Senior editor Ash Bennington joins managing editor Ed Harrison to discuss Q2 earnings for banks such as JPMorgan and Wells Fargo and use it as a barometer to talk about market cycles. Ash and Ed consider how the abysmal results in financials can cloud our understanding of where markets are at in the cycle. They also break down the sector weightings in the S&P 500, examining how severely underrepresented certain industries are and how that is distorting equity market performance. They also ponder the ways in which the system is currently “rigged,” the sorts of inequities that arise out of it, and how the pandemic is exposing it all. In the intro, Peter Cooper discusses the Q2 earnings for JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, and analyzes how effective the Payroll Protection Program has been in supporting small businesses in the US.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2OnSqyG Tyler Durden
Iran Executes Alleged CIA Spy Who Worked In Defense Ministry Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/14/2020 – 18:10
Last summer Iran began claiming to have busted a network of CIA spies within the country. Statements at the time described that Iranians embedded at key military and defense technology sites were in contact with CIA officers based in Arab Gulf countries.
While little detail has been given as to their identities, at least a dozen have faced capital offense cases for ‘treason’ and other charges.
Iran’s judiciary on Tuesday announced that it executed a defense ministry employee who was convicted for spying on behalf of the CIA.
It marks the second recent such announced execution of an alleged asset said to be working for the Americans, the AP notes. Typically names and details only emerge after such death penalty cases.
The report said Reza Asgari was executed last week. Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili said Asgari had worked in the airspace department of the ministry and retired in 2016.
“In the last years of his service, he joined the CIA, he sold information about our missiles… to the CIA and took money from them,” Esmaili said. “He was identified, tried and sentenced to death.”
In some recent examples, Iranian officials have claimed some among the spies have “confessed” to working with the CIA or other Western intelligence agencies.
In other instances there are still Western travelers who ended up in Iranian political prisons on what seem to many like trumped up charges of spying and sabotage related activities.
Often the charges are ambiguous with no evidence publicly issued.
In recent years such controversial detentions appear more for the sake of gaining leverage with Washington – in recent cases for example to conduct prisoner exchanges with the US. Both the US and UK have been in quiet back-channel negotiations with Tehran to get their citizens back, who most often are dual nationals holding US or UK and Iranian citizenship.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30aeHWn Tyler Durden
As the school year approaches, there is much consideration over whether or not to close the K-12 system in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. These concerns come from a wide variety of constituencies, from parents to public officials to teachers. However, much like the overall discussion regarding COVID-19, this proposal is ill-informed and will likely lead to unintended consequences that will be far more severe than the problem it seeks to address.
School Closures Are a Time-Sensitive Policy
One of the first points to consider when approaching the question of closing schools is timing. Yale University sociologist Nicholas Christakis, a proponent of school closure, warns that although the policy could be beneficial it must be done very early. Furthermore, although Dr. Christakis certainly supports school closure if done at the correct time, he acknowledges that now
“It’s sort of closing the barn door after the cow is gone.”
This maneuver, even for those that support it, will be incredibly difficult to do effectively and the appropriate time to even consider this policy may well have been in January, not July.
It also seems that proponents of school closure seem to misunderstand the purpose of their proposal. Italian epidemiologist Marco Ajelli tells NPR
“Closing schools can buy time and delay the peak of an epidemic.”
Unfortunately, that time has passed as well. Much like anything concerning COVID-19 and epidemiology, we cannot be certain that closing schools will actually delay the peak of an epidemic. Even if it is an effective policy measure, school closures are not intended for simply reducing cases amongst children; they are a way to buy time to prepare for the climax of an outbreak.
As outlined by Dr. Christakis’s sentiments, the time for this conversation should have been months ago. It may have been an effective policy to buy time for hospitals to retool and prepare for the outbreak but that has since been accomplished, although rather sloppily. The peak of the pandemic has passed, COVID-related deaths have dramatically decreased, and hospitals are far more prepared than they were months ago.
