New HK Law Includes Penalties Of Life In Prison & ‘Closed’ Trials To Protect “State Secrets” Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/30/2020 – 17:45
Despite Beijing officials’ denials, it’s been fiercely debated in the past days and weeks to what degree the now officially passed new controversial law for Hong Kong that would allow authorities to crack down on pro-democracy protesters and “foreign forces” who attempt to destabilize the semi-autonomous region can be applied retroactively.
Hours ago the law was finally published, though an official English translation has been slow to emerge:
Expected to take effect immediately, starting Wednesday, some crimes could be published with a maximum lifetime jail sentence.
And there’s no independent review, instead an incredibly opaque process where “closed” trials can take place on the basis of “national security”. Axios points out in its initial review of the text:
It includes sweeping definitions of crimes and penalties that gives the government broad power to limit people’s political freedom, while explicitly denying any kind of independent oversight of the law or how it is carried out.
Currently the US, Britain, and European countries are pouring through it, readying a reaction. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Tuesday that the law’s contents will determine Britain’s next step.
“Despite the urging of the international community, Beijing has chosen not to step back from imposing this legislation,” Raab said in a statement. “China has ignored its international obligations regarding Hong Kong. This is a grave step, which is deeply troubling. We urgently need to see the full legislation, and will use that to determine whether there has been a breach of the Joint Declaration and what further action the UK will take.”
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, via Reuters.
As expected, the sweeping legislation is ambiguous enough on the ‘foreign interference’ angle that it leaves Beijing as the ultimate interpreter in terms of the law’s application.
It’s further still ambiguous on the question of its having a retroactive effect.
* * *
Here are some of the brief early highlights as translated and paraphrased by Hong Kong politics specialist Kris Cheng:
max life imprisonment
anyone convicted cannot run for public office (or be disqualified) without mentioning for how long
cases involving national secrets will not have open trials
uncertain if have retroacting effect – no bail for suspects
suspects may hire lawyers, but it may be possible after first interrogation
chief executive selects judges, judges can be disqualified if they made remarks endangering national security
cases can be heard behind closed doors to protect national secrets
Beijing has jurisdiction for cases when foreign forces were interfering, when Hong Kong gov cannot effectively implement the law, when China faces substantial national security threats
The law applies to foreigners committing the said crimes outside Hong Kong
East Asia analyst Tom Fowdy also noted the law is designed to have a chilling effect on the kind of mass protests and unrest seen over much of the past year:
Article 24 In order to coerce the Central People’s Government, the HK SAR Government or international organizations or intimidate the public in order to achieve political ideas, organize, plan, implement, participate in or threaten to implement the following terrorist activities
Leading a terrorist organization carries a minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life in prison, but it’s unclear what sorts of organizations that designation will apply to.
There is concern in Hong Kong that the prohibition of “terrorist activity” will be applied broadly and arbitrarily. The law does get specific in some instances, with “destroying a vehicle” cited as possible terrorist activity.
The law requires Hong Kong to carry out “national security education” — a particularly controversial element given local resistance to propaganda in schools.
The law also requires Hong Kong’s police to establish a national security division, and states that it may hire “specialists and technicians from outside the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” — meaning mainland China.
Ultimately, it’s clearly a huge blow to Hong Kong independence activists:
Imagine turning Hong Kong into a state of chaos for a full year and destroying everything in the belief you could force “five demands” on the government and then this is what you end up with in the end.
Head over to Google today and you’ll see one of its famous doodle sketches in the form of Marsha P. Johnson, the LGBT rights activist, with her signature flower crown, gender-bending ensemble, and wide smile.
In recent years, Johnson has been credited as a “trans woman of color” who started the Stonewall Riots and thus, in some sense, the LGBT rights movement. While it’s undeniable that she was a charismatic central figure in that story, it’s far from clear that she was one of the main instigators at Stonewall. Even more fraught: It’s far from clear she was trans.
On one level, it doesn’t really matter. She was an inspiring person who fought for civil rights despite huge obstacles in her way, and that’s enough to celebrate. But being on the right side of history—as so many activists in the intersectional social justice space believe they are—doesn’t give you license to rewrite it. In the end, the facts matter, even when they are slightly less convenient for your narrative.
In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, New York City police officers descended on the Stonewall Inn to conduct what had become their typical, humiliating, and brutal raids on gay establishments. Patrons weren’t having it. Several days of riots followed.
In popular culture, the Stonewall Riots are widely viewed as pivotal. But there’s also a mythic air to the protests. Folkloric tellings and retellings change with each passing year: Who spearheaded the charge against authority? Who threw that fateful first brick? Or was it a shot glass?
The answers to those questions largely remain unanswered, but in recent years one narrative has taken hold. The claim that it was “trans women of color“—especially Johnson—who led the uprising has been repeated uncritically by politicians, pundits, and in the national media.
