Tag: news

Authored by Christopher Snowdon via Spectator USA,

You can argue about the merits of pulling down statues, but it’s hard to make the case that mass protests serve no useful purpose. At the very least, they provoke debate and draw attention to uncomfortable topics that it might otherwise be easier to ignore. The recent protests have forced everyone to have difficult discussions about race, class, poverty and attainment. Any serious examination of the statistics shows that we’re pretty far from equal, but what the figures also show is that it’s wrong-headed and damaging to lump very different groups together.

In these discussions politicians often lazily assume that all BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) people are the same, and that all white groups are equally privileged. But a proper look at the data shows not just that there are striking difference within BAME groups, but that the very worst-performing group of all are white working-class boys — the forgotten demographic.

It might seem divisive to compare different groups, but attainment in education and in life is relative and if we’re to help the worst off, we have to know who they are. We should help everyone who needs it — but it is vital to be able to compare groups to know who’s falling behind, relative to their peers. In the UK, Bangladeshi-Brits earn 20 percent less than whites on average, for instance, but those with Indian heritage are likely to earn 12 percent more. Black Britons on average earn 9 percent less, but Chinese earn 30 percent more. What these differences tell us is that employers aren’t systematically discriminating between people on the basis of their skin color, and that we have to look elsewhere to see the roots of inequality.

Ucas, the British university admissions service, can provide unique insight into these issues: it is the only outfit in the world to gather detailed information on all university applicants, including their age, gender, neighborhood and school type. This is collected along with data on who applied for which courses and who was accepted, and it is renewed in huge detail every year.

Much of the data shows predictable results: there is a gap between rich and poor, as you might expect in a UK state system where the best schools tend to be located in the most expensive areas. But there are surprising discoveries too: nearly half the children eligible for free school meals in inner London go on to higher education, but in the country outside London as a whole it is just 26 percent.

Black African British children outperform white children, whereas black Caribbean children tend to do worse. Poor Chinese girls (that is to say, those who qualify for free school meals) do better than rich white children. But, interestingly, the ethnic group least likely to get into university are whites. With the sole exception of Gypsy/Roma, every ethnic group attends university at a higher rate than the white British and, of the white British who do attend, most are middle class and 57 percent are female.  The least likely group to go on to higher education are poor white boys. Just 13 percent of them go on to higher education, less than any black or Asian group.

This is a trend that can also be seen in the GCSE data; only 17 percent of white British pupils eligible for free school meals achieve a strong pass in English and maths. Students categorized as Bangladeshi, Black African and Indian are more than twice as likely to do so. In 2007, the state sector saw 23 percent of black students go on to higher education; this was true for 22 percent of whites. So about the same. But at the last count, in 2018, the gap had widened to 11 points (41 percent for black students, 30 percent for whites). The children of the white working class are falling away from their peers, in danger of becoming lost.

Going to university is not the golden ticket it once was, but it requires stupefying naivety to believe that seven out of eight poor white boys take a sober look at the economics of higher education and choose to set up their own businesses instead. The trail of hard evidence runs cold once they leave school, but the prospects for those who can barely read and write are dreadful and we can get some idea of the consequences by looking at the ‘left behind’ areas where unemployment, crime and ‘deaths of despair’ are significantly higher than the national average.

Angus Deaton, a Nobel Laureate based at Princeton University, came up with the phrase ‘deaths of despair’ when he looked at the demographics of those suffering from alcoholism, depression and drug abuse. Suicides among whites, he found, was soaring and those who took their own lives tended to be poor and low-educated. His recently-published book on the subject (Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, co-written with Anne Case) tells the devastating story of what he calls ‘the decline of white working-class lives over the last half-century’.

Yet while white working-class males are the largest disadvantaged minority, their cause is the least fashionable. In the intersectional pyramid of victimhood, white males are at the bottom, tarnished by ideas of ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘white privilege’ despite the fact that in Britain class has always been the most significant indicator of true privilege. It’s worrying, then, that any who attempt ‘positive action’ on behalf of poor white boys face a hostile reaction. Last year, Dulwich and Winchester colleges turned down a bequest of more than £1 million ($1.25 million) because the donor, Sir Bryan Thwaites, wanted the money ring-fenced for scholarships for white working-class boys. Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust, a charity whose stated mission is to improve social mobility, described Thwaites’s offer as ‘obnoxious’.