Closing Schools May Hurt Children More Than It Protects Them From COVID-19
When it comes to protecting the health of children, sending them to school could possibly be the safest option. Sonja Santelises, CEO of Baltimore Public Schools tells NPR that
“For a large number of our students, the safest place for them to be is actually in school.”
Schools provide a number of things that would be advantageous to the well-being of a child. Being at school places children in a controlled environment which in some neighborhoods could be better for more problems besides infection control.
Children are the least vulnerable to COVID-19. Professor Peter Collignon, an Australian microbiologist and infectious disease physician, writes in the Guardian
“The data from a range of countries shows that children rarely, and in many countries never, have died from this infection. Children appear to get infected at a much lower rate than those who are older… there is no evidence that children are important in transmitting the disease.”
Furthermore, a paper published by medical experts at Colorado State University and Yale University says that
“What we know about social distancing policies is based largely on models of influenza, where children are a vulnerable group. However, preliminary data on COVID-19 suggests that children are a small fraction of cases and may be less vulnerable than older adults.”
The Atlantic offers some additional insight on why children seem to be at a lower risk of contracting COVID-19 as they report
“Everything an infant sees, or a young child sees, is new,” says Donna Farber, an immunologist at Columbia University. Thus, their immune system is primed to fight new pathogens in a number of ways… This is why adults are able to mount a rapid immune response to previously encountered pathogens, but also why they might have trouble fighting a new one. Diseases such as rubella and chicken pox are also, for various reasons, more severe in adults than in children.”
The CDC echos this assertion that children are at a lower risk of COVID-19 not only in the mortality rate which is extremely rare but also in the infection rate. Furthermore, online teaching in its current state would not deliver the same results as an in-person experience. If schools intend to stay closed for any substantial amount of time that could be incredibly detrimental for young students.
“Many will likely miss out on over six months of teaching. While online learning might be available it is unlikely to be as effective as face-to-face teaching and those with less resources will disproportionately be disadvantaged. Minimal or no mixing with their friends and other children for over six months will also have deleterious effects.”
Many teachers will have little to no aptitude for effectively running online classes. Disadvantaged students such as those with troubled families or low socioeconomic status will be most harmed by school closure. In particular, many parents will need to take time off from work to care for their children. For many, this would be impossible.
Childcare Obligations Will Decrease the Effectiveness of the Healthcare Sector And Potentially Increase Deaths
When considering the childcare needs of healthcare workers, closing schools may actually lead to an increase in mortality rates not just for COVID patients but sick individuals more broadly. Congruent with AIER’s observation that the conversation surrounding COVID-19 seems to be utterly blind to the tradeoffs of lockdown measures, Jude Bayham and Eli Fenichel write
“School closures come with many tradeoffs. Setting aside economic costs, school closures implemented to reduce COVID-19 spread create unintended childcare obligations, which are particularly large in healthcare occupations.”
According to their raw data about 15% of registered nurses, 19.14% of Diagnostic- related technicians and technologists, as well as 14.45% of EMT and paramedics will be unable to meet their childcare obligations with the help of a nonworking adult or sibling just to name a few. Much like all models and calculations, the true percentage of total healthcare professionals that will be forced to take time off from work is not certain. However, what we can be certain about is that closing schools will impose childcare obligations on healthcare workers that will lead to a reduction in the overall medical staff.
The drawbacks of such a decision, the most important being an increase in mortality rates due to lack of medical professionals, can only be estimated with models. These models, much like those used by epidemiologists to predict COVID-19 deaths and spread, must rely on assumed values and equations that seek to imitate reality. As a result, we cannot be certain whether the result will be more or less severe.
We can be certain that closing schools will result in a reduction of medical staff. We can also be certain that this reduction of staff will increase the risk of mortality not just for COVID-19 which is a comparatively mild disease but also for those suffering from even more serious ailments. Whether it will be a slight increase that can be justified by an overall reduction in infections, as some would say, or send catastrophic shockwaves of unintended consequences, much like closing the economy, cannot be reliably predicted at this time.