But it isn’t difficult to figure out that the Stonewall riots did not begin with Johnson. For one thing, Johnson said so herself. “I was uptown and I didn’t get downtown until about two o’clock. When I got downtown, the place was already on fire, and there was a raid already,” she told historian Eric Marcus in 1987. “The riots had already started.”
Yet in recent years, an alternate narrative has shifted from urban legend to indisputable fact. Johnson was “one of three individuals” who first “incited pushback against police,” writesRolling Stone. “It started when Marsha P. Johnson cried ‘I got my civil rights!’ and threw a shot glass into a mirror,” says a Forbes contributor, whose piece was selected and promoted as an Editors’ Pick.
“Transgender women of color led the uprising at the Stonewall Inn 51 years ago on Sunday,” The New York Timesclaimed, though the paper later ghost-edited that line and appended a correction.
What’s more, there’s no evidence Johnson used the term transgender for herself. Though it’s true that the term was not nearly as widespread as it is today, it wasn’t unheard of. And Johnson—who used both “he” and “she” pronouns, and wore both male and female clothing—identified as a drag queen, as well as “gay” and as a “transvestite.” To conflate those identities with transgenderism trivializes and misappropriates the unique struggles those communities face.
Intersectionality—while built around the well-intentioned idea that we should be vigilant and caring toward society’s most vulnerable—can end up encouraging activists to prioritize identity at the expense of the truth. Saying your movement was started by a “transgender woman of color” checks a lot of boxes and confers the proper legitimacy on your cause.
Exactly how Johnson identified shouldn’t really be the main focus, though present-day activists have placed undue emphasis on it. Johnson was a determined activist for the cause and a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front.
We could all stand to learn from Johnson, whose chosen middle initial—”P”—stood for “Pay it no mind,” a common response she’d give those who’d inquire about her gender. She begged not to be put into a box. Today’s activists have done the opposite.
On a broader level, such retroactive reimagining of history makes it hard to actually learn from the past. “Stonewall Inn was not a very hospitable place to those who were then referred to as transsexuals or transvestites,” says James Kirchick, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “A lot of gay bars were segregated in that way, and a lot of gay bars were racially segregated, maybe not officially or legally, but unofficially certainly.” Those like Johnson, then, were often rejected by the community they wanted to join. Members of that same community have now co-opted and reimagined Johnson for their own purposes.
Put differently, you could say Johnson was likely one step ahead of her peers. But that was because she understood what it was like not to have a seat at the table, much less to be at the head of it. “In some ways,” writes journalist Andrew Sullivan at New York, “it was the rebellion of those with much more to lose that marked a shift in consciousness.”
Perhaps ironically, the left has often led the charge against attempts to change history and decried the effects of such revisionism. When it comes to the debate around Confederate monuments, for instance, many left-leaning folks have rightly resisted false portrayals surrounding the circumstances in which those statues were erected. To rewrite the Civil War narrative, they say, is to erase a savage history of human suffering, one that we’re still trying to learn from today.
It’s for that same reason that Johnson’s history—her actual history, to the extent that we can know it—should be told truthfully, and in full.
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Despite 33 states with over 10 percent unemployment rates, gross domestic product quarterly dives of over 50 percent, and a resurgence of COVID-19 infection numbers making both those conditions seem unlikely to turn around soon, the stock market as a whole remains strangely healthy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is actually up over 1,500 points since mid-March when the coronavirus shutdowns began in earnest (though still down more than twice that number of points from the optimistic beginning of 2020).
While ultimately the only sure reason why the stock market does what it does is “the people buying and selling stocks make decisions that lead to those prices,” one very likely reason those making such decisions seem to think staying in and even buying more is a good idea right now is a concerted government effort to socialize the risk inherent in buying stocks across the economy.
The establishment market-watchers at The Wall Street Journalspelled out this thesis yesterday: “Expectations that the U.S. Federal Reserve will keep injecting liquidity into the market have helped fuel rebounds each time fallout from the coronavirus pandemic have sparked selloffs,” with one analyst insisting that because of Fed policy, “There’s a safety net under the bond market and the equity market.”
This judgment that government policy wants to get stock buyers and sellers to ignore grim economic reality via what amounts in part to special favors to big corporations is widespread. One of the reasons why is the Federal Reserve’s eager buying up of corporate debt this year.
In a note to clients Monday, Goldman Sachs said the Fed’s announcement that it would buy corporate bonds in the primary and secondary markets was enough to quickly provide relief. “The mere presence of the backstops helped to restore the flow of private credit,” chief economist Jan Hatzius said.
Lip service to the idea that these policies create problems for those not getting the help is given, as CNN notes. (“There are fears that an ongoing commitment to corporate bond purchases could create a so-called ‘moral hazard,’ encouraging companies to borrow more from less-selective lenders on the expectation that Fed intervention would limit risks.”) But such considerations almost never stop the government from doing what it can to help out Big Money.