When Ben Bradley, the Conservative MP for Mansfield, tried to ask an ‘Equalities’ question about working-class white boys in parliament earlier this year, he was turned down by the Table Office because they do not have any ‘protected characteristics’. The concept of ‘protected characteristics’ was wheeled into UK law by Harriet Harman’s Equality Act, 10 years ago, and the Tories, then in opposition, took the rare step of voting for it. The nine protected characteristics include ‘race’, ‘sex’ and ‘sexual orientation’, but the Table Office is not alone in interpreting these as ‘non-white’, ‘female’ and ‘gay’.

Under the Equality Act, ‘positive discrimination’ remains technically unlawful, but the barely indistinguishable concept of ‘positive action’ is explicitly legal. Firms cannot have quotas, but they can set targets. Employers cannot refuse to look at job applications from people who lack protected characteristics, but by stating that ‘applications are particularly welcome’ from BAME, female or LBGTQ+ candidates they send a message that some need not apply.

In 2016 the BBC pledged that half its workforce and leadership would be female by 2020 despite less than 40 percent of Britain’s full-time workers being women. It also set an 8 percent target for LGBT employees, although only around 2 percent of the population identify as LGBT. This target has been comfortably exceeded, as has been the target of having 15 percent of employees from a BAME background. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests last month, the corporation raised this target to 20 per cent.

The BBC admits that people from ‘low and intermediate income households’ are hugely underrepresented in its workforce. But what does it do about it? Earlier this month Oxford University proudly reported that it was making ‘steady progress’ in its efforts to make its campuses ‘representative of wider society’. Of its most recent intake of British students, only 14 percent came from the poorest 40 percent of households.

This fits a pattern: at a push, we can hear acknowledgement of the ‘poor white male’ problem. But that’s as far as it ever goes. The underperformance of white boys and men is not considered to be a problem worth solving. When figures come out showing the stunning attainment gaps between boys and girls, the interest lasts for about a day. ‘It always got a few headlines,’ says Mary Curnock Cook, the former head of Ucas. ‘Where it never got any traction at all was in policy-making in government. I began to think that the subject of white boys is just too difficult for them, given the politicization of feminism and women’s equality.’

When I asked a teacher why white working-class boys have fallen so far behind, he gave me a short answer: girls are better behaved and immigrant parents are stricter. This is a generalization but nonetheless interesting: if it is the case that parenting is the problem, then it’s not clear how much the UK government can do. Perhaps the reluctance to discuss the subject stems from fear that such a discussion would lead to difficult territory about family structure, quality of parenting and — in short — culture. Perhaps politicians think it better to let the problem fester, and the children suffer, than to risk discussing it.

Last month, the British government announced that its commission on racial inequality would include an examination into the underperformance of working-class white boys at schools. Will it look deep into the causes? It might look at recent studies that suggest poor reading levels in schools is a huge part of the problem. And it might ask whether ‘positive action’ in the name of diversity has left white working-class boys behind.

The US government already controls almost every aspect of your daily life. Soon, it will “instruct” you to drink less as well.

With most Americans suffering from one or more chronic diet-related health conditions, including obesity, heart disease, and certain cancers, an advisory panel told government agencies that it will endorse limiting alcoholic drink to one a day when alcohol is consumed. That’s the new advice experts are recommending for the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are scheduled to be updated later this year for the first time in five years. The guidelines now say men should limit themselves to two drinks a day, and that women should limit themselves to one. That advice has been in place since 1990.

The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee proposed federal departments should also recommend reducing consumption of added sugars from 10% of caloric intake to less than 6%, and that children younger than 2 shouldn’t drink sugar-sweetened beverages.

In the report released Wednesday, a committee of experts noted there isn’t adequate evidence to support different alcohol recommendations for men and women, and that research supports tightening the limit for men. U.S. health agencies that issue dietary guidelines aren’t required to adopt the committee’s recommendations.

“As a nation, our collective health would be better if people generally drank less,” said Dr. Timothy Naimi, an alcohol researcher at Boston University and one of the experts on the committee convened by federal officials.

The proposed advice shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that not having a drink on Thursday means you can have two on Friday, Naimi said. One drink is the equivalent of about one 12-ounce can of beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine or a shot of liquor.