A paper on epidemiology written by British Healthcare Professionals caution concludes that
“Other implications of school closure (e.g., ethical and economic considerations) and viral properties such as virulence must also be considered in policy decisions.”
It is worth noting that the authors of the paper conclude that school closures would be effective in combating influenza. In the case of COVID-19, in which children are at a lesser risk, it is unclear whether or not school closures would be as helpful in slowing infections. What we can be sure of is that there will be a host of unintended consequences. These include everything from a drop in healthcare staffing to an additional economic disturbance on top of the current financial calamity generated by the lockdowns.
Closing Schools Will Exacerbate Existing Economic Calamity
“We find that closing all schools in the U.S. for four weeks could cost between $10 and $47 billion dollars (sic) (0.1-0.3% of GDP) and lead to a reduction of 6% to 19% in key health care personnel. These should be considered conservative (i.e., low) economic estimates in that earnings rather than total compensation are used to calculate costs.”
This is only assuming schools will be closed for four weeks, not until 2021 which many either advocate or have already done. Much like shutting down the economy and labeling some businesses “nonessential” has unleashed a wide range of predicted as well as unpredicted consequences, we can be sure closing schools will do the same.
Sending children to school has been a basic component of American socioeconomic life for generations. A sudden cessation leaves millions of kids at home in an economic system which is virtually built on the assumption that their parents don’t have to take care of them during the day. We can only imagine how disruptive that would be.
Perhaps one of the most overlooked consequences of closing schools and lockdowns more generally because of its difficulty in measuring is hope. Although we can measure decreases in the healthcare workforce and economic retraction, we can’t easily measure optimism. Right now optimism is critical. A working paper from the University of Chicago estimates that 60% of the current economic downturn is due to consumer sentiments; that is, being afraid of living their lives due to COVID-19.
There will surely be further economic retraction due not only from physically closing schools but a reduction of hope and increased anxiety. The effects will be impossible to measure until they happen. The same goes for increases in suicide rates, domestic violence, substance abuse, and so on. These are further unintended consequences and tradeoffs that have resulted from the lockdowns. It is not absurd to think they will only worsen by closing schools.
Are the Tradeoffs Worth It??
As the 2020-2021 academic year approaches, closing K-12 education and switching to remote learning is on the minds of many. Those who advocate for this decision must come to terms with a number of important tradeoffs that come with it. Some of those tradeoffs are more apparent than others.
Closing schools will certainly be detrimental to the education and social needs of a generation of children.
For some, school might actually be the safest place to be and for countless working parents they need their kids to be there. More importantly, the healthcare sector needs all hands on deck not only to handle the pandemic but to serve patients with ailments far deadlier than COVID-19.
Forcing healthcare professionals to stay home to take care of their children will likely result in a higher mortality rate. Closing schools will inevitably worsen the economic downturn caused by the existing lockdown in ways that we can only begin to imagine.
Medical experts who support school closures more generally clarify that they are a tool to be considered at the beginning of a pandemic, not seven months in. Lastly, COVID-19 poses a far lesser risk to children for both death and infection. Closing schools will probably spare some schoolchildren from infection. Whether it will be enough to justify what we may have to sacrifice is another question entirely.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3j7v1A2 Tyler Durden
The White House has rescinded a controversial directive that would have revoked visas from foreign students attending college in the U.S. if those institutions opted to go online-only amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
The initial order, issued July 6, was met with a July 8 lawsuit filed by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which 200 other institutions also publicly backed. Several state attorneys general also filed their own lawsuits against the Trump administration over the policy.
During a hearing today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts over the Harvard/MIT lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it would drop the controversial directive, which had already prompted widespread confusion as colleges sought to map out a suitable plan for dealing with foreign students while also addressing coronavirus concerns.