Hussein Sayed, chief market strategist at FXTM, was warning his clients this week, CNN reported, that “monetary policy stimulus which explains most of the recovery in asset prices from the March lows will become less effective going forward if it doesn’t translate into a rebound in economic activity and better prospects for corporate earnings.”
The Washington Post reminds us that the “central bank has said it launched the corporate debt program to support the markets,” although it’s “unclear what the implications of its actions will be” as “the Treasury Department has devoted $75 billion to the Fed’s two corporate credit facilities as part of a pot of money allocated by the Cares Act….The Fed has bought almost $429 million in individual bonds,” buying them both directly from the company and from investors or funds that already owned previously issued bonds.
Aaron Klein, policy director of the Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution, is quoted in the Post asking: “Why is the solution buying Apple, Microsoft and Comcast debt? Or eBay or Google?…Is the problem in America that the holders of Apple stock need more help? Is the problem that investors in Google debt are likely to suffer catastrophic and unexpected losses from the covid shutdown?”
As Politico reported regarding this latest round of Federal Reserve corporate debt buying, “most of the debt has to be considered investment-grade by credit ratings services, meaning it carries minimal risk to investors. But otherwise eligible firms that have been downgraded a notch to junk status since late March will still be included in the program.” Even if no actual straight-up losses to the government (read: all of us) arise from such debt buying, their very existence distorts where investment and growth goes, to the advantage of big business’ being temporarily propped up.
As James Dorn of the Cato Institute further explained:
The promise of supporting corporate bond prices and making loans to highly leveraged companies undermines corrective market forces: real markets are supplanted by pseudo markets in which the central bank will be subsidizing distressed companies and politicizing the allocation of capital. Initially private investors may purchase more corporate debt, but if corporations use that credit to pay off existing debt, and do not invest in productive capital, losses may continue. Private investors then will have an incentive to offload their holdings to the SPV [the Fed’s “special purpose vehicle” for such debt buys], effectively socializing those losses. Those who value private, free markets recognize that the Fed’s promise to revitalize corporate debt markets is, in reality, a step toward market socialism.
The Federal Reserve has since the 2008-09 economic crisis become more and more a holder of financial assets of all sorts, a change whose risks are detailed in this 2014 Reason feature, “How the Fed Got Huge,” by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.
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via IFTTT
Head over to Google today and you’ll see one of its famous doodle sketches in the form of Marsha P. Johnson, the LGBT rights activist, with her signature flower crown, gender-bending ensemble, and wide smile.
In recent years, Johnson has been credited as a “trans woman of color” who started the Stonewall Riots and thus, in some sense, the LGBT rights movement. While it’s undeniable that she was a charismatic central figure in that story, it’s far from clear that she was one of the main instigators at Stonewall. Even more fraught: It’s far from clear she was trans.
On one level, it doesn’t really matter. She was an inspiring person who fought for civil rights despite huge obstacles in her way, and that’s enough to celebrate. But being on the right side of history—as so many activists in the intersectional social justice space believe they are—doesn’t give you license to rewrite it. In the end, the facts matter, even when they are slightly less convenient for your narrative.
In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, New York City police officers descended on the Stonewall Inn to conduct what had become their typical, humiliating, and brutal raids on gay establishments. Patrons weren’t having it. Several days of riots followed.
In popular culture, the Stonewall Riots are widely viewed as pivotal. But there’s also a mythic air to the protests. Folkloric tellings and retellings change with each passing year: Who spearheaded the charge against authority? Who threw that fateful first brick? Or was it a shot glass?
The answers to those questions largely remain unanswered, but in recent years one narrative has taken hold. The claim that it was “trans women of color“—especially Johnson—who led the uprising has been repeated uncritically by politicians, pundits, and in the national media.
But it isn’t difficult to figure out that the Stonewall riots did not begin with Johnson. For one thing, Johnson said so herself. “I was uptown and I didn’t get downtown until about two o’clock. When I got downtown, the place was already on fire, and there was a raid already,” she told historian Eric Marcus in 1987. “The riots had already started.”
Yet in recent years, an alternate narrative has shifted from urban legend to indisputable fact. Johnson was “one of three individuals” who first “incited pushback against police,” writesRolling Stone. “It started when Marsha P. Johnson cried ‘I got my civil rights!’ and threw a shot glass into a mirror,” says a Forbes contributor, whose piece was selected and promoted as an Editors’ Pick.
“Transgender women of color led the uprising at the Stonewall Inn 51 years ago on Sunday,” The New York Timesclaimed, though the paper later ghost-edited that line and appended a correction.
