1/4/2012: President Obama makes three appointments to the NLRB. The Supreme Court would find these appointments unconstitutional in NLRB v. Noel Canning.
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The Broader Meaning of the Trad-Cons’ New War on Porn
While the rest of us were gearing up for the holiday season, a small group of conservatives was busy cranking up something a good deal less cheerful: a new war on pornography.
On Dec. 6, four members of Congress wrote a letter to Atty. Gen. William Barr, beseeching him to “declare the prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority,” and “bring prosecutions against the major producers and distributors of such material.”
We’ve been down this speech-trampling road before, most recently with the Bush administration’s Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. It was disbanded in 2011, having been such a debacle that U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon delivered the following lecture when dismissing all federal charges against adult-film producer John Stagliano: “I hope the government will learn a lesson from its experience.”
But political memory is notoriously short. Social conservatives have reacted to this latest suggested smut crackdown with a flurry of high fives.
Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh suggested moving toward an outright ban on pornography. New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari, echoing a prior argument in the increasingly assertive First Things magazine, posited that reality has changed the conditions underpinning the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1997 Reno vs. ACLU decision striking down the indecency provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
And at the Trumpy American Greatness website, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry disgorged a long “Science-Based Case for Ending the Porn Epidemic,” which if nothing else demonstrates that our public discourse epidemic of pronouncing things “epidemics” shows little sign of receding.
The new anti-porn movement isn’t without its amusements. “Conservatives must partner with anti-porn feminists,” Ahmari tweeted, then deleted, last month. (He says his tweets are programmed to auto-delete.) “We won’t agree on everything, but imagine how powerful such an alliance could be.”
But there is a more serious project afoot. Emboldened conservatives are trying to use the Trump moment to steer the GOP firmly away from its commitments to individual liberty.
A manifesto last spring in First Things, “Against the Dead Consensus,” helped define the battle lines, arguing that too many in the pre-Trump conservative camp were guilty of “fetishizing” individual “autonomy,” which allegedly “yielded the very tyranny that consensus conservatives claim most to detest.”
The first item on the Dead Consensus statement, signed by Ahmari, Gobry and a dozen others, would not be out of place at a Bernie Sanders rally: “We oppose the soulless society of individual affluence.” The authors dismiss as “dogmas” the notions of “free trade on every front, free movement through every boundary, small government as an end in itself, technological advancement as a cure-all.”
But these are the same people who also brought us a whole damn month last year of internecine conservative warfare over drag-queen story hour. They are itching to go on the offensive in the culture wars, whether on abortion or gender pronouns or porn, and they consider your constitutional objections to be about as relevant as stopping a tidal wave with a slide rule.
“The Founding generation,” Ahmari wrote last month, “would likely have reacted to [Pornhub] not with high-libertarian nostrums, but with tar and feathers.”
So is it time to start preemptively deleting your browser history? Not yet. Four members of Congress are considerably fewer than the 42 senators — including such Democrats as Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) — who objected to the dissolution of the last Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. And the Supreme Court these past two decades has been on a pro-free speech tear, one that has been strengthened, not weakened, by the Republican appointment of judges.
But ideology of all stripes is up for grabs right now, a fact our resurgent social conservative friends grasped more quickly than the rest of us. If and when they can partner up with the puritans of the left — as happened in 2018 with the passage of the speech-squelching FOSTA-SESTA sex trafficking act — the implications will leap from page to prison.
As the anti-porn troops are quick to point out, then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016 signed a pledge to “give serious consideration to appointing a presidential commission to examine the harmful public health impact of internet pornography on youth, families and the American culture.”
Social cons may be moral scolds, but they are not above a little pragmatism in using a thrice-married consorter with adult actresses to achieve their policy ends. “Whatever else might be said about it,” the Dead Consensus manifesto concludes, “the Trump phenomenon has opened up space in which to pose these questions anew.”
The intellectual tendency toward leaning hungrily into the wind of power has been with us for all recorded history. So has, as any visitor to Pompei can tell you, the human desire to view sexual imagery. Trump-era manifesto artists, responding as they are to a democratic upheaval, are seeking to use anti-democratic means to criminalize expression enjoyed by tens of millions. A task that herculean will require much more than strongly worded letters.
This article originally appeared in the L.A. Times.
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No Adults in the Room: From Election to The Politician
The recent release of Ryan Murphy’s series The Politician on Netflix has inspired endless comparisons to Alexander Payne’s 1999 film Election. Both works recount the stories of hotly contested elections for the class presidency at a high school. Both take highly ambitious and accomplished students as their antiheroes. Both find the bulk of their dark comedy in the notion that a high school election would or could ever entail the types of campaigning, corruption, and chaos that occur in elections for national office. And both suggest, as a result, that elections on any level and the people who try to win them are fundamentally broken.
Election, however, believes that some people are good, or at least trying to be. The Politician, released a tidy 20 years later, gives us a world where everyone runs amok. The difference in attitude between the movie and the show neatly captures a change in the way that Americans have approached politics over the last two decades. In the late-’90s movie, politics is a cynical enterprise threatening a core remnant of earnestness and institutional decency. In the 2019 show, politics is something darker and more empty—a hollow act of power seeking for its own sake, set in an equally hollow society that cheers it on. In Election, politicians are dead inside. In The Politician, everything is.
While 20 years of American politics have left us feeling that Election doesn’t go far enough, no viewer would ever confuse Election with something like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and its heartfelt story of an innocent and honest politician whose integrity might just change the system.
None of the main characters in Election provides any kind of moral center to the film. We learn that Tracy Flick, an ambitious high school presidential candidate, had an affair with her English teacher the previous year. Just as we are inclined to sympathize with her violated innocence, she comments that it would all have been fine “if certain older, wiser people hadn’t acted like such little babies and gotten so mushy.”