The majority of international students that attend college in the U.S. do so on non-immigrant F-1 and M-1 visas, which require them to maintain a full-time course load. Those visas are overseen by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The White House directive came absent any economic or security justification for giving foreign students the boot, though some have speculated it was part of an effort to pressure colleges to reopen. President Donald Trump, as well as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, have strongly advocated for school openings across the U.S. Others wondered if the directive was more of a strategic political maneuver, designed to appease a restrictionist base and bolster Trump’s reelection chances.
Either way, the White House plan would have created needless logistical challenges for numerous foreign students who simply hope to continue their studies in the U.S. And if any of those students had violated the directive, they would have faced deportation and the possibility of being banned from reentering the country.
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Last week in Quillette, a Princeton Classics professor, Joshua T. Katz, published an article criticizing a letter signed by some of his institution’s professors “to block the mechanisms that have allowed systemic racism to work, visibly and invisibly, in Princeton’s operations.” The faculty letter insisted that “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America” and that it was “rampant” even at progressive institutions such as the school formerly known as the College of New Jersey. The letter articulated a long list of demands regarding the recruitment and retention of people of color as faculty members and students and even called for the creation of
a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.
In the Quillette article, Katz agreed with some of the letter’s action items but said that the above “scares me more than anything else: For colleagues to police one another’s research and publications in this way would be outrageous.” On its face, the call to investigate and discipline research and publications of other faculty is a complete refutation of academic freedom.
But of course, “cancel culture” doesn’t exist, right? So there’s no problem here, only the disenfranchised faculty of an Ivy League institution finally getting to join a conversation from which they’d been excluded. As Nesrine Malik puts it in The Guardian, “what is really unfolding here is a cohort of established influencers grappling with the fact they are losing control over how their work is received.”
Such a formulation doesn’t seem to be capture what’s going on in the case of Katz. In his Quillette article critiquing his colleagues’ call for the right to “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty,” he also characterized the Black Justice League, a student group active on campus from 2014 to 2016, as a “local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands.”
That phrasing drew the ire of Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, who said
“While free speech permits students and faculty to make arguments that are bold, provocative, or even offensive, we all have an obligation to exercise that right responsibly,” Eisgruber said in a statement to The Daily Princetonian. “Joshua Katz has failed to do so, and I object personally and strongly to his false description of a Princeton student group as a ‘local terrorist organization.'”
The student newspaper also noted that a university spokesperson said the administration “will be looking into the matter further.” What does that mean, exactly? Will Katz be docked pay, demoted, or denied course release or a sabbatical? He almost certainly couldn’t be fired, but if this had happened after his colleagues had created their anti-racism committee, who knows? Because the faculty letter was published on July 4, Katz had ironically titled his critique “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor.” Maybe that headline will be more literal than he’d ever conceived.
As Matt Welch writes elsewhere at Reason today about the resignations of Bari Weiss from The New York Times’ opinion page and Andrew Sullivan from his column at New York magazine, free speech and open inquiry are not threatened only by state censorship or draconian corporate policy. Weiss and Sullivan are in many ways professional controversialists, but the places that hired them have made it clear that the range of acceptable opinion they will tolerate is getting smaller and smaller. Indeed, the Times‘ fired its op-ed page editor after he published an article by ultra-conservative Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.). Both The Times op-ed page and New York aren’t explicitly ideological outlets along the lines of a Reason or a Jacobin or a National Review. If they are chasing away people such as Weiss, a pro-choice #NeverTrumper, and Sullivan, the former editor in chief of The New Republic and an influential advocate for marriage equality, something like “cancel culture” is absolutely real. It needn’t be as stark or powerful as a government office of censorship to radically constrict and constrain free expression. It can even coexist comfortably with an ever-increasing range of platforms from which we can all shout whatever we want to shout. In a world where a young policy analyst was fired after tweeting about peer-reviewed research on the impact of violent protests on the 1968 election, do we really want to pretend a convulsion of censorial behavior is not happening?