What’s more, there’s no evidence Johnson used the term transgender for herself. Though it’s true that the term was not nearly as widespread as it is today, it wasn’t unheard of. And Johnson—who used both “he” and “she” pronouns, and wore both male and female clothing—identified as a drag queen, as well as “gay” and as a “transvestite.” To conflate those identities with transgenderism trivializes and misappropriates the unique struggles those communities face.
Intersectionality—while built around the well-intentioned idea that we should be vigilant and caring toward society’s most vulnerable—can end up encouraging activists to prioritize identity at the expense of the truth. Saying your movement was started by a “transgender woman of color” checks a lot of boxes and confers the proper legitimacy on your cause.
Exactly how Johnson identified shouldn’t really be the main focus, though present-day activists have placed undue emphasis on it. Johnson was a determined activist for the cause and a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front.
We could all stand to learn from Johnson, whose chosen middle initial—”P”—stood for “Pay it no mind,” a common response she’d give those who’d inquire about her gender. She begged not to be put into a box. Today’s activists have done the opposite.
On a broader level, such retroactive reimagining of history makes it hard to actually learn from the past. “Stonewall Inn was not a very hospitable place to those who were then referred to as transsexuals or transvestites,” says James Kirchick, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “A lot of gay bars were segregated in that way, and a lot of gay bars were racially segregated, maybe not officially or legally, but unofficially certainly.” Those like Johnson, then, were often rejected by the community they wanted to join. Members of that same community have now co-opted and reimagined Johnson for their own purposes.
Put differently, you could say Johnson was likely one step ahead of her peers. But that was because she understood what it was like not to have a seat at the table, much less to be at the head of it. “In some ways,” writes journalist Andrew Sullivan at New York, “it was the rebellion of those with much more to lose that marked a shift in consciousness.”
Perhaps ironically, the left has often led the charge against attempts to change history and decried the effects of such revisionism. When it comes to the debate around Confederate monuments, for instance, many left-leaning folks have rightly resisted false portrayals surrounding the circumstances in which those statues were erected. To rewrite the Civil War narrative, they say, is to erase a savage history of human suffering, one that we’re still trying to learn from today.
It’s for that same reason that Johnson’s history—her actual history, to the extent that we can know it—should be told truthfully, and in full.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2VAzv7Q
via IFTTT
Despite 33 states with over 10 percent unemployment rates, gross domestic product quarterly dives of over 50 percent, and a resurgence of COVID-19 infection numbers making both those conditions seem unlikely to turn around soon, the stock market as a whole remains strangely healthy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is actually up over 1,500 points since mid-March when the coronavirus shutdowns began in earnest (though still down more than twice that number of points from the optimistic beginning of 2020).
While ultimately the only sure reason why the stock market does what it does is “the people buying and selling stocks make decisions that lead to those prices,” one very likely reason those making such decisions seem to think staying in and even buying more is a good idea right now is a concerted government effort to socialize the risk inherent in buying stocks across the economy.
The establishment market-watchers at The Wall Street Journalspelled out this thesis yesterday: “Expectations that the U.S. Federal Reserve will keep injecting liquidity into the market have helped fuel rebounds each time fallout from the coronavirus pandemic have sparked selloffs,” with one analyst insisting that because of Fed policy, “There’s a safety net under the bond market and the equity market.”
This judgment that government policy wants to get stock buyers and sellers to ignore grim economic reality via what amounts in part to special favors to big corporations is widespread. One of the reasons why is the Federal Reserve’s eager buying up of corporate debt this year.
In a note to clients Monday, Goldman Sachs said the Fed’s announcement that it would buy corporate bonds in the primary and secondary markets was enough to quickly provide relief. “The mere presence of the backstops helped to restore the flow of private credit,” chief economist Jan Hatzius said.
Lip service to the idea that these policies create problems for those not getting the help is given, as CNN notes. (“There are fears that an ongoing commitment to corporate bond purchases could create a so-called ‘moral hazard,’ encouraging companies to borrow more from less-selective lenders on the expectation that Fed intervention would limit risks.”) But such considerations almost never stop the government from doing what it can to help out Big Money.
Hussein Sayed, chief market strategist at FXTM, was warning his clients this week, CNN reported, that “monetary policy stimulus which explains most of the recovery in asset prices from the March lows will become less effective going forward if it doesn’t translate into a rebound in economic activity and better prospects for corporate earnings.”
The Washington Post reminds us that the “central bank has said it launched the corporate debt program to support the markets,” although it’s “unclear what the implications of its actions will be” as “the Treasury Department has devoted $75 billion to the Fed’s two corporate credit facilities as part of a pot of money allocated by the Cares Act….The Fed has bought almost $429 million in individual bonds,” buying them both directly from the company and from investors or funds that already owned previously issued bonds.
Aaron Klein, policy director of the Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution, is quoted in the Post asking: “Why is the solution buying Apple, Microsoft and Comcast debt? Or eBay or Google?…Is the problem in America that the holders of Apple stock need more help? Is the problem that investors in Google debt are likely to suffer catastrophic and unexpected losses from the covid shutdown?”
