling for a raise in my salary. Also, the President and Provost of Loyola University, while not agreeing with my viewpoints on these matters, have come out in favor of ideological diversity and academic freedom.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2D9v1yM Tyler Durden
Gold Futures Hit $2000 After US Mint Reduces Bullion Coin Supplies Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 21:46
Gold and Silver futures prices have extended their gains after hours, with the barbarous relic hitting $2000…
…and silver topping $26.
This move came after Bloomberg reported that, according to documents reporters had seen, the U.S. Mint has reduced the volume of gold and silver coins it’s distributing to authorized purchasers as the coronavirus pandemic slows production.
As we previously noted, sales of silver and gold coins had been surging until the pandemic hit and shutdown production.
The Mint’s West Point complex in New York is taking measures to prevent the virus from spreading among its employees, and that will probably slow coin production there for the next 12 to 18 months.
The facility is no longer able to produce gold and silver coins at the same time, forcing it to choose one metal over the other, according to the document, which was presented to companies authorized to buy coins from the Mint last week.
Bloomberg reports that a spokesman for the Mint didn’t immediately have comment.
“The pandemic created a whole new set of challenges for us to manage,” the Mint said in the document.
“We believe that this environment is going to continue to lead to some degree of reduced capacity as West Point struggles to balance employee safety against market demand.”
Putin Hails Russian Navy On Cusp Of Achieving Hypersonic Nuclear Strike Weapons Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 21:25
It’s been a while since Russian President Vladimir Putin touted the country’s experimental hypersonic weapons, especially following last year’s (Aug. 2019) major radiation emitting explosion at a military testing ground in Russia’s far northern Arkhangelsk region, believed to have been a failed hypersonic missile test, which killed multiple scientists and technicians.
But according to new statements of his addressing an annual naval parade in St. Petersburg, the Russian military is far past merely the realm of the “experimental,” but is on the cusp of deploying hypersonic nuclear strike weapons.
Putin with Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov, left), Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, via TASS.
“The widespread deployment of advanced digital technologies that have no equals in the world, including hypersonic strike systems and underwater drones, will give the fleet unique advantages and increased combat capabilities,” Putin said on Sunday, according to Reuters. He claimed that the whole world is “chasing after Russia” in this crucial area of cutting edge defense technology.
The Pentagon, which has its own program which is at an unknown stage of development, has had current and former generals dub missiles flying at hypersonic speeds essentially “indefensible” — though the US program is aimed in part at achieving precisely defensive capability against them.
The weapons, some of which have yet to be deployed, include the Poseidon underwater nuclear drone, designed to be carried by submarines, and the Tsirkon (Zircon) hypersonic cruise missile, which can be deployed on surface ships.
The combination of speed, manoeuvrability and altitude of hypersonic missiles, capable of travelling at more than five times the speed of sound, makes them difficult to track and intercept.
Elsewhere the Russian defense ministry was widely cited as a saying its first nuclear submarine capable of launching the Poseidon nuclear drone had entered the testing phase. “Work is being successfully completed to create modern weapons systems for the Navy,” a Kremlin statement said.
Aboard the Raptor patrol boat before the Navy Day parade in Saint Petersburg, via Reuters.
However, Western analysts have typically considered such statements to be far out front of actual successful testing. But Russian media has detailed that “The tests of Russia’s ship-based Zircon missile – one of several hypersonic weapons introduced by the country’s military – are successfully nearing completion,” citing the Defense Ministry, which has “confirmed the unique tactical and technical characteristics of this missile, as well as its ability to travel at hypersonic speeds.” The Zircon is said to be capable of reaching Mach 9 at an operational range of 1,000km.
Putin also touted that the navy will receive at least 40 new ships this year, without giving further details on types and sizes.
MiG-31 with hypersonic rocket, via Sputnik
The speech comes days after last week the Russian president held a phone call with Trump over New START, which is set to expire next year. Both sides have expressed a strong desire to avoid an arms race, especially involving nuclear arms.