In a fascinating essay about his failed attempts to make a documentary about tennis legend Martina Navratilova, Glenn Greenwald writes that cancel culture is “a term I dislike due to its lack of definitional precision and inaccurate connotations that it is something novel—it is not—but it is also unavoidable when referencing ongoing debates about ‘free discourse.'” As Nesrine Malik writes, “the people who are waiting to pile on you, dox you (spread private information about you online with malicious intent) and get you fired” have made her “a more cautious writer” who “take[s] fewer risks.”
Having your university president call you out publicly for failing to exercise free speech “responsibly” is not the same as getting fired or thrown in jail, but it’s also not going to make scholars at Princeton or anywhere else more likely to push the envelope, is it? Libertarians are right to insist on strict definitions of censorship as something that only governments can do, but we should also always and everywhere push back against people and forces that would restrict and shrink the range of public opinion to the equivalent of a comically undersized “free-speech zone” on a college campus. Free speech, as popularly understood, is something that only was achieved in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We turn away from attacks on freewheeling expression at great risk, even in an age of unparalleled options for speaking our minds.
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The White House has rescinded a controversial directive that would have revoked visas from foreign students attending college in the U.S. if those institutions opted to go online-only amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
The initial order, issued July 6, was met with a July 8 lawsuit filed by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which 200 other institutions also publicly backed. Several state attorneys general also filed their own lawsuits against the Trump administration over the policy.
During a hearing today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts over the Harvard/MIT lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it would drop the controversial directive, which had already prompted widespread confusion as colleges sought to map out a suitable plan for dealing with foreign students while also addressing coronavirus concerns.
The majority of international students that attend college in the U.S. do so on non-immigrant F-1 and M-1 visas, which require them to maintain a full-time course load. Those visas are overseen by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The White House directive came absent any economic or security justification for giving foreign students the boot, though some have speculated it was part of an effort to pressure colleges to reopen. President Donald Trump, as well as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, have strongly advocated for school openings across the U.S. Others wondered if the directive was more of a strategic political maneuver, designed to appease a restrictionist base and bolster Trump’s reelection chances.
Either way, the White House plan would have created needless logistical challenges for numerous foreign students who simply hope to continue their studies in the U.S. And if any of those students had violated the directive, they would have faced deportation and the possibility of being banned from reentering the country.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Cw6js6
via IFTTT
Last week in Quillette, a Princeton Classics professor, Joshua T. Katz, published an article criticizing a letter signed by some of his institution’s professors “to block the mechanisms that have allowed systemic racism to work, visibly and invisibly, in Princeton’s operations.” The faculty letter insisted that “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America” and that it was “rampant” even at progressive institutions such as the school formerly known as the College of New Jersey. The letter articulated a long list of demands regarding the recruitment and retention of people of color as faculty members and students and even called for the creation of
a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.
In the Quillette article, Katz agreed with some of the letter’s action items but said that the above “scares me more than anything else: For colleagues to police one another’s research and publications in this way would be outrageous.” On its face, the call to investigate and discipline research and publications of other faculty is a complete refutation of academic freedom.
But of course, “cancel culture” doesn’t exist, right? So there’s no problem here, only the disenfranchised faculty of an Ivy League institution finally getting to join a conversation from which they’d been excluded. As Nesrine Malik puts it in The Guardian, “what is really unfolding here is a cohort of established influencers grappling with the fact they are losing control over how their work is received.”
Such a formulation doesn’t seem to be capture what’s going on in the case of Katz. In his Quillette article critiquing his colleagues’ call for the right to “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty,” he also characterized the Black Justice League, a student group active on campus from 2014 to 2016, as a “local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands.”
That phrasing drew the ire of Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, who said
“While free speech permits students and faculty to make arguments that are bold, provocative, or even offensive, we all have an obligation to exercise that right responsibly,” Eisgruber said in a statement to The Daily Princetonian. “Joshua Katz has failed to do so, and I object personally and strongly to his false description of a Princeton student group as a ‘local terrorist organization.'”