The advice is based on links that researchers observed between drinking habits and all causes of death, including heart disease, cancer and car accidents, rather than a specific physical harm that alcohol might have. While such observational studies, common in food and nutrition science, do not establish a cause-and-effect relationship, they are often the best evidence available, so experts use them to give guidance.

With alcohol, Naimi said two drinks a day was associated with an increased risk of death compared with one drink a day. While the increase was modest, he said that it was notable enough for the committee to recommend updating the advice.

Whether the proposed new advice would influence behavior isn’t clear. Many Americans already exceed the current advice on alcohol limits, Naimi noted. Still, he said most people could generally benefit from any reduction in alcohol, even if they’re not within the advised limits.

The report noted that the guidelines may be aspirational, but are important for “stimulating thought around behavior change.”

The guidelines are based on the overall health of a population, and an individual’s risk from drinking could vary depending on a variety of factors and health habits, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a professor of nutrition at Tufts University.

Mozaffarian also noted that many people misinterpret the current advice to mean they should have one or two drinks a day. The limits are meant for people who already drink. Hilarious, he felt the need to explain that the guidelines do not recommend that people who do not drink alcohol to start doing so.

Even if most Americans aren’t familiar with the details of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, they’re subject of intense lobbying because of their power to shape the advice dispensed by doctors and what’s served in federal food programs, including school lunches, as federal food assistance programs, military rations, and doctors’ dietary recommendations reflect the guidelines.

Federal officials are expected to issue the updated guidelines by the end of the year, after considering public comments and input from other agencies. We expect they will be substantially “watered down” by the time of the final draft.

Authored by Mike Whitney via GlobalResearch.ca,

Let’s assume that the events of the last five months are neither random nor unexpected.

Let’s say they’re part of an ingenious plan to transform American democracy into a lockdown police state controlled by criminal elites and their puppet governors.

And let’s say the media’s role is to fan the flames of mass hysteria by sensationalizing every gory detail, every ominous prediction and every slightest uptick in the death toll in order to exert greater control over the population.

And let’s say the media used their power to craft a message of terror they’d repeat over and over again until finally, there was just one frightening storyline ringing-out from every soapbox and bullhorn, one group of governors from the same political party implementing the same destructive policies, and one small group of infectious disease experts –all incestuously related– issuing edicts in the form of “professional advice.”

Could such a thing happen in America?

What’s most astonishing about the Covid-19 operation is the manner in which the elected government was circumvented by public health experts (connected to a power-mad billionaire activist.) That was a stroke of genius. Most people regard the US as a fairly stable democracy and yet, the first sign of infection triggered the rapid transfer of power from the president to unelected “professionals” whose conflicts of interest are too vast to list.

Equally fascinating is the fact that the lockdowns were not the brainchild of Donald Trump but the mainly Democrat governors who shrugged-off any Constitutional limits to their power and arbitrarily ordered people to stay in their homes, wear masks and avoid close physical contact with other humans.

All of this was done in the name of “science” and condoned under “emergency powers” despite the fact that mass quarantines of healthy people have no historical precedent or scientific basis. No matter, this was never about science or logic anyway, and it certainly wasn’t about saving lives. It was always about power, pure, unalloyed political power. The power to push the economy into freefall destroying millions of jobs and businesses. The power to bail out Wall Street while diverting attention to a fairly-mild infection that kills roughly 1 in every 500 people. The power to create a permanent underclass willing to work for table scraps or less. And the power to fundamentally restructure human relations so that normal intimacies like handshakes, hugs or social gatherings are entirely banned. This, of course, was the most ambitious part of the project, the basic changes to human interaction that date back thousands of years, and which are now seen as an obstacle to a new order in which the individual must be isolated, desensitized and kept in a constant state of fear to be more easily controlled and manipulated.

On top of that, all of this is taking place in plain sight where anyone with even minimal critical thinking skills should be able to see what is happening, but very few do. Why is that?

Fear. Fear has gripped the population and is preventing typically intelligent, perceptive people from seeing something that’s right beneath their noses. Check out this clip from an article titled “When Will the Madness End?”:

“What’s happening now is a spread of this serious medical condition to the whole population… The public is adopting a personality disorder … paranoid delusions, and irrational fear…

It can happen with anything but here we see a primal fear of disease turning into mass panic…

… Once fear reaches a certain threshold, normalcy, rationality, morality, and decency fade and are replaced by shocking stupidity and cruelty.…..We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

…

This is made far worse by politics, which has only fed the beast of fear. This is the most politicized disease in history, and doing so has done nothing to help manage it and much to make it all vastly worse.” (“When Will the Madness End?“, AIER)

We’re not saying that Covid doesn’t kill people, and we’re not suggesting that Covid is a bioweapon released on the public for nefarious purposes. (although that’s certainly a possibility.) What we’re saying is that scheming elites and their allies in the media and politics see every crisis as an opportunity to advance their own authoritarian agenda.