New START, which is the landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty signed by the two superpowers in 1991 and took effect in 1994, specifically is set to expire in February 2021, which would be a mere weeks after the next presidential inauguration.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/309M3WN Tyler Durden
One of the most oft-cited and criticized goals of the Black Lives Matter organization is its stated desire to abolish the family as we know it. Specifically, BLM’s official website states:
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
This idea isn’t unique to BLM, of course. “Disrupting” the “nuclear family” is a commonly stated goal among Maxist organizations. Given that BLM’s founders have specifically claimed to be “trained Marxists,” we should not be surprised that the organization’s leadership has embraced a Marxian view of the family.
But where does this hostility toward the family originate? Partly, it comes from the theories of Marx and Engels themselves, and their views that an earlier, matriarchal version of the family rejected private property as an organizing principle of society. It was only later that this older tribal model of the family gave way to the modern “patriarchal” family, which promotes and sustains private property.
Clearly, in the Marxian view, this “new” type of family must be opposed, since the destruction of this family model will make it easier to abolish private property as well.
Early Family Units in Tribal Life
Frederick Engels’s 1884 book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the Stateprovides a historical perspective of the Marxian view of the development of the modern Western family unit and its relation to property rights. (Engels, of course, was the longtime benefactor of and collaborator with Marx.)
In reconstructing the origins of the family within a Marxian framework, Engels traces back to the “savage” primeval stage of humanity that, according to his research, revealed a condition in which “unrestricted sexual intercourse existed within a tribe, so that every woman belonged to every man, and vice versa.”
Under such conditions, Engels explained, “it is uncertain who is the father of the child, but certain, who is its mother.” Only female lineage could be acknowledged. “[B]eing the only well known parents of younger generations,” Engels explained, women as mothers “received a high tribute of respect and deference, amounting to a complete women’s rule [gynaicocracy].”
Furthermore, Engels wrote, tribes were subdivided into smaller groups called “gentes,” a primitive form of an extended family of sorts.
These gens were consanguineous (i.e., included people descended from the same ancestor) on the mother’s side, within which intermarrying was strictly forbidden. “The men of certain ‘gens,’ therefore, could choose their wives within the tribe, and did so as a rule, but had to choose them outside of their ‘gens,’” Engels explained. And “marriage” at this stage was a “communal” affair, meaning that multiple partnerships between men and women was closer to the rule than the exception.
Because mothers were the only parents who could be determined with certainty, and the smaller gentes were arranged around the mother’s relatives, early family units were very maternal in nature and maternal law regarding rights and duties for childrearing and inheritance were the custom.
Transition to the “Pairing Family”
This was the state of affairs for thousands of years, according to Engels. Over time, however, there emerged what Engels referred to as the “pairing family,” in which “A man had his principal wife…among many women, and he was to her the principal husband among others.” This was in no small part due to the “gentes” within tribes developing more and more classes of relatives not allowed to marry one another. Due to these increasing restrictions, group marriage became increasingly impossible and ever more replaced by the pairing family structure.
Under this structure, however, the role of mothers was still dominant. Quoting Arthur Wright, a missionary among the Seneca Iroquois tribe, Engels notes, “The female part generally ruled the house….The women were the dominating power in the clans [gentes] and everywhere else.”
The fact that women all belonged to the same gens, while husbands came from separate gentes “was the cause and foundation of the general and widespread supremacy of women in primeval times,” Engels wrote.
“In the ancient communistic household comprising many married couples and their children, the administration of the household entrusted to women was just as much a public function, a socially necessary industry, as the procuring of food by men,” he added.
As society evolved, as Engels described it, from “savagery” to “barbarism,” an important evolution was man’s development of weapons and knowledge that enabled them to better domesticate and breed animals.
Cattle and livestock became a source of wealth, a store of milk and meat. “But who was the owner of this new wealth?” asked Engels. “Doubtless it was originally the gens,” he answered, referring to a collective, or group ownership over the sources of wealth. “However, private ownership of flocks must have had an early beginning.”
“Procuring the means of existence had always been the man’s business. The tools of production were manufactured and owned by him. The herds were the new tools of production, and their taming and tending was his work. Hence he owned the cattle and the commodities and slaves obtained in exchange for them,” Engels explained. This transition marked an early passage from “collective” property to “private” ownership over property—particularly property in productive resources.
Such a transformation, Engels noted, “brought about a revolution in the family.”
Part of that revolution involved a shift in the power dynamics of the household.
“All the surplus now resulting from production fell to the share of the man. The woman shared in its fruition, but she could not claim its ownership,” wrote Engels.