The student newspaper also noted that a university spokesperson said the administration “will be looking into the matter further.” What does that mean, exactly? Will Katz be docked pay, demoted, or denied course release or a sabbatical? He almost certainly couldn’t be fired, but if this had happened after his colleagues had created their anti-racism committee, who knows? Because the faculty letter was published on July 4, Katz had ironically titled his critique “A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor.” Maybe that headline will be more literal than he’d ever conceived.
As Matt Welch writes elsewhere at Reason today about the resignations of Bari Weiss from The New York Times’ opinion page and Andrew Sullivan from his column at New York magazine, free speech and open inquiry are not threatened only by state censorship or draconian corporate policy. Weiss and Sullivan are in many ways professional controversialists, but the places that hired them have made it clear that the range of acceptable opinion they will tolerate is getting smaller and smaller. Indeed, the Times‘ fired its op-ed page editor after he published an article by ultra-conservative Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.). Both The Times op-ed page and New York aren’t explicitly ideological outlets along the lines of a Reason or a Jacobin or a National Review. If they are chasing away people such as Weiss, a pro-choice #NeverTrumper, and Sullivan, the former editor in chief of The New Republic and an influential advocate for marriage equality, something like “cancel culture” is absolutely real. It needn’t be as stark or powerful as a government office of censorship to radically constrict and constrain free expression. It can even coexist comfortably with an ever-increasing range of platforms from which we can all shout whatever we want to shout. In a world where a young policy analyst was fired after tweeting about peer-reviewed research on the impact of violent protests on the 1968 election, do we really want to pretend a convulsion of censorial behavior is not happening?
In a fascinating essay about his failed attempts to make a documentary about tennis legend Martina Navratilova, Glenn Greenwald writes that cancel culture is “a term I dislike due to its lack of definitional precision and inaccurate connotations that it is something novel—it is not—but it is also unavoidable when referencing ongoing debates about ‘free discourse.'” As Nesrine Malik writes, “the people who are waiting to pile on you, dox you (spread private information about you online with malicious intent) and get you fired” have made her “a more cautious writer” who “take[s] fewer risks.”
Having your university president call you out publicly for failing to exercise free speech “responsibly” is not the same as getting fired or thrown in jail, but it’s also not going to make scholars at Princeton or anywhere else more likely to push the envelope, is it? Libertarians are right to insist on strict definitions of censorship as something that only governments can do, but we should also always and everywhere push back against people and forces that would restrict and shrink the range of public opinion to the equivalent of a comically undersized “free-speech zone” on a college campus. Free speech, as popularly understood, is something that only was achieved in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We turn away from attacks on freewheeling expression at great risk, even in an age of unparalleled options for speaking our minds.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2CzQPDo
via IFTTT
NYT ‘Chief Threat To Democracy’: Eric Weinstein Takes Flamethrower To Paper Of Record After Bari Weiss Quits Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/14/2020 – 17:30
Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital and hsot of The Portal podcast, hasgone scorched earth on the New York Times following the Tuesday resignation of journalist Bari Weiss.
Illustration via DanielMiessler.com
Weinstein describes howThe Times has morphed into an activist rag – refusing to cover “news” unpaletable to their narrative, while ignoring key questions such as whether Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring was “intelligence related.”
Jump into Weinstein’s Twitter thread by clicking on the below tweet, or scroll down for your convenience.
* * *
On 6/1/17 Ms Weiss was the only journalist covering “The News”.
Only she was doing it from the opinion section because the NYT refused to find interesting that there was a racist Maoist insurrection at a public college where police would be stood down:https://t.co/0sq70VCP2g
At that moment Bari Weiss became all that was left of the “Paper of Record.” Why? Because the existence of Black Racists with the power to hunt professors with Baseball Bats and even redefine the word ‘racism’ to make their story impossible to cover ran totally counter-narrative.
At some point after 2011, the NYT gradually stopped covering the News and became the News instead. And Bari has been fighting internally from the opinion section to re-establish Journalism inside tbe the NYT. A total reversal of the Chinese Wall that separates news from opinion.