Tracy also pulls down the campaign posters of other candidates and allows someone else to take the blame. Meanwhile, her main competition, the football jock Paul Metzler, has sex with his sister’s ex-girlfriend, who—in a bit of a quid pro quo—volunteers to manage his campaign. And Paul’s sister Tammy begins her own presidential campaign as a way to avenge herself upon her brother and her ex.
The adults aren’t much better. The English teacher, who is “totally in love” with Tracy and sends her handwritten love notes, is obviously corrupt. Less obvious are the failings of Jim McAllister, the social studies teacher played by Matthew Broderick. Broderick’s considerable charm as an actor and his history of playing puckish heroes like Ferris Bueller cleverly combine to mask, for much of the film, exactly how reprehensible his character is.
Jim begins the movie by discussing his commitment to helping his students through the tough years of adolescence and by leading a classroom discussion on the difference between morals and ethics. But he blames Tracy for her affair with the English teacher and the teacher’s eventual firing, cheats on his wife with her best friend, and manipulates the outcome of the election at the center of the film to punish what he sees as Tracy’s outsized ambition.
The movie does also give us Carver High School principal Walt Hendricks. He’s as much of a stuffed shirt as every other high school principal in every other high school movie, but in the end, he does his job. When he finds out that the English teacher is sleeping with a student, he fires him. When he discovers that Jim has intentionally hidden election ballots in order to keep Tracy from the presidency, he confronts Jim with the evidence and requests his resignation.
Under Hendricks, the integrity of the political process, and thus of the institution he oversees, is upheld. Despite the efforts of the players involved, the system works. Yes, the main characters in Election are all moral nightmares. But there is a sense in the film that despite the many corruptions of those who seek power, there are still a few people in the world who will make sure that the system functions properly and who will help it stay strong enough to resist being bent to the will of the corrupt.
The Politician, by contrast, presents a world without one upright character, one morally correct choice, or one spark of hope that the world, the political process, and humanity are anything other than monsters.
Payton Hobart, the politician of The Politician, has been training to be president for his whole life. During the interview with the Harvard admissions committee that begins the first episode, he explains that he wants to go there because more U.S. presidents have graduated from Harvard than from any other school.
While his older brothers have gotten into Harvard on the strength of their parents’ donations, Payton insists on getting in on the strength of his curriculum vitae. Lest you think this is a sign of some sort of moral excellence, he is quick to note that buying one’s way into the Ivy League is exactly the sort of scandalous detail that comes out during a campaign, so his future run for the U.S. presidency depends on getting in on merit. After the school waitlists him, Payton decides he must succeed in his campaign for the student body presidency in order to be accepted and step into the golden political future he is certain awaits him.
Payton assumes his run for class president will be easy, but he is confronted by a challenging opponent: the male student he is dating in secret, River Barkley. The two engage in an escalating contest over who can find the most oppressed running mate, which ends when River chooses a gender-fluid person of color and Payton selects a young woman suffering from devastating childhood cancer. River, the only character in the first season who has any kind of authenticity or moral core, becomes overwhelmed by the pressure of the campaign before the first half of episode one is over and kills himself in front of Payton.
Assisting Payton in his run is his girlfriend Alice, whose color-coordinated outfits, pearls, and relentless drive to attain power through her partner are a chilling mashup of Jackie Kennedy and Lady Macbeth. After River’s death, she calmly asks Payton if he killed River. She wouldn’t judge him or report him, but she needs to know, as she cannot protect Payton’s secrets if she isn’t aware of them.
The campaign continues through the season in an accelerating spiral of scandal. Murders are plotted and foiled. Payton’s running mate, Infinity, is revealed to be a victim of Munchausen by Proxy. Her cancer is entirely faked by her grandmother. There are sex tapes, scandalous slips of the tongue leaked to the press, transparent appeals to public sympathy (Payton chooses gun control as his main campaign issue as a tribute to River’s death; River’s grieving girlfriend takes up the campaign in his memory), assassination attempts, faux kidnappings, false information, and—in the best move of the season—an entire episode dedicated to both candidates’ attempts to capture the vote of one undecided student at their school.
Unlike the principal in Election, the adults in the world of The Politician are no better than the shameless young opportunists who inhabit the high school. Payton’s Mandarin teacher tells him to just show up for the final and he’ll give him an A, since Payton has had such a rough year. The Harvard admissions committee comes back to offer Payton a spot in the entering class if he’ll provide the money for a Slavic languages department. Parents are alternately absent and abusive. There is not a decent principal, or a decent principle, to be found.
There were barely any adults in the room in 1999’s Election. In 2019’s The Politician, the adults have all left the room, moved out of town, and either gone to jail or joined ashrams. There’s no one to protect the political system from well-dressed sociopaths like Payton and his crew.
That’s a message that many critics seem to have missed. A review in Vox by Emily Todd VanDerWerff argues that the show “has almost no interest in actual politics.” Instead, Payton “seems to have arrived at his political positions because they are advantageous, not because the issues he’s chosen to focus on are deeply important to him. And yet other characters earnestly intone several times that he wants to make the world a better place.” Writing in Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz observes that “on the rare occasions when it calms down and tries to be earnest and affecting, the sincerity comes across as calculated, like a politician tearing up while delivering the same campaign speech for the fourth time in a week.” And a review in Rolling Stone by Alan Sepinwall complains that “moments when anyone onscreen emotionally resembles a person are rare.”
These critics are right to notice all the hollowness, but they are wrong to think that it’s a flaw. The hollowness is the point.
The late economist James Buchanan’s retrospective piece about the history and status of public choice economics, “Public Choice: Politics without Romance,” was published in the journal Policy in 2003. It thus fell neatly between the release dates of Election and The Politician. Buchanan pointed out one result of the work done by public choice theorists: “By simple comparison with the climate of opinion in 1950, both the punditry and the public are more critical of politics and politicians, more cynical about the motivations of political action, and less naive in thinking that political nostrums offer easy solutions to social problems. And this shift in attitudes extends well beyond the loss of belief in the efficacy of socialism.”