As Politico reported regarding this latest round of Federal Reserve corporate debt buying, “most of the debt has to be considered investment-grade by credit ratings services, meaning it carries minimal risk to investors. But otherwise eligible firms that have been downgraded a notch to junk status since late March will still be included in the program.” Even if no actual straight-up losses to the government (read: all of us) arise from such debt buying, their very existence distorts where investment and growth goes, to the advantage of big business’ being temporarily propped up.
As James Dorn of the Cato Institute further explained:
The promise of supporting corporate bond prices and making loans to highly leveraged companies undermines corrective market forces: real markets are supplanted by pseudo markets in which the central bank will be subsidizing distressed companies and politicizing the allocation of capital. Initially private investors may purchase more corporate debt, but if corporations use that credit to pay off existing debt, and do not invest in productive capital, losses may continue. Private investors then will have an incentive to offload their holdings to the SPV [the Fed’s “special purpose vehicle” for such debt buys], effectively socializing those losses. Those who value private, free markets recognize that the Fed’s promise to revitalize corporate debt markets is, in reality, a step toward market socialism.
The Federal Reserve has since the 2008-09 economic crisis become more and more a holder of financial assets of all sorts, a change whose risks are detailed in this 2014 Reason feature, “How the Fed Got Huge,” by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.
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In early 1775, Benjamin Franklin and his European colleague, Charles Dumas, developed a secret method of communicating with each other.
Dumas had spent years gathering intelligence in Europe to assist the Americans in their revolt against Britain. But the two needed a secure way to pass information across the Atlantic.
So they developed a special cipher– a crude form of encryption where letters and words were substituted for numerals.
The decryption key changed with every letter; so, for example, in a letter from Franklin dated March 2, 1781, the word “MERCHANT” was written as “23. 3. 4. 13. 6. 14. 24. 18.”
At the same time, the physician James Jay (brother to the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay) developed an invisible ink so that revolutionary leaders could communicate in secret.
These encrypted communications became critical to the Revolution. And it’s safe to say there would probably not be a United States if they hadn’t developed a secure way to send information.
Ironically, politicians are trying to destroy modern methods of encryption.
Over the past few months while everyone has been in mandatory isolation, cowering in fear in their homes… and over the past few weeks while the Land of the Free has been consumed with rage…
…a few US Senators have once again proven that chilling political adage– ‘never let a good crisis go to waste.’
Exhibit A: Senate Bill 4051, the “Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act”, which was quietly introduced last week when everyone’s attention was consumed elsewhere.
First thing’s first, like all freedom-killing bills, this one has a catchy name.
The Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act is LEAD for short, as in “Move over China! The Land of the Free will LEAD the way in destroying the last remaining freedoms of its citizens.”
(In that way it seems more like ‘lead’, the highly toxic metal that poisons the brain and creates severe intellectual disability.)
At its core, the LEAD Act is an encryption killer. It aims to require technology companies to build ‘back doors’ into their products to ensure that the government can remotely access your data, your device, and your life.
This is nothing short of earth shattering.
Apple, for example, currently provides device encryption on its iPhones and iPads. And once you encrypt your device, only YOU can decrypt it. Apple can’t. Hackers can’t. And the government can’t.
So if your device is ever stolen (or confiscated), your data cannot be compromised.
Under the LEAD Act, this practice would become illegal. Apple would no longer be able to offer device encryption, and they’d have to provide a way for the federal government to remotely access your device, and all of its contents.
The same goes for your favorite chat applications.
WhatsApp, for example, is one of the most popular texting apps in the world. A few years ago, Facebook (which owns WhatsApp) began implementing end-to-end encryption for all WhatsApp data.
This means that any message you send someone via WhatsApp is immediately encrypted the moment it leaves your phone.
That messages arrives to the WhatsApp servers fully encrypted. So any hacker (or Facebook engineer) who intercepts the data will see nothing but a garbled mess.
And the message isn’t decrypted until it arrives to the intended recipient’s device. So the only people who can see the message in “clear text” are the two people participating in the conversation.
No one else can eavesdrop, or download the data.
But again, under the LEAD Act, this too would become illegal… and Facebook will be obligated to build in a ‘back door’ for the government to remotely access your conversations.
LEAD also requires developers of operating systems, like Microsoft Windows and Apple’s MacOS, to provide backdoor access to your computer.
It’s extraordinary to think of how far-reaching the effects of this legislation will go.
For example, do you use an online password manager like OnePassword?
They will also be required to give the government access to your data… which essentially would give the government access to EVERYTHING you do online.
Do you upload files and photos to iCloud? Yup. That too. Apple will be required to build a back door and give the government access to your data.
Any ‘zero knowledge’ encryption, whether it’s for storing files, sharing photos, texting friends, making video calls, sending encrypted emails, etc., will become illegal under this legislation.