This is the paper in 2016 that couldnt be interested in the story that millions of Americans were likely lying to pollsters about Donald Trump.
The paper refusing to ask the CIA/FBI if Epstein was Intelligence related.
The paper that can’t report that it seeks race rioting:
I have had the honor of trying to support both @bariweiss at the New York Times and @BretWeinstein in their battles simply to stand alone against the internal mob mentality. It is THE story all over the country. Our courageous individuals are being hunted at work for dissenting.
Before Bari resigned, I did a podcast with her. It was chilling. I‘d make an innocuous statement of simple fact and ask her about it. She‘d reply “That is obviously true but I’m sorry we can’t say that here. It will get me strung up.” That‘s when I stopped telling her to hang on.
So what just happened? Let me put it bluntly: What was left of the New York Times just resigned from the New York Times. The Times canceled itself. As a separate Hong Kong exists in name only, the New New York Times and affiliated “news” is now the chief threat to our democracy.
This is the moment when the passengers who have been becoming increasingly alarmed, start to entertain a new idea: what if the people now in the cockpit are not airline pilots? Well the Twitter Activists at the @nytimes and elsewhere are not journalists.
What if those calling for empathy have a specific deadness of empathy?
Those calling for justice *are* the unjust?
Those calling “Privilege” are the privileged?
Those calling for equality seek to oppress us?
Those anti-racists are open racists?
The progressives seek regress?
The journalists are covering up the news?
Try the following exercise: put a minus sign in front of nearly every banner claim made by “the progressives”.
Q: Doesn’t that make more sense?
Those aren’t the pilots you imagine. And we are far closer to revolution than you think.
Bari and I agree on a lot but also disagree fiercely. And so I have learned that she is tougher than tough. But these university and journalistic workplaces are now unworkable. They are the antithesis off what they were built to stand for. It is astounding how long she held out.
Read her letter. I have asked her to do a make-up podcast & she has agreed. Stay tuned If you don’t want to be surprised again by what‘s coming understand this: just as there has been no functioning president, there‘s now no journalism. We‘re moving towards a 🌎 of pure activism.
Prepare to lose your ability to call the police & for more autonomous zones where kids die so that Govenors & Mayors can LARP as Kayfabe revolutionaries. Disagree with Ms Weiss all you want as she isn’t perfect. But Bari is a true patriot who tried to stand alone. Glad she’s out.
We are not finished by a long shot. What the Intellectual Dark Web tried to do MUST now be given an institutional home.
Podcast with Bari on The Portal to come as soon as she is ready.
Stay tuned. And thanks for reading this. It is of the utmost importance.
Thank you all. 🙏
P.S. Please retweet the lead tweet from this thread if you understand where we are. Appreciated.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3fue68r Tyler Durden
Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg Hospitalized With Possible Infection Tyler Durden
Tue, 07/14/2020 – 17:29
No details yet but the wires are reporting that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was admitted to the hospital on Tuesday morning for treatment of a possible infection, according to a statement.
She is resting comfortably and will stay there for a few days for antibiotic treatment.
Developing…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Op0WgX Tyler Durden
It was March 3 when Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) appeared on Martha MacCallum’s Fox News show to discuss his committee’s investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s involvement with a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings Limited.
Questions surrounding the former Vice President’s middle child have swirled since Biden’s presidential campaign announcement on April 29 of last year.
Hunter Biden was a paid board member of Burisma Holdings Limited. His firm Rosemont Seneca was paid over $80 thousand a month during that time, despite the fact that Hunter Biden had no experience in natural gas, nor could he speak the language. He did, however, have the Vice President as his father.
At the same time, Joe Biden was tasked with heading the Obama administration’s Ukrainian policies. His crowning achievement was forcing the country to fire one of its top prosecutors: Viktor Shokin — who was investigating Burisma Holdings when he was fired.