The emptiness that reviewers sense in The Politician is the natural and predictable result of decades of such work combined with a political climate that seems dedicated to proving the truth of economist F.A. Hayek’s observation that “to act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group.” In other words, The Politician is hollow, emotionless, and imbued with only a surface commitment to the issues it pretends to take on because 21st century politics is increasingly hollow, emotionless, and insincerely committed.
A 2019 Pew Research Center study found that about three-quarters of Americans believe we have less and less trust both in the American government and in our fellow citizens. That backs up the trend noted in the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, which found that “only a third of Americans now trust their government ‘to do what is right’—a decline of 14 percentage points” from the previous year. Shows like The Politician are precisely the cultural artifacts that you’d expect to see created by a society that tells pollsters things like that.
Buchanan would have recognized the world of Election and The Politician. Anyone who reads him could have predicted the increase in the cynicism expressed by these works as we moved further into the 21st century. Unlike the critics, we understand the hollowness of Election and The Politician as a condemnation of our political climate. We get the joke they’re telling.
We just aren’t all that sure it’s funny.
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No Adults in the Room: From Election to The Politician
The recent release of Ryan Murphy’s series The Politician on Netflix has inspired endless comparisons to Alexander Payne’s 1999 film Election. Both works recount the stories of hotly contested elections for the class presidency at a high school. Both take highly ambitious and accomplished students as their antiheroes. Both find the bulk of their dark comedy in the notion that a high school election would or could ever entail the types of campaigning, corruption, and chaos that occur in elections for national office. And both suggest, as a result, that elections on any level and the people who try to win them are fundamentally broken.
Election, however, believes that some people are good, or at least trying to be. The Politician, released a tidy 20 years later, gives us a world where everyone runs amok. The difference in attitude between the movie and the show neatly captures a change in the way that Americans have approached politics over the last two decades. In the late-’90s movie, politics is a cynical enterprise threatening a core remnant of earnestness and institutional decency. In the 2019 show, politics is something darker and more empty—a hollow act of power seeking for its own sake, set in an equally hollow society that cheers it on. In Election, politicians are dead inside. In The Politician, everything is.
While 20 years of American politics have left us feeling that Election doesn’t go far enough, no viewer would ever confuse Election with something like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and its heartfelt story of an innocent and honest politician whose integrity might just change the system.
None of the main characters in Election provides any kind of moral center to the film. We learn that Tracy Flick, an ambitious high school presidential candidate, had an affair with her English teacher the previous year. Just as we are inclined to sympathize with her violated innocence, she comments that it would all have been fine “if certain older, wiser people hadn’t acted like such little babies and gotten so mushy.”
Tracy also pulls down the campaign posters of other candidates and allows someone else to take the blame. Meanwhile, her main competition, the football jock Paul Metzler, has sex with his sister’s ex-girlfriend, who—in a bit of a quid pro quo—volunteers to manage his campaign. And Paul’s sister Tammy begins her own presidential campaign as a way to avenge herself upon her brother and her ex.
The adults aren’t much better. The English teacher, who is “totally in love” with Tracy and sends her handwritten love notes, is obviously corrupt. Less obvious are the failings of Jim McAllister, the social studies teacher played by Matthew Broderick. Broderick’s considerable charm as an actor and his history of playing puckish heroes like Ferris Bueller cleverly combine to mask, for much of the film, exactly how reprehensible his character is.
Jim begins the movie by discussing his commitment to helping his students through the tough years of adolescence and by leading a classroom discussion on the difference between morals and ethics. But he blames Tracy for her affair with the English teacher and the teacher’s eventual firing, cheats on his wife with her best friend, and manipulates the outcome of the election at the center of the film to punish what he sees as Tracy’s outsized ambition.
The movie does also give us Carver High School principal Walt Hendricks. He’s as much of a stuffed shirt as every other high school principal in every other high school movie, but in the end, he does his job. When he finds out that the English teacher is sleeping with a student, he fires him. When he discovers that Jim has intentionally hidden election ballots in order to keep Tracy from the presidency, he confronts Jim with the evidence and requests his resignation.
Under Hendricks, the integrity of the political process, and thus of the institution he oversees, is upheld. Despite the efforts of the players involved, the system works. Yes, the main characters in Election are all moral nightmares. But there is a sense in the film that despite the many corruptions of those who seek power, there are still a few people in the world who will make sure that the system functions properly and who will help it stay strong enough to resist being bent to the will of the corrupt.
The Politician, by contrast, presents a world without one upright character, one morally correct choice, or one spark of hope that the world, the political process, and humanity are anything other than monsters.
Payton Hobart, the politician of The Politician, has been training to be president for his whole life. During the interview with the Harvard admissions committee that begins the first episode, he explains that he wants to go there because more U.S. presidents have graduated from Harvard than from any other school.
While his older brothers have gotten into Harvard on the strength of their parents’ donations, Payton insists on getting in on the strength of his curriculum vitae. Lest you think this is a sign of some sort of moral excellence, he is quick to note that buying one’s way into the Ivy League is exactly the sort of scandalous detail that comes out during a campaign, so his future run for the U.S. presidency depends on getting in on merit. After the school waitlists him, Payton decides he must succeed in his campaign for the student body presidency in order to be accepted and step into the golden political future he is certain awaits him.
Payton assumes his run for class president will be easy, but he is confronted by a challenging opponent: the male student he is dating in secret, River Barkley. The two engage in an escalating contest over who can find the most oppressed running mate, which ends when River chooses a gender-fluid person of color and Payton selects a young woman suffering from devastating childhood cancer. River, the only character in the first season who has any kind of authenticity or moral core, becomes overwhelmed by the pressure of the campaign before the first half of episode one is over and kills himself in front of Payton.