And to be crystal clear about what that means, CRYPTOCURRENCY will effectively become illegal under the LEAD Act as well.
That’s right. Cryptocurrency relies on data encryption too.
Your ‘wallet’ is essentially a public key / private key combination. And in theory, only you are supposed to have access.
But that’s exactly what this legislation aims to prevent. The government wants backdoor access to everything.
Honestly this legislation would be hilarious if it weren’t actually true… because it shows how totally clueless these people really are.
The politicians are calling it as ‘lawful access’, as if only the government would be able to use these back doors. Clearly these people understand nothing about cybersecurity.
There is no such thing as a ‘back door’ that only the government can access.
Once a technology company creates a way to remotely access a device, then that back door is available to ANYONE who can crack it.
It’s not like some hacker, or foreign intelligence agency, is going to probe the back door on your iPhone and say, “Oh, nevermind, this is only for the US government. I guess I’ll try to find another way in.”
If this law passes, not only will the government be able to access your devices, but hackers will have endless new treasures of data to steal… courtesy of the United States Senate.
Global Hydroxychloroquine Study To Resume After Positive Trial Results Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/30/2020 – 17:05
UK regulators have approved the resumption of a global trial aimed at determining whether hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are effective in preventing COVID-19 infections in healthcare settings, according to Reuters.
The trial, known as COPCOV, was paused after another British study found the drugs to be ineffective in treating the virus, however the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has now allowed the research to resume following positive COPCOV trial results.
“Participants will take the study drugs each day for a period of three months, and will be followed closely to see how well the drug is tolerated, whether they contract the virus, and if they do, whether they develop mild or more severe COVID-19,” according to Tropical Health Network.
According to Reuters, COPCOV is a “randomised, placebo-controlled trial that is aiming to enrol 40,000 healthcare workers and other at-risk staff around the world,” conducted by Oxford University’s Bangkok-based Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU).
The study is funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Unsurprisingly, their website makes no mention of the inclusion of zinc – largely credited by pro-HCQ physicians as the key ingredient to the treatment.
U.S. President Donald Trump said in March hydroxychloroquine could be a game-changer and then said he was taking it himself, even after the U.S. regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), advised that its efficacy and safety were unproven.
The FDA later revoked emergency use authorisation for the drugs to treat COVID-19, after trials showed they were of no benefit as treatments.
But Oxford University’s Professor Nicholas White, who is co-leading the COPCOV trial, said studies of the drugs as a potential preventative medicine had not yet given a conclusive answer. –Reuters
“Hydroxychloroquine could still prevent infections, and this needs to be determined in a randomised controlled trial,” said Oxford’s White, adding “The question whether (it) can prevent COVID-19 or not remains as pertinent as ever.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3ikn0qG Tyler Durden
A few thoughts on America’s smash-hit #1 guide to egghead racialism…
A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.
It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?
DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory.White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.
If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”
DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.
DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier.
Writers like DiAngelo like to make ugly verbs out of ugly nouns and ugly nouns out of ugly verbs (there are countless permutations on centering and privileging alone). In a world where only a few ideas are considered important, redundancy is encouraged, e.g. “To be less white is to break with white silence and white solidarity, to stop privileging the comfort of white people,” or “Ruth Frankenberg, a premier white scholar in the field of whiteness, describes whiteness as multidimensional…”
DiAngelo writes like a person who was put in timeout as a child for speaking clearly. “When there is disequilibrium in the habitus — when social cues are unfamiliar and/or when they challenge our capital — we use strategies to regain our balance,” she says (“People taken out of their comfort zones find ways to deal,” according to Google Translate). Ideas that go through the English-DiAngelo translator usually end up significantly altered, as in this key part of the book when she addresses Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” speech:
One line of King’s speech in particular—that one day he might be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin—was seized upon by the white public because the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend that we don’t see race, and racism will end. Color blindness was now promoted as the remedy for racism, with white people insisting that they didn’t see race or, if they did, that it had no meaning to them.
That this speech was held up as the framework for American race relations for more than half a century precisely because people of all races understood King to be referring to a difficult and beautiful long-term goal worth pursuing is discounted, of course. White Fragility is based upon the idea that human beings are incapable of judging each other by the content of their character, and if people of different races think they are getting along or even loving one another, they probably need immediate antiracism training. This is an important passage because rejection of King’s “dream” of racial harmony — not even as a description of the obviously flawed present, but as the aspirational goal of a better future — has become a central tenet of this brand of antiracist doctrine mainstream press outlets are rushing to embrace.
The book’s most amazing passage concerns the story of Jackie Robinson:
The story of Jackie Robinson is a classic example of how whiteness obscures racism by rendering whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible. Robinson is often celebrated as the first African American to break the color line…
While Robinson was certainly an amazing baseball player, this story line depicts him as racially special, a black man who broke the color line himself. The subtext is that Robinson finally had what it took to play with whites, as if no black athlete before him was strong enough to compete at that level. Imagine if instead, the story went something like this: “Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.”