In fact, the restructuring of basic democratic institutions can only take place within the confines of a major crisis. That’s why the CIA, the giant corporations, the WHO and the Gates Posse gathered for meetings that anticipated an event just like the Covid outbreak. They needed a crisis of that magnitude to achieve their ultimate objective; total control. That’s what they mean when they say there will be “no return to normal”, they mean they’re replacing representative government with a new totalitarian model in which the levers of state power will be controlled by them. So while the virus outbreak might be coincidental, the management of the crisis certainly is not. This is from an article by Gary Barnett:

“We are in the midst of an attempt by the oligarchs to eliminate the human spirit, and if this attempt is successful, the singular majesty of the human experience will have been abolished, and only a technocratic black hole of emptiness and despair will remain. This is the essence of a failed society brought about by the destruction of human intellect by state education, mass propaganda, and the planned control of individuals through physical and psychological manipulation due to fear.”(“Pandemic Madness: The State’s Plan Rests on the Destruction of the Human Spirit“, Gary Barnett, Lew Rockwell)

Is the author exaggerating?

I don’t think so. Our species has withstood myriad epidemics in the past without ever resorting to the extremist measures we have taken during this latest outbreak. Take the state of Oregon, for example, whose Democratic governor Kate Brown just signed another executive order extending a state of emergency through Sept. 4. The move comes months after the peak in deaths was reached in mid-April. As of Tuesday, Oregon’s death toll is a meager 240 nearly 90% of who are over 65 with underlying health conditions. That means that Brown shut down a $226 billion per year economy, put tens of thousands of people out of work, destroyed countless small and medium-sized businesses and plunged the state deep into debt, to save roughly 24 or 25 people under 65 with no underlying health conditions. That’s not the reaction of an intelligent, responsible political leader acting in the best interests of the people. That is the reaction of someone who is either criminally insane or doing someone else’s bidding. So which is it?

Like many of the other mainly Democrat governors, Brown also issued a “mask” mandate, punishable by a fine. The new executive order was neither approved by the House or by any other democratic body. It’s just Brown testing the limits of her new emergency powers. Interestingly, the mask mandate comes a full three months after the state reached its peak in fatalities which means that it has less to do with controlling the infection than it does with using the virus to usurp tyrannical powers. Does that mean Brown or the other Democrat governors are closet tyrants?

Probably not. But it does suggest that the people who fund Brown’s campaigns and pull her strings want to see how far they can push things before the public fights back. Here’s a comment by Carlo Caduff in the Medical Anthropology Quarterly that helps to put these developments into perspective:

“Across the world, the pandemic unleashed authoritarian longings in democratic societies allowing governments to seize the opportunity, create states of exception and push political agendas. Commentators have presented the pandemic as a chance for the West to learn authoritarianism from the East. This pandemic risks teaching people to love power and call for its meticulous application.” (“What Went Wrong: Corona and the World After the Full Stop“ Academia.edu)

Once again, we are not denying that Covid kills people. All we’re saying is that powerful elites are using crisis management to advance their own narrow political agenda.

It should be no surprise that states governed by Democrats are doing considerably worse than those run by Republicans. Watching the eagerness with which the Dems impose their economy-crushing measures, one can only wonder how the states will ever dig out of the current mess and regain solvency. Of course, maybe that’s the goal, to generate so much red ink that essential social services will have to be slashed, the poor will be left to starve, and the big money guys will buy-up public assets for pennies on the dollar. Indeed, that must be the plan, “shock therapy for the proles while the Democrat governors act as a battering ram to open the state to the plunder and looting of their Wall Street crony friends and others in the parasite class. Here’s how Israel Shamir summed it up in a recent article at the Unz Review:

“There are people who think we have it too good. They think we did nothing to deserve our high civilization. They think we shouldn’t be able to afford food, the roof above our heads and other goodies. This is the view of some very wealthy people. They are annoyed at seeing Tom, Dick and Harry going to Acapulco and eating in a restaurant, instead of being at their beck and call. They want to lower our income and raise the cost of living. They are willing to fund anyone who calls for more austerity.