Assisting Payton in his run is his girlfriend Alice, whose color-coordinated outfits, pearls, and relentless drive to attain power through her partner are a chilling mashup of Jackie Kennedy and Lady Macbeth. After River’s death, she calmly asks Payton if he killed River. She wouldn’t judge him or report him, but she needs to know, as she cannot protect Payton’s secrets if she isn’t aware of them.
The campaign continues through the season in an accelerating spiral of scandal. Murders are plotted and foiled. Payton’s running mate, Infinity, is revealed to be a victim of Munchausen by Proxy. Her cancer is entirely faked by her grandmother. There are sex tapes, scandalous slips of the tongue leaked to the press, transparent appeals to public sympathy (Payton chooses gun control as his main campaign issue as a tribute to River’s death; River’s grieving girlfriend takes up the campaign in his memory), assassination attempts, faux kidnappings, false information, and—in the best move of the season—an entire episode dedicated to both candidates’ attempts to capture the vote of one undecided student at their school.
Unlike the principal in Election, the adults in the world of The Politician are no better than the shameless young opportunists who inhabit the high school. Payton’s Mandarin teacher tells him to just show up for the final and he’ll give him an A, since Payton has had such a rough year. The Harvard admissions committee comes back to offer Payton a spot in the entering class if he’ll provide the money for a Slavic languages department. Parents are alternately absent and abusive. There is not a decent principal, or a decent principle, to be found.
There were barely any adults in the room in 1999’s Election. In 2019’s The Politician, the adults have all left the room, moved out of town, and either gone to jail or joined ashrams. There’s no one to protect the political system from well-dressed sociopaths like Payton and his crew.
That’s a message that many critics seem to have missed. A review in Vox by Emily Todd VanDerWerff argues that the show “has almost no interest in actual politics.” Instead, Payton “seems to have arrived at his political positions because they are advantageous, not because the issues he’s chosen to focus on are deeply important to him. And yet other characters earnestly intone several times that he wants to make the world a better place.” Writing in Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz observes that “on the rare occasions when it calms down and tries to be earnest and affecting, the sincerity comes across as calculated, like a politician tearing up while delivering the same campaign speech for the fourth time in a week.” And a review in Rolling Stone by Alan Sepinwall complains that “moments when anyone onscreen emotionally resembles a person are rare.”
These critics are right to notice all the hollowness, but they are wrong to think that it’s a flaw. The hollowness is the point.
The late economist James Buchanan’s retrospective piece about the history and status of public choice economics, “Public Choice: Politics without Romance,” was published in the journal Policy in 2003. It thus fell neatly between the release dates of Election and The Politician. Buchanan pointed out one result of the work done by public choice theorists: “By simple comparison with the climate of opinion in 1950, both the punditry and the public are more critical of politics and politicians, more cynical about the motivations of political action, and less naive in thinking that political nostrums offer easy solutions to social problems. And this shift in attitudes extends well beyond the loss of belief in the efficacy of socialism.”
The emptiness that reviewers sense in The Politician is the natural and predictable result of decades of such work combined with a political climate that seems dedicated to proving the truth of economist F.A. Hayek’s observation that “to act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group.” In other words, The Politician is hollow, emotionless, and imbued with only a surface commitment to the issues it pretends to take on because 21st century politics is increasingly hollow, emotionless, and insincerely committed.
A 2019 Pew Research Center study found that about three-quarters of Americans believe we have less and less trust both in the American government and in our fellow citizens. That backs up the trend noted in the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, which found that “only a third of Americans now trust their government ‘to do what is right’—a decline of 14 percentage points” from the previous year. Shows like The Politician are precisely the cultural artifacts that you’d expect to see created by a society that tells pollsters things like that.
Buchanan would have recognized the world of Election and The Politician. Anyone who reads him could have predicted the increase in the cynicism expressed by these works as we moved further into the 21st century. Unlike the critics, we understand the hollowness of Election and The Politician as a condemnation of our political climate. We get the joke they’re telling.
We just aren’t all that sure it’s funny.
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How Long Will It Take For The US To Collapse?
How Long Will It Take For The US To Collapse?
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
There are a multitude of false assumptions out there on what the collapse of a nation or “empire” looks like. Modern day Americans have never experienced this type of event, only peripheral crises and crashes. Thanks to Hollywood, many in the public are under the delusion that a collapse is an overnight affair. They think that such a thing is impossible in their lifetimes, and if it did happen, it would happen as it does in the movies – They would simply wake up one morning and find the world on fire. Historically speaking, this is not how it works. The collapse of an empire is a process, not an event.
This is not to say that there are not moments of shock and awe; there certainly are. As we witnessed during the Great Depression, or in 2008, the system can only be propped up artificially for so long before the bubble pops. In past instances of central bank intervention, the window for manipulation is around ten years between events, give or take a couple of years. For the average person, a decade might seem like a long time. For the banking elites behind the degradation of our society and economy, a decade is a blink of an eye.
In the meantime, danger signals abound as those analysts aware of the situation try to warn the populace of the underlying decay of the system and where it will inevitably lead. Economists like Ludwig Von Mises foresaw the collapse of the German Mark and predicted the Great Depression; almost no one listened until it was too late. Multiple alternative economists predicted the credit crisis and derivatives crash of 2008; and almost no one listened until it was too late. People refused to listen because their normalcy bias took control of their ability to reason and accept the facts in front of them.
There are a number factors that cause mass blindness to economic and social reality. First and foremost, establishment elites deliberately create the illusion of prosperity by rigging economic data to the upside. In almost every case of economic crisis or geopolitical disaster, the public is conditioned to believe they are in the midst of a financial “boom” or era of “peace”. They are encouraged to ignore fundamental warning signs in favor of foolish faith in the system. Those people that try to break the apathy and expose the truth are called “chicken little” and “doom monger”.