Johnson told the Fox News audience, “if there’s wrongdoing, the American people need to understand that.” The sentiment is surely genuine but how close his committee — the Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs — is to providing this understanding is unclear. And with the Senate in session for a mere 37 more days before election day, time is running out.
Sen. Johnson did not respond to this reporter’s request for comment.
Eight Republicans and six Democrats compose the committee with Johnson at the helm — this majority grants relative ease in conducting the investigation — with the exception of Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) inconsistency.
Referring to the investigation and Biden’s corruption on March 4, President Trump said, “That will be a major issue in the campaign, I will bring that up all the time…I don’t see how they can answer those questions…that was purely corrupt.”
The most significant step taken in providing Democratic primary voters and Americans as a whole clarity on the Biden corruption was Johnson’s May 20 party-line vote victory to subpoena Blue Star Strategies — despite months of Sen. Romney flirting with a vote against it.
Blue Star Strategies is a public relations firm that consulted for Burisma. The committee’s probe is looking into allegations that the firm attempted to use Hunter Biden’s board position to influence the State Department.
“The question I would ask is, what is everybody worried about?” Johnson told Politico in late May. “If there’s nothing there, we’ll find out there’s nothing there. But if there’s something there, the American people need to know that.”
More recently, the committee has reached out to and demanded testimony from three former Obama administration officials: former Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former Special Envoy for International Energy Amos Hochstein, former senior State Department officials Victoria Nuland and Catherine Novelli, and former chief of staff to Secretary of State John Kerry, David Wade, according to Politico.
The committee is currently scheduling the above witness interviews and subpoenaing transcribed interviews and documents pertaining to the Bidens and Ukraine.
These actions are steps in the right direction for producing a report — a large component of which will be a timeline of events depicting Hunter’s actions alongside his Vice President father’s actions.
An indication of a release date, however, has yet to be given for when the conclusions will be made public.
There is no question Democrats are opposed to the investigation — when reached out to for comment, committee-member Tom Carper (D-DE) sent a press release calling for Johnson to address other problems the nation is facing instead of “trying to score political points and help a President in an election year.”
On the other side, Republicans have not been fully supportive, either. Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) told Johnson that the investigation into BIden may aid Russia in causing chaos and uncertainty in American politics.
The lacking support in both parties may be a reason for a potential delay in the investigation — or perhaps Johnson is taking a breather after receiving immense Republican blowback over his co-proposal to replace Columbus Day with Juneteenth as a Federal Holiday — an idea he later retracted.
Whatever the reason, a clear release date has not been made.
A July 2 tweet from Politico reporter Andrew Desiderio is the most recent indication that there isn’t one.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) tells me his committee’s report on the Burisma probe, expected to be released this summer, is currently being written by staff. “We’ve got the timeline laid out, we’re just trying to fill in the gaps.”
— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) July 2, 2020
When asked, neither Johnson’s office nor the committee provided further details on the report’s expected release date.
Delays from COVID-19 lockdowns and precautions are unavoidable, but there is no indication if it will actually arrive before voters cast ballots on Nov. 3.
Voters have a right to know the truth about their candidates before they vote. Just like former FBI Director James Comey’s July 5, 2016 press conference on Hillary Clinton’s email scandal — it was held almost exactly four years ago and right before a consequential election. Voters deserve to know.
For the critics of the investigation, let us not forget President Donald Trump’s impeachment was over the same issue: uncovering the truth about the Biden family cashing in with shady oil companies.
Since the Trump impeachment was about due process and justice under the law, an investigation into seeming corruption done by a former vice president and possible president is exactly the same.
Another issue is the Senate has just 37 scheduled days of work before election day on Nov 3. They have big questions to face like coronavirus relief packages, too.
Time is running out.
Senator Ron Johnson is leading an important investigation and the voters deserve to know the truth before they vote.
With the limited days of Senate work ahead, this report can easily get sidelined until voters find out the truth too late.
A deadline and release date should be promised and committed to immediately.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Cb0mRA Tyler Durden