Now they support lockdowns, claiming that it is the best way to fight disease. Yesterday they were calling on us to shut down industry in order to save the climate. Today these same people are still trying to reduce us to poverty, this time for the sake of Covid” (“Unmasking Freedom, The Unz review)

Shamir is right of course, the justifications are forever changing while the ultimate goal remains the same, wreak havoc the economy, divide the people into warring camps, and clear the way for the new streamlined system of authoritarian government, the glorious NWO. And the speed at which we are moving towards this new order is truly breathtaking. Take a look at this sampling of articles I’ve compiled which illustrates the catastrophic damage that is being done to the economy but swept under the rug by the media. In short, Covid is the diversion that keeps the American people from realizing that the system that keeps them employed, pays the mortgage and puts food on the table is being decimated by voracious oligarchs who want to start fresh. Check out these articles:

• Some 42% Of Jobs Lost In Pandemic Are Gone For Good

• US Consumer Credit Crashes As Americans Repay A Record Amount Of Credit Card Debt

• A Tidal Wave of Bankruptcies is Coming

• “More Than Half Of The US Population Is Not Working”

• “52% Of Small Businesses Expect To Be Out Of Business Within Six Months

• “53% Of Restaurants Closed Amid Coronavirus Have Shuttered Permanently”

• Tsunami” Of Evictions Could Make 28 Million Americans Homeless This Summer Alone

• Hurtling towards Depression–Based on information as of May 2020, we show that global consumption losses amount to 3.8$tr, triggering significant job (147 million full-time equivalent) and income (2.1$tr) losses.

• Eighty percent feel country is spiraling out of control, according to Wall Street Journal/NBC poll

Anyway, you get the picture, the situation is dire. But as severe as the economic carnage may be, the psychic damage is that much worse. Many readers probably already know that suicides, divorces, child abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse and domestic violence have all risen sharply in the last 5 months. The impact of the lockdowns on people suffering from chronic depression or other mental health conditions has also increased dramatically. As Doctor Waqar Rashid opines in an article at The Spectator:

“Many people are… still terrified.,… afraid of venturing back into the outside world…. Masks are everywhere, and are compulsory on public transport. The result is a reminder that this ‘new normal’ is utterly unlike what we are used to. Even to those who don’t suffer from mental health problems it’s a depressing and dispiriting sight. And I fear this ongoing state of stress and anxiety is doing profound damage to people’s psychological wellbeing...

It was widely acknowledged before the pandemic struck that mental health problems were not only increasing in number but also being seen more frequently in younger people. As a neurologist, the people I see are especially at risk from suffering from mental health problems. It’s a sad fact that in my line of work, we can cure very little. But we can try to control and mitigate the illnesses we seek to treat. Much of this relies on the patient remaining hopeful and optimistic about their prospects. But now, surrounded as we are by this ‘invisible enemy’, all too often hope has been substituted for fear, even terror.” (“What’s the true cost of lockdown?”, The Spectator)

Covid-19; Phase 1 of the “Permanent Crisis”

It all boils down to this: Ruling class elites are using a public health crisis to wage a full-scale war on the American people and their system of representative government. The Democrat-CIA-Media Axis has been instrumental in prosecuting the conflict, as they were in the Russiagate fiasco. These are the shock troops who execute the battleplan of economic strangulation, covert skulduggery, and relentless disinformation. By the time the American people figure out what’s going on, the political landscape will have changed completely.

At least two American spy planes were observed flying over contested waters of the South China Sea in an area southeast of Taiwan Wednesday afternoon. 

It appears confirmation that the US military is stepping up its aerial reconnaissance activities amid soaring tensions with China, and with US warships in the region, including two aircraft carriers. The South China Morning Post reported of the spy planes:

The US Navy MQ-4C Triton – a long endurance unmanned aerial vehicle – was seen flying towards the southeast of Taiwan at about noon on Wednesday, according to the SCS Probing Initiative (SCSPI), a Peking University think tank.

It said a US P-8A anti-submarine aircraft and a KC-135R aerial refuelling aircraft were also seen on Thursday flying southwest of Taiwan over the South China Sea.