In the minds of the cheerful lemmings a “collapse” is something very obvious; they think they would know it when they saw it. It’s like trying to teach a blind person about colors; it’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult to get all these Helen Kellers to understand that what they perceive is not the whole reality. There’s a vast world hidden from them and they have no concept of how to observe it.
Crash events are like stages in the process of collapse; they create moments of clarity for the blind. However, they are also often engineered to benefit the establishment. There’s a reason why the elites put so much energy into hiding the real data on the state of the economy, and it’s not because they are trying to keep the system from faltering by using sheer public ignorance. Rather, a crash event is a tool, a means to an end. As Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. warned after the panic of 1920:
“Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created; the present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical problem…”
Central bankers and their cohorts manipulate economic data and promote the false notion of a boom before almost every major crash because they WANT to ambush the populace. They WANT to create panic, and then use it to their advantage as they rebuild and mutate the system into something unrecognizable only decades ago. Each consecutive crash contributes to the collapse of the whole, until eventually the society we once had is barely a distant memory.
This process can take decades, and the US has been subject to it for quite some time now. Once again in 2019 we are seeing the lie of an “economic boom” being perpetuated in the mainstream. The public was growing too aware of the danger and had to be subdued. More specifically, conservatives were growing too aware. The sad thing is that the boom propaganda is most prominent today among conservatives, who are desperately trying to ignore the fundamentals in an attempt to defend the Trump Administration.
The same people who were pointing out the economic bubble under Obama are now denying its existence under Trump. Trump himself argued that the markets were a dangerous economic fraud created by the Federal Reserve during his campaign, yet once he was in office he flip-flopped and started taking full credit for the bubble. What is mind boggling to me is that many people, even in the liberty movement, still choose to dismiss this behavior in favor of worshiping Trump as some kind of hero on a white horse.
This only reinforces my theory that the system is due for another major engineered crash event, and that the ongoing collapse of the US is soon to accelerate. Each case of economic calamity in modern history was preceded by peak delusional optimism and peak greed. When the people traditionally most vigilant against crisis suddenly capitulate and claim victory, this is when reality strikes hardest. This is when the establishment triggers yet another controlled demolition.
In order to determine how long an empire will last, one has to take into account the agenda of the elites that control its institutions. As long as they are in key positions of power within the system and as long as they can inject their own puppet politicians, they will have the ability to influence the collapse timeline of that system.
Can they prolong and stave off crisis? Yes, for a short while. However, once the machine of a crash has been set in motion the best they can do is slow down the Titanic; they cannot change its path towards the iceberg. And frankly, at this point why would they? I hear it argued often that the elites are going to “keep the plates spinning” on the economy and that they don’t want to lose their “golden goose” in the US economy. This reveals an naivety among skeptics of the true agenda.
Firstly, the elites have a highly useful political puppet in the form of Donald Trump; he is useful in that he inspires sharp national division, and, he is a self proclaimed conservative champion and nationalist. If the elites did not trigger a crash under Trump, then this would give the public the impression that conservative ideals and national sovereignty works. This is the opposite of what they want. Why would globalists that want the erasure of nation states and the creation of a centralized socialist “Utopia” seek to make conservatives and nationalists look good? Well, they wouldn’t.
The only concern of the banks is that they do not take the blame as their engineered collapse of the old world order hits the public with increasingly painful consequences. These consequences are already becoming visible.
The next major crash has begun in the form of plunging fundamentals, and far too many conservatives are placing their heads in the sand for the selfish sake of proving the political left wrong. Declines in US manufacturing, US freight, global exports and imports, mass closures in US retail, as well as all time highs in consumer debt, corporate debt and national debt are being shrugged off and rationalized as nothing more than “hiccups” in an otherwise booming economy. The Fed’s repo market purchases, barely keeping up with demand from liquidity starved corporations are also not being taken seriously.
Conservatives and analysts are going to have to forget about supporting Trump, a Rothschild owned proxy, and start acknowledging reality once again. The only question now is, will the elites allow the crash to spread further into mainstreet and strike markets before or after the 2020 election?
As noted above, to predict the timing of a collapse in a nation or empire, one has to examine the agendas of the elites that dominate its institutions. We can gain some sense of timing from the public admissions of globalist organizations like the IMF and the UN. Each has announced the year 2030 as a target date for the finalization of globalization, a cashless society and sustainability goals. This means that the elites have around ten years to create a crisis and then “solve” that crisis with globalism.
Ten years is a narrow window, and if the elites intend for conservatives to take the blame for the next crash, they will have to initiate it soon. They may not have a choice anyway, as the chain of dominoes was already been set in motion by the Fed in 2018 with its liquidity tightening policies.
We can also gauge timing of a collapse to a point by understanding the common tactics the establishment uses to hide what they are doing. Generally, when a collapse is about to accelerate the elites use crisis events as cover to distract the public and produce scapegoats. In my article ‘Globalists Only Need One More Major Event To Finish Sabotaging The Economy’, I outlined three potential distractions that could be used in the near term, and if any of these events took place, then people should watch for the collapse to move faster. Two of these events now appear imminent: The first being a war with Iran, and the second being a ‘No Deal’ Brexit.
Finally, we can take into account the globalist need for a scapegoat, and it appears that conservatives and nationalists are their target for blame. This leaves less than one year for a crisis event if Trump is intended to leave the White House in 2020, or less than four years if he is intended to stay in for a second term. Keep in mind that A LOT can happen in a single year, and a second Trump term is certainly not guaranteed yet.
But why create a collapse in the first place? Crash events allow the establishment to consolidate control over hard assets as poverty forces the population to sell what they have to survive. This poverty also creates fear, which makes the public malleable and easier to control. Each new crisis opens doors to political and social changes, changes which end in less freedom and more centralization. Collapse is a succession of crashes leading to a complete erasure of the original society. It’s not a Mad Max event, it’s a hidden and insidious cancer that takes over the national body and warps it into a wretched form. The collapse is complete when the nation either breaks apart, or is so damaged for so long that no one can remember what it used to look like.