The domestic status of the woman in the house, which had previously involved control and distribution of the means of sustenance, had been reversed.
“Man’s advent to practical supremacy in the household marked the removal to his universal supremacy,” and further ushered in “the gradual transition from the pairing family to the monogamic family” (what we would consider the nuclear family).
With the superior status acquired, Engels wrote, men were able to overthrow the maternal right to inheritance, a move he described as “the historic defeat of the female sex.”
The family unit’s transition to a male-centered patriarchy was complete, according to Engels. Much of the blame for this can be attributed to the emergence of private property and men’s claim over it.
How to Overcome the Patriarchy?
In the Marxian view, therefore, the modern nuclear family runs counter to the ancient “communistic” household Engels had earlier described. It is patriarchal and centered on private property.
“In the great majority of cases the man has to earn a living and to support his family, at least among the possessing classes. He thereby obtains a superior position that has no need of any legal special privilege. In the family, he is the bourgeois, the woman represents the proletariat.” The family unit, rather than the collective tribe, had become the “industrial unit of society.”
The overthrow of this patriarchic dominance can only come, according to Engels, by abolishing private property in the means of production—which he and those steeped in Marxist ideology blame for the patriarchy.
“The impending [communist] revolution will reduce this whole care of inheritance to a minimum by changing at least the overwhelming part of permanent and inheritable wealth – the means of production – into social property,” he concluded.
What would this new social arrangement look like, according to Engels?
The care and education of children becomes a public matter. Society cares equally well for all children, legal or illegal. This removes the care about the “consequences” which now forms the essential social factor – moral and economic – hindering a girl to surrender unconditionally to the beloved man.
In this we see early echoes of the modern left’s current refrain attacking “patriarchy” and the nuclear family as essentially capitalist and private property–based institutions.
In this, BLM is no different from other Marxist groups. The organization’s goals extend far beyond police abuse and police brutality. The ultimate goal is the abolition of a society based upon private property in the means of production.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30Toxw7 Tyler Durden
Mind-Bending Medicine: An Overview Of Psychedelic Substances Tyler Durden
Mon, 07/27/2020 – 20:45
Fueled by a slew of new research, psychedelics may hold the key to treating a multitude of debilitating disorders such as addiction, PTSD, and depression.
But as an industry that has laid dormant for decades, Visual Capitalist’s Katie Jones explains below that it will need to shed its negative connotations that have limited its potential and undermined new discoveries for so long.
The infographic below showcases data from The Report on Psychedelics which explains seven of the most common psychedelic substances and examines the many mind-bending ways they could radically transform mental health as we know it.
Resurrecting a Stigmatized Industry
Although evidence of humans using psychedelics as medicine dates back thousands of years, it was not until the 1940s that psychiatrists became advocates of their therapeutic potential.
Unfortunately, recreational psychedelics became a symbol of the 1960’s counterculture movement, which contaminated the industry’s reputation. The U.S. responded by introducing the Controlled Substances Analogue Enforcement Act, deeming these drugs illegal and stymying research studies in the process.
Following some new discoveries in the early ‘90s however, psychedelics moved from the hands of festival-goers back to the labs of scientists. Since then, certain substances such as psilocybin have been granted breakthrough therapy status for treating depression by the U.S. FDA.
With these recent developments, new companies and investment opportunities are beginning to emerge in the psychedelics space. But these complex drugs are not always easy to understand—so let’s dive in.
What are Psychedelics?
Psychedelics are psychoactive substances that can alter perception, mood, and cognitive processes. There are two broad classifications of psychedelics that relate to chemical structure.
Entheogenic Plants: Plants or fungi that produce chemical substances that can cause hallucinations
Synthetic Drugs: Drugs created in laboratory setting to mimic the effects of entheogenic plants
Here are seven of the most common psychedelic substances explained:
With sound scientific evidence and standards coming into place, it’s no surprise that investors—from bestselling author Tim Ferris to several established cannabis companies—are supporting the born-again industry.
Given the industry’s foothold in recreational use, a therapeutic comeback may be a tough pill for many to swallow. However, it is possible that we are on the precipice of not only a psychedelic revolution but more importantly, a mental health one.
“Psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy.”
– Stanislav Grot
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/302MEJz Tyler Durden