There were additional reports of another unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flying toward the south of Taiwan on the same day as well, suggesting significantly stepped up US reconnaissance operations in the region.

Regional analysts have interpreted it as part of expanded US military efforts to track Chinese submarine and other underwater activities.

This also at a moment the guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson sailed near the disputed Spratly Islands in “freedom of navigation” exercises this week.

China will be shocked:

15 July 2020 15:30
Reg.: n/a
Country:USA
ICAO:AE64C6
It’s flying over China & heading Beijing, but what is this？

At high altitude 50,000ft a reconnaissance plane or UAV?
The speed is nearly 1,000kt pic.twitter.com/fKnn1UYcGn

— Taiwan Formosa Club 🌐 (@taiwanformosan) July 15, 2020

The Trump administration’s new sanctions related to the Hong Kong security law, as well as visa restrictions targeting certain state-linked entities, has further put the region on edge. 

Authored by Michael Tracey via Unherd.com,

Are journalists deliberately ignoring the effects of these devastating riots?

Having spent the past month traveling around the United States — from major cities to the countryside — the scale of the ‘movement’ which erupted in late May after the death of George Floyd is almost incomprehensible. According to the New York Times, which relays their finding with obvious excitement, the ‘movement’ (its precise contours seldom defined) “may be the largest” in U.S. history.

That is certainly plausible. In which case, it would presumably be important to document how ordinary Americans, especially those most directly affected, perceive the “movement” in question.

Scan almost any of the popular media coverage over the past six weeks and you’ll find that journalists have been steadfast in their depiction of “protesters” as unassailably “peaceful.” While the vast majority of those who attended a state-backed demonstration or some other event spurred by the ‘movement’ are unlikely to have committed any acts of physical destruction, the term “peaceful protest” doesn’t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots — the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.

From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed — commercial, civic, and residential — is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the New York Times would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found.

A standard retort one often hears is that “the riots” must not be conflated with “the protests,” which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the media like to make out. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis explained to me, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned.

In Milwaukee, a man described being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong.

This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media’s strident insistence to depict the ‘movement’ as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony.

Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about ‘erasure’.

So why, exactly, has the scope of these riots been so assiduously downplayed, and the opinions of those who experienced them first-hand been largely ignored? A number of potential explanations ring true. For one, media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a ‘movement’ that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is “Black Lives Matter” would be embarrassing for obvious reasons.

The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people — or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express “small-c” conservative cultural attitudes.

For instance, black Americans whom I’ve spoken to on the street across America in randomly-selected encounters were almost unanimous in their approval of the National Guard deployments to their neighborhood during the riots. If anything, their main criticism was that these deployments came too late to prevent the destruction.

This certainly makes the emotional meltdown of coddled 20 and 30-something journalists, who seriously claimed that they were “endangered” by a U.S. Senator’s NYT column advocating for a military presence to maintain order in cities, look especially disconnected and bizarre. So one could understand why the media would be reluctant to feature the “voices” of minorities who take an alternate view.

There’s also the barely-hidden fear that properly depicting the after-effects of these riots would somehow “help Trump” during an election year. Even if it could be established as true that reporting on a historically significant event would “help” the incumbent president, refraining from such reportage on that ground would obviously be wildly improper from a journalistic perspective.

But even from a raw political standpoint, it’s almost certainly not even true. Trump’s inability to convert this post-riot political environment into some kind of electoral advantage is an irony unto itself, given the theme of his inaugural address — which ominously (but not entirely unjustifiably) invoked the specter of “American carnage”. For all the non-stop hysteria painting Trump as some kind of maniacal fascist, it truly is a lousy fascist who fails to leverage widespread social unrest and instability to consolidate power.

Needless to say, Trump is also currently presiding over a disastrous federal pandemic response, and rapidly shedding support among elderly voters. So if one insists on behaving purely as a partisan actor — which many contemporary journalists certainly are — any fatuous “would it help Trump?” calculation ought to be irrelevant.

Trump or no Trump, the lack of adequate coverage is the true affront. It should be more widely known that large swathes of a major American metropolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, still lies in rubble over a month after the riots. And the main perpetrators of this destruction — namely those who committed the most incendiary arson attacks — were, by many accounts relayed to me directly, white Left-wing activists. Refusing to seek out and accurately present this information reflects the mainstream media’s propensity to operate under predetermined, politicised assumptions that are antithetical to any rightly-understood conception of journalism.