What we are witnessing today is the beginning of a new crash, and the final phases of a collapse of our way of life. The economic boom narrative among conservatives is a farce designed to trick us into complacency. The bubble that we warned about under the Obama Administration has been popped under the Trump Administration. Nothing has changed in the ten years since the 2008 crash except that the motivation for keeping the crash hidden is quickly disappearing.
Crashes are inevitable, but collapse is only possible when the public remains unprepared. Our civilization and its values are under attack, but they can only be destroyed if we stay apathetic to the threat and refuse to prepare for their defense. We must adopt a philosophy of decentralization. We need localized and self sufficient economies, as well as a return to localized production. Beyond that, we have to prepare for the eventuality of a fight. The fate of the US economy has already been sealed, but the people who are destroying it can still be stopped before they use the collapse to force society into subservience. We have to offer security, we have to offer alternatives to the “new world order” and we have to remove the globalist threat permanently.
Make no mistake, we are living in the midst of an epoch moment; the outcome of collapse depends on us and our reactions. This is not the task of the next generation, it is a task for our generation. We do not have another couple of decades to take the danger seriously. The plates are not spinning, they have already dropped.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/03/2020 – 23:45
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2MUNL75 Tyler Durden
How 2019 Changed Migration At The Southern Border
How 2019 Changed Migration At The Southern Border
2019 was a year that changed the face of migration on the U.S. Southwestern border. Not only did many more immigrants try to cross it, but a majority – almost 56 percent – arrived together with their families, fleeing violence in Central America. As a result of this fundamental change in who is seeking to immigrate to the United States, Non-Mexicans outnumbered Mexicans 4:1 at the Southern border in the fiscal year of 2019. These numbers are inferred from arrest records of Customs and Border Protection.
In FY2019, the number of Mexicans arrested at the border was down to 160,000, while the number of non-Mexicans exceeded 680,000. Out of these, 81 percent came from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The number of undocumented immigrants reached its peak in May 2019, when more than 132,000 people were apprehended. In November 2019 (FY2020) was back down to approximately 33,500.
Because many of the new arrivals are applying for asylum, the Trump administration has overhauled its application process, making many asylum seekers wait in camps on the Mexican side without much assistance. These changes were implemented after another system overhaul – the separation of families in U.S. custody and the tendency to release fewer immigration detainees on bail – had caused chaotic scenes at detention centers and an international outcry.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Historically, Mexicans made up the largest share of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. but have been more successful at finding work in Mexico, where the economy is improving and workers are more sought after as the country’s population ages. As more asylum seekers and less work migrants arrive, the U.S. has also slashed the number of refugees it accepts annually to the historic low of 18,000 for 2020.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/03/2020 – 23:25
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2tuPkli Tyler Durden
New York Times Reveals America’s Weapons-Makers Drive Trump-Impeachment
New York Times Reveals America’s Weapons-Makers Drive Trump-Impeachment
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
A remarkably non-propagandistic news-report, in the New York Times, by Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and Mark Mazzetti, included powerful evidence that the impeachment-effort against US President Donald Trump is motivated, in part if not totally, by a desire by US Senators and Representatives – as well as by career employees of the US Departments of Defense, State Department, and other agencies regarding national defense – to increase the sales-volumes of US-made weapons to foreign countries.
Whereas almost all of the contents of that article merely repeat what has already been reported, this article in the Times states repeatedly that boosting corporations such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop-Grumman, has been a major — if not the very top — motivation driving US international relations, and that at least regarding Ukraine, Trump has not been supporting, but has instead been trying to block, those weapons-sales — and creating massive enemies in the US Government as a direct consequence.
The article, issued online on Sunday, December 29th, is titled “Behind the Ukraine Aid Freeze: 84 Days of Conflict and Confusion”, and it quotes many such individuals as saying that President Trump strongly opposed the sale of US weapons to Ukraine, and that,
In an Oval Office meeting on May 23, with Mr. Sondland, Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Blair in attendance, Mr. Trump batted away assurances that [Ukraine’s current President] Mr. Zelensky was committed to confronting corruption. “They are all corrupt, they are all terrible people,” Mr. Trump said, according to testimony in the impeachment inquiry.
In other words, Trump, allegedly, said that he didn’t want “terrible people” to be buying, and to receive, US-made weapons (especially not as US aid — free of charge, a gift from America’s taxpayers).
The article simply assumes that Trump was wrong that “they are all terrible people.”
Indeed, Trump himself has sold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of US-made weapons to the Royal Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, and he refuses to back down about those sales on account of that family’s having been behind the widely-reported torture-murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and on account of their effort since 2015 to starve into submission — by bombing the food-supplies to — the Houthis in adjoining Yemen, and on account of their using US weapons in order to achieve that mass-murdering goal. Consequently, even if Trump is correct about Ukraine’s Government, he would still have a lot of explaining to do, in order to cancel congressionally authorized US weapons-sales to Ukraine but not to Saudi Arabia.
However, a very strong case can be made that he is correct about Ukraine — even if he is wrong about the Sauds. Clearly, the standard line in the US-and-allied media, that the February 2014 overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected Government was a ‘democratic revolution’, instead of a US coup, is based on blatant lies, and the US-imposed coup-regime there is still in force, and has been perpetrating an ethnic cleansing in order to be able to remain in power. In fact, the current Ukrainian President, Volodmyr Zelenskiy, is the self-described “business partner” of, and was brought to power by, the brutal Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, who helped the ‘former’ “Social Nationalist’ (National Socialist or Nazi) Arsen Avakov, plan and execute on 2 May 2014 the burning-alive inside the Odessa Trade Unions Building, of dozens or perhaps over a hundred people who had been printing and distributing leaflets against the coup.
For the New York Times, in its ’news’-report — even this article that’s less prejudiced than most of mainstream US ’news’-reporting is — to simply presume that Trump had no valid reason for asserting what he did against Ukraine’s present (the Obama-installed) Government of Ukraine, constitutes merely anti-Trump (and pro-Obama) propaganda, on their part, and it would be more appropriate in an editorial or op-ed from them than in an alleged news-article, such as here. However, the actual news-value in that article is real. They quoted from “a piece in the conservative Washington Examiner saying that the Pentagon would pay for weapons and other military equipment for Ukraine, bringing American security aid to the country to $1.5 billion since 2014.” This was an anti-Democrat, pro-Republican, newspaper and article, saying:
Kurt Volker, the US special representative for Ukraine, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a Tuesday hearing. “I think it’s also important that Ukraine reciprocate with foreign military purchases from us as well, and I know that they intend to do so.” The assistance comes at a pivotal moment for Ukraine’s newly minted president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a popular comedian who won a landslide victory in April. Zelensky has made ending the Russian-backed insurrection in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region his top political priority.
The Times, in order to appear nonpartisan, was there citing, as authority, the anti-Trump appointee by Trump, Kurt Volker, who said “it’s also important that Ukraine reciprocate with foreign military purchases from us as well, and I know that they intend to do so.” In other words: Volker was saying that Ukraine’s Government would follow through with America’s war against Russia, next door to Ukraine, and that therefore, US taxpayers should pay for Ukraine’s purchases of US-made weapons, such as from Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. He was saying that milking US taxpayers to boost those US corporations’ profits is good, not bad. He was saying that Ukraine is on US taxpayers’ dole, as if the Obama-installed, rabidly anti-Russian, Ukrainian Government is a charity-case which is the US Government’s business (and not merely those private stockholders’ business), and that therefore, Trump should continue Obama’s policy toward Ukraine, of using Ukraine in order ultimately to place on Ukraine’s border with Russia, missiles against Moscow, right across that border. This is what the New York Times is presenting in a favorable light.
Then, the New York Times ‘news’-report said:
For a full month, the fact that Mr. Trump wanted to halt the aid remained confined primarily to a small group of officials.
That ended on July 18, when a group of top administration officials meeting on Ukraine policy — including some calling in from Kyiv — learned from a midlevel budget office official that the president had ordered the aid frozen.
“I and the others on the call sat in astonishment,” William B. Taylor Jr., the top United States diplomat in Ukraine, testified to House investigators. “In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of our strong support for Ukraine was threatened.”
In other words: the Times’s further attack against Trump’s intention not to provide this US taxpayer boondoggle to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, United Technologies, and other US weapons-making corporations — a boondoggle so as to continue free supply to the Obama-installed Ukrainian regime of US-made weapons against Russia — is that career US national-security personnel support and want to continue Obama’s war against Russia.
Then, the Times reported further:
“This is in America’s interest,” Mr. Bolton argued, according to one official briefed on the gathering.
“This defense relationship, we have gotten some really good benefits from it,” Mr. Esper added, noting that most of the money was being spent on military equipment made in the United States.
America’s war against Russia is designed to enrich investors in US ‘Defense’-contractors.
Isn’t it clear, then, what was actually behind 9/11, and behind America’s invasion of (instead of merely Special-Forces operation regarding) Afghanistan in 2001, and invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Libya in 2011, and of Syria in 2012-now, etc., and coup against Ukraine in 2014?
The Times article closes with this impeach-Trump line:
But then, just as suddenly as the hold was imposed, it was lifted. Mr. Trump, apparently unwilling to wage a public battle, told Mr. Portman he would let the money go.
White House aides rushed to notify their counterparts at the Pentagon and elsewhere. The freeze had been lifted. The money could be spent. Get it out the door, they were told.
The debate would now begin as to why the hold was lifted, with Democrats confident they knew the answer.
“I have no doubt about why the president allowed the assistance to go forward,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “He got caught.”
In other words: Trump yielded to the threat of being impeached. Trump, the sales-person who had sold the Saud family hundreds of billions of dollars worth of US weaponry, recognized that unless Russia is going to be the main target of US weaponry, Trump’s own Presidency will be in jeopardy.
US foreign policies are a vast sales-promotion scheme, for America’s billionaires, who crave to control Russia, above all. Trump won’t buck them. Instead, he’s continuing Obama’s policy on Ukraine.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/03/2020 – 23:05
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/37wOnru Tyler Durden
This Is The Top Job For Americans Hoping To Make Six Figures With No Experience
This Is The Top Job For Americans Hoping To Make Six Figures With No Experience
Given the insane cost of college in the US, who can blame prospective students for trying to game out which career paths have the highest short-term payouts immediately after graduation?
To that end, the two men behind the website theinterviewguys.com (h/t to MarketWatch’s Quentin Fottrell) analyzed some data from the BLS’s Occupational Requirements Survey to glean some insights on which jobs offer the highest salaries to those who are just starting their careers post-graduation.
They found that in 2019, the highest-paying job for college graduates that required no previous work experience was being a pharmacist.
Roughly 64% of pharmacist job postings required no previous work experience in the field, while also carrying a median starting salary of $126,000 a year, more than twice the average wage in the US. Next up was another position in the health-care field: Nurse practitioner. 60% of job postings for nurse practitioners required no prior work experience, while advertising a median salary of $114,000.
Of course, the high median salaries in these fields aren’t an accident, or some kind of happy coincidence. Rather, students face a difficult curriculum during their undergrad years, plus at least some grad school. Pharmacy students must obtain a doctoral degree in pharmacy just to be eligible to enter the workforce, and they must also pass the Pharmacy College Admission Test.
Looking further down the income distribution, the pair found that high school teachers and special education teachers most often required no previous work experience (According to their research, the interview guys found that more than 91% of postings in those fields stipulated that no prior experience in the field was necessary).
However, median salaries for these teaching jobs came in at just over $60,000. Police patrol officers also ranked high on the list of jobs requiring no prior experience in the field (something that the SJWs will surely latch on to as an example of the rank injustices permeating the law-enforcement community). The median salary for patrol officer jobs came in at just over $65,400.