Travelling around Minneapolis, one frequently sees the anarchist “A” symbol scrawled on charred and/or boarded-up buildings, as well as catchphrases like “Viva La Revolucion” — expressions typical of Left-wing activists. Indeed, it’s abundantly clear that there was a strong ideological component to these riots, one that’s also been under-emphasised by the media, again likely because of the belief that it could in some vague sense “help Trump.” I spoke to numerous residents who are convinced that white out-of-towners were the ones who instigated the most severe chaos, after which locals latched on opportunistically. Marianne Robinson, a black woman who has resided in Chicago’s South Side for decades, asked me if I was familiar with “antifa” and blamed them for the riots.

Flora Westbrooks of Minneapolis, whose hair salon was burned down, was likewise convinced that the perpetrators could not have possibly been familiar with the neighbourhood given her longstanding community ties there. The theory might be a tad over-simplistic, but it does seem at least partially accurate. A (white) rioter I interviewed, who was present when the Third Police Precinct building in Minneapolis burned, remarked to me that he found himself in jail alongside people who came from as far as Missouri, Florida, Colorado, California and other distant states. He said they ventured to Minnesota out of a mixture of thrill-seeking and inchoate political grievance.

A police officer on foot patrol in Chicago’s heavily-black West Side remarked to me how perplexed she was by the lack of coverage of the damage in these neighbourhoods. Indeed, a simple drive around such parts of Chicago reveals a stunning number of boarded-up establishments, many of which appear like they will never return. The officer mused that she enjoyed the social-work aspects of the job — I watched her greeting various street-dwellers by name — and so, far from seeing the “Defund the Police” slogan and other expressions of animosity as an existential threat to the Chicago Police Department, regarded it as so detached from her everyday experience that she wasn’t even bothered. Over the course of my ten days in Minneapolis, I didn’t see a single officer on foot patrol, which is highly unusual for a major American city.

In Chicago, at the peak of the riots during the last weekend in May, there were a record-breaking 18 homicides in a single 24-hour period — the most since such data started being collected in 1961. I mention this not to make a knee-jerk “what about black-on-black crime” point, but simply to ask in general terms: why wasn’t this historic occurrence featured more prominently in the coverage of these protests?

Something extreme just happened in America. I could give dozens of additional examples of reportorial tidbits which don’t align with the prevailing media narrative that has flourished in the wake of this “movement”. And if you hadn’t seen it directly, would you ever know?

Bolivian sex workers are preparing for a post-corona world, one where they will sport skimpy see-through “biosecurity suits” while performing sex acts on clients, reported Reuters.   

The sex workers, based in brothels in the capital La Paz, have been given a 30-page safe sex manual drawn up by the Organization of Night Workers of Bolivia (OTN). 

OTN outlines sex workers should wear “biosecurity suits” and be prepared to carry sanitary tools to mitigate COVID-19 spreading, such as bottles of bleach, masks, and gloves. The industry group is demanding the government relax day-time business restrictions for brothels that remain heavily restricted. 

Lily Cortes, a spokesperson of OTN, told Reuters that some sex workers would resort to prostitution on the streets if brothels remain close. Another sex worker, who goes by the name Antonieta, showed Reuters earlier this month her space-suit-like outfit, consisting of a raincoat, gloves, plastic visor, and face mask. She said bleach is used on a pole she uses for clients at the brothel. 

“The biosecurity suit will allow us to work and protect ourselves,” she said.

​

AP said kissing would be banned, and mask-wearing is mandatory in brothels. 

Sex worker Luna hopes for the sake of her family that she can get back to work: 

 “We are part of society. The majority of us are single mothers. We have children and live alone. We need to earn money,” Luna said. 

Landlocked Bolivia has more than 49,000 cases and nearly 1,900 deaths on Tuesday. In early June, government officials relaxed some lockdowns but left brothels closed. 

We noted Tuesday sex workers in Germany were furious the government continued to refuse brothels reopening status. 

Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

Recent rounds of sabotage attacks against Iranian targets have been consistently blamed on Israel. It’s not just Israel being Israel, according to some officials familiar with the situation, but rather, Israel trying to start a war while Trump is still in power.

Israel sees war as a tougher sell if Biden gets elected, while Trump would be easier, especially ahead of the vote. EU officials were reportedly concerned Israel would try to provoke something soon. Israeli officials refuse to comment on specific sabotage operations.

Veteran Middle East war correspondent Mitch Prothero writes in a bombshell Business Insider report based on Israeli government sources:

Israel is involved in an extended campaign to pressure or damage Iran before President Donald Trump can be voted out of office in the November election, a former Israeli defense official and a current European Union intelligence official told Insider.

Iran has seen weekly incidents, including explosions at a missile-production facility on June 22; the Natanz nuclear facility, Iran’s largest uranium-enrichment center, on July 2; and an important shipyard in the port city of Bushehr on Wednesday.

Israeli officials concede it is “common knowledge” they are behind some of the Iran attacks, but they don’t want to specify which ones when there are so many candidates.

Officials also say their policy on Iran is clear, without confirming or denying trying to suck the US into a war.

The US has “several” intelligence indications Iran has put portions of air defense system on ‘high alert’ in recent days. This comes in wake of unexplained explosions at key facilities tied to its military and nuclear programs: US Official. Worries abt Iran retaliation. #natanz

— Barbara Starr (@barbarastarrcnn) July 16, 2020

The report says further:

A former Israeli defense official told Insider it was common knowledge in Israeli intelligence circles that at least some of the events in Iran over the past month were the work of Israeli intelligence operations.

“I don’t know which ones exactly and wouldn’t tell you anyway because the entire point is for the Iranians to feel considerable stress trying to decide what might have been our work,” they said.

Trump’s own administration has some officials very keen on provoking fights with Iran, but so far Trump has resisted launching a war. It’s not clear, with his “most pro-Israel ever” label on the line, he could resist joining an Israeli war.

Israel has been keen on a war with Iran for decades, and is always trying to pick a good time to sucker the US into the conflict. While Iran focuses on defensive preparedness, it’s likely they’ll be advised by allies to try to resist any reaction to the provocations through November hoping that as this window closes, Israel will dial back attacks.

With tens of millions of Americans out of work, people fleeing cities for rural communities, others working from home, online shopping flourishing, and the virus remerging in many states forcing governors to pause or reverse reopenings, consultancy firm KPMG International has some bad news for those betting the economy is going to “rocket ship” recovery as President Trump boasts about at press conferences and on Twitter. The consultancy firm warns “social-distancing measures” will “dramatically cut the amount of miles Americans travel by car” (fewer miles driven is terrible news for an economy driven by consumer spending). 

The effects of COVID-19 will be felt for years. The response to the virus has accelerated powerful behavioral changes that will continue to shape how Americans use automobiles. We believe the changes in commuting and e-commerce are here to stay and that the combined effect of reduced commuting and shopping journeys could be as much as 270 billion fewer vehicle miles traveled (VMT) each year in the US. -KPMG 

At the height of lockdowns in April, Americans drove 64% fewer miles, “an unprecedented decline in travel,” noted Bloomberg. KPMG estimates 10% permanent reduction of the almost 3 trillion miles driven each and year, and vehicle ownership will slump. 

“People buy a car to get to and from work and because shopping is a very important part of their lives,” Gary Silberg, head of KPMG’s global automotive practice, told Bloomberg in an interview. “If two of the primary missions that the American public buys a car for are going to reduce in demand, we know that’s going to have an adverse impact on auto sales. It’s just like gravity.”

The report states, the new normal could be as many as “14 million fewer cars” on America’s highways. This is good for anyone who still has a job and commutes – rush our in some metros areas have already been eliminated. 

However, there’s always a consequence – that is, automakers, retailers, and industries directly or indirectly related to transportation will take a massive hit for the next several years. 

Falling VMT would also affect used-car sales and aftermarket parts and service: less driving also means less wear and tear on vehicles, as well as a decline in traffic accidents, cutting into the lucrative collision parts business. Auto aftermarket suppliers will likely see a significant falloff in demand for replacement parts and maintenance services. – KPMG 

KPMG outlines three scenarios of falling VMT will result in declining car ownership through 2025.

The key takeaway of the report is that change in habits and jobs along with an economic downturn could result in few miles driven by Americans for many years, indicating a V-shaped recovery in the overall economy is certainly not in the cards for this year or next. 

KPMG’s conclusion: “COVID-19 is the defining event of 2020–and will continue to shape society, politics, and business for years to come.”

It’s all downhill from here…