For college graduates, jobs offering high starting salaries with little required experience fall into a category that the study’s authors have dubbed “the sweet spot.” After all, one of the most infuriating struggles that recent grads face is surmounting the ‘experience’ barrier. Every year, hundreds of thousands of American students embark on unpaid or for-credit internships in the hopes of gaining precious work experience.
Some employers, in turn, have been castigated for taking advantage of this situation by relying on unpaid interns or “perma-interns” who receive pay, but no other benefits, for their work.
In many professional-class fields, jobs with low starting wages often lead to higher-paying positions after three or four years in the workforce.
And more often than not, jobs with a low barrier to entry pay much less than other positions. But with unemployment at 50-year lows, some jobs that were traditionally seen as menial or blue-collar labor are seeing upward pressure on wages as jobs like long-haul trucker and fast-food cook become increasingly difficult to fill.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/03/2020 – 22:45
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FftXHw Tyler Durden
Physicists Just Achieved Quantum Teleportation Between Computer Chips For The First Time
Physicists Just Achieved Quantum Teleportation Between Computer Chips For The First Time
Authored by Manuel Garcia Aguilar via TheMindUnleashed.com,
“Quantum” may possibly have been one of the most common words we’ve been reading, listening to, and even writing about last year – and there is a big reason for that… quantum is no longer the future, quantum is now.
Physicists have been able to demonstrate quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time.
A few years ago, we were just beginning to understand the main aspects of quantum physics. Even Albert Einstein died not agreeing with a lot of the theories enclosing this new world for physics because in some aspects it was not “matching” the special relativity theory (that’s one of the reasons why the “theory of everything,” explaining how everything was created in a physical perspective hasn’t been published yet).
But not understanding everything about quantum physics doesn’t mean we can’t take advantage of its amazing properties, one of them being entanglement. Entanglement describes how when a pair or group of particles is generated, interact, or share spatial proximity and the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently, this is one of the fundamental contrasts between classical and quantum physics.
Scientists from the University of Bristol, in collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), have successfully developed chip-scale devices that are able to exploit the application of quantum physics by generating and manipulating single particles of light within programmable nano-scale circuits.
These chips encode quantum information in light generated inside the circuits and can process information with high efficiency and extremely low noise. This could be translated into an ability to create more complex quantum circuits that nowadays are required in quantum computing and communications, that in the present, are the most powerful supercomputers that exist.
Quantum teleportation offers quantum state transfer of a quantum particle from one place to another by utilizing entanglement. Establishing this entangled communication in the lab was not easy stuff.
“We were able to demonstrate a high-quality entanglement link across two chips in the lab, where photons on either chip share a single quantum state,” Bristol Co-author Dan Llewellyn said.
“Each chip was then fully programmed to perform a range of demonstrations which utilize the entanglement… the flagship demonstration was a two-chip teleportation experiment, whereby the individual quantum state of a particle is transmitted across the two chips after a quantum measurement is performed. This measurement utilizes the strange behavior of quantum physics, which simultaneously collapses the entanglement link and transfers the particle state to another particle already on the receiver chip.”
Dr. Imad Faruque, another co-author, added:
“Based on our previous result of on-chip high-quality single-photon sources, we have built an even more complex circuit containing four sources… all of these sources are tested and found to be nearly identical emitting nearly identical photons, which is an essential criterion for the set of experiments we had performed, such as entanglement swapping.”
The results showed efficiency in the quantum teleportation of 91 percent and other important features such as entanglement swapping used for quantum repeaters and networks and four-photon GHZ states, required in quantum computing and quantum internet.
These developments are predicted to have immense impacts on modern society, quantum physics is here to stay.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/03/2020 – 22:25
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/39Hzjtd Tyler Durden
Amid Flavored-Vaping ‘Ban’, Smoking Loses Its Cool
Amid Flavored-Vaping ‘Ban’, Smoking Loses Its Cool
13% of Americans smoke e-cigarettes, but that is nothing compared to China, where 1-in-5 ‘vape’…
You will find more infographics at Statista
Worse still, at least 25 percent of 12th grade students have tried nicotine vaping products, according to a poll conducted by New England Journal of Medicine, cited by the New York Times.
You will find more infographics at Statista
But now, the Trump administration on Thursday announced plans to bar sales of flavored e-cigarette cartridges, except for menthol and tobacco flavors.
“The United States has never seen an epidemic of substance use arise as quickly as our current epidemic of youth use of e-cigarettes,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement about the change, which goes into effect in 30 days.
The FDA released its statement announcing the new policy on Thursday, saying the move was not a “ban” but an announcement prioritizing the agency’s law enforcement powers against tobacco products. The agency “has attempted to balance the public health concerns,” the statement said.
Will this ‘ban’ push smokers back to ‘real’ cigarettes?
While lighting up a cigarette was once considered a sign of class and sophistication or, at the very least, an act of coolness, smoking seems to have lost some of its spark in recent years. According to a new report published by the Federal Trade Commission, cigarette sales in the United States dropped to 216.9 billion in 2018, the lowest level since the FTC started tracking cigarette sales in 1967.
As Statista’s Felix Richter shows the the chart below, cigarette sales have declined more or less continuously over the past 40 years, dropping by 66 percent since peaking in the early 1980s.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Over the same period, cigarette advertising and promotional spending increased from $1.2 billion in 1980 to $8.4 billion in 2018, most of which came in the form of price discounts for retailers and wholesalers.
Interestingly, the number of cigarette smokers in the United States, while also declining, has not dropped at a similar rate as cigarette sales over the past four decades. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an estimated 34.2 million adults in the U.S. were smoking cigarettes in 2018, down 34 percent from 51.6 million in 1980.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/03/2020 – 22:05
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/39DlGuU Tyler Durden