There is not a single baseball fan anywhere – literally not one, except perhaps Robin DiAngelo, I guess – who believes Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier because he “finally had what it took to play with whites.” Everyone familiar with this story understands that Robinson had to be exceptional, both as a player and as a human being, to confront the racist institution known as Major League Baseball. His story has always been understood as a complex, long-developing political tale about overcoming violent systemic oppression. For DiAngelo to suggest history should re-cast Robinson as “the first black man whites allowed to play major league baseball” is grotesque and profoundly belittling.
Robinson’s story moreover did not render “whites, white privilege, and racist institutions invisible.” It did the opposite. Robinson uncovered a generation of job inflation for mediocre white ballplayers in a dramatic example of “privilege” that was keenly understood by baseball fans of all races fifty years before White Fragility. Baseball statistics nerds have long been arguing about whether to put asterisks next to the records of white stars who never had to pitch to Josh Gibson, or hit against prime Satchel Paige or Webster McDonald. Robinson’s story, on every level, exposed and evangelized the truth about the very forces DiAngelo argues it rendered “invisible.”
It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.
Yet these ideas are taking America by storm. The movement that calls itself “antiracism” – I think it deserves that name a lot less than “pro-lifers” deserve theirs and am amazed journalists parrot it without question – is complete in its pessimism about race relations. It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.
Where we reside on the spectrum of righteousness is, they say, almost entirely determined by birth, a view probably shared by a lot of 4chan readers. With a full commitment to the program of psychological ablutions outlined in the book, one may strive for a “less white identity,” but again, DiAngelo explicitly rejects the Kingian goal of just trying to love one another as impossible, for two people born with different skin colors.
This dingbat racialist cult, which has no art, music, literature, and certainly no comedy, is the vision of “progress” institutional America has chosen to endorse in the Trump era. Why? Maybe because it fits. It won’t hurt the business model of the news media, which for decades now has been monetizing division and has known how to profit from moral panics and witch hunts since before Fleet street discovered the Mod/Rocker wars.
Democratic Party leaders, pioneers of the costless gesture, have already embraced this performative race politics as a useful tool for disciplining apostates like Bernie Sanders. Bernie took off in presidential politics as a hard-charging crusader against a Wall Street-fattened political establishment, and exited four years later a self-flagellating, defeated old white man who seemed to regret not apologizing more for his third house. Clad in kente cloth scarves, the Democrats who crushed him will burn up CSPAN with homilies on privilege even as they reassure donors they’ll stay away from Medicare for All or the carried interest tax break.
For corporate America the calculation is simple. What’s easier, giving up business models based on war, slave labor, and regulatory arbitrage, or benching Aunt Jemima? There’s a deal to be made here, greased by the fact that the “antiracism” prophets promoted in books like White Fragility share corporate Americas instinctive hostility to privacy, individual rights, freedom of speech, etc.
Corporate America doubtless views the current protest movement as something that can be addressed as an H.R. matter, among other things by hiring thousands of DiAngelos to institute codes for the proper mode of Black-white workplace interaction.
If you’re wondering what that might look like, here’s DiAngelo explaining how she handled the fallout from making a bad joke while she was “facilitating antiracism training” at the office of one of her clients.
When one employee responds negatively to the training, DiAngelo quips the person must have been put off by one of her Black female team members: “The white people,” she says, “were scared by Deborah’s hair.” (White priests of antiracism like DiAngelo seem universally to be more awkward and clueless around minorities than your average Trump-supporting construction worker).
DiAngelo doesn’t grasp the joke flopped and has to be told two days later that one of her web developer clients was offended. In despair, she writes, “I seek out a friend who is white and has a solid understanding of cross-racial dynamics.”
After DiAngelo confesses her feelings of embarrassment, shame and guilt to the enlightened white cross-racial dynamics expert (everyone should have such a person on speed-dial), she approaches the offended web developer. She asks, “Would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated toward you in that meeting?” At which point the web developer agrees, leading to a conversation establishing the parameters of problematic joke resolution.
This dialogue straight out of South Park – “Is it okay if I touch your penis? No, you may not touch my penis at this time!” – has a good shot of becoming standard at every transnational corporation, law firm, university, newsroom, etc.
Of course the upside such consultants can offer is an important one. Under pressure from people like this, companies might address long-overdue inequities in boardroom diversity.
The downside, which we’re already seeing, is that organizations everywhere will embrace powerful new tools for solving professional disputes, through a never-ending purge. One of the central tenets of DiAngelo’s book (and others like it) is that racism cannot be eradicated and can only be managed through constant, “lifelong” vigilance, much like the battle with addiction. A useful theory, if your business is selling teams of high-priced toxicity-hunters to corporations as next-generation versions of efficiency experts — in the fight against this disease, companies will need the help forever and ever.
Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion that “anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities.” He reportedly was forced out of the Writer’s Union of Canada for the crime of “cultural appropriation,” and denounced as a racist by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway. The latter said Niedzviecki “doesn’t see the humanity of indigenous peoples.” Last week, Benaway herself was denounced on Twitter for failing to provide proof that she was Indigenous.
Michael Korenberg, the chair of the board at the University of British Columbia, was forced to resign for liking tweets by Dinesh D’Souza and Donald Trump, which you might think is fine – but what about Latino electrical worker Emmanuel Cafferty, fired after a white activist took a photo of him making an OK symbol (it was described online as a “white power” sign)? How about Sue Schafer, the heretofore unknown graphic designer the Washington Post decided to out in a 3000-word article for attending a Halloween party two years ago in blackface (a failed parody of a different blackface incident involving Megyn Kelly)? She was fired, of course. How was this news? Why was ruining this person’s life necessary?
People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of “anti-black racism” to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to start submarining each other’s careers before they’ve even finished growing?
“People who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs,” one 16 year-old said.
“Someone rly started a Google doc of racists and their info for us to ruin their lives… I love twitter,” wrote a different person, adding cheery emojis.
A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago.
Parents calling out their kids is also in vogue. In Slate, “Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill” wrote to advice columnist Michelle Herman in a letter headlined, “I think I’ve screwed up the way my kids think about race.” The problem, the aggrieved parent noted, was that his/her sons had gone to a diverse school, and their “closest friends are still a mix of black, Hispanic, and white kids,” which to them was natural. The parent worried when one son was asked to fill out an application for a potential college roommate and expressed annoyance at having to specify race, because “I don’t care about race.”
Clearly, a situation needing fixing! The parent asked if someone who didn’t care about race was “just as racist as someone who only has white friends” and asked if it was “too late” to do anything. No fear, Herman wrote: it’s never too late for kids like yours to educate themselves. To help, she linked to a program of materials designed for just that purpose, a “Lesson Plan for Being An Ally,” that included a month of readings of… White Fragility. Hopefully that kid with the Black and Hispanic friends can be cured!
This notion that color-blindness is itself racist, one of the main themes of White Fragility, could have amazing consequences. In researching I Can’t Breathe, I met civil rights activists who recounted decades of struggle to remove race from the law. I heard stories of lawyers who were physically threatened for years in places like rural Arkansas just for trying to end explicit hiring and housing discrimination and other remnants of Jim Crow. Last week, an Oregon County casually exempted “people of color who have heightened concerns about racial profiling” from a Covid-19 related mask order. Who thinks creating different laws for different racial categories is going to end well? When has it ever?
At a time of catastrophe and national despair, when conservative nationalism is on the rise and violent confrontation on the streets is becoming commonplace, it’s extremely suspicious that the books politicians, the press, university administrators, and corporate consultants alike are asking us to read are urging us to put race even more at the center of our identities, and fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our differences.
Meanwhile books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, which are both beautiful and actually anti-racist, have been banned, for containing the “N-word.” (White Fragility contains it too, by the way).
It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YKkjao Tyler Durden
WTI Jumps After Biggest Crude Inventory Draw Since 2019 Tyler Durden
Tue, 06/30/2020 – 16:34
A rollercoaster day saw WTI ramped to $40, fail and fade back to close red on the day (but ends more than 90% higher for the quarter, but still down nearly 36% year to date).
“As we move into the second half of the year, the energy rebound is showing signs of stalling, however, as traders assess the threat of the recent resurgence in COVID-19 cases and the looming possibility of more economic shutdowns in the back half of the year,” said Tyler Richey, co-editor at Sevens Report Research. .
API
Crude -8.156mm (-2.7mm exp)
Cushing +164k
Gasoline -2.459mm (-2.7mm exp)
Distillates +2.638 (+900k exp)
After two weekly surprise builds in a row, US crude stocks saw a major draw of over 8mm barrels – the most since 2019…
Source: Bloomberg
WTI hovered around $39.30 ahead of the API print and spiked higher on the surprisingly large draw…
“The second quarter will not soon be forgotten by energy traders given that WTI crude oil futures plunged into negative territory for the first time in history, and decidedly so, in the month of April.”
That was “due to logistics issues in the physical supply chain, most notably a critical lack of available storage for freshly lifted crude barrels in the U.S.”
On April 20, WTI oil futures fell 306% to settle at negative $37.63.
“Since then, oil and refined product markets have staged an equally historic rebound… due to a swift recovery in consumer demand as well as sharp output cuts by global oil producers,”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Zs02FJ Tyler Durden
I have now finished reading the Court’s 92-page decision in Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue. (If you’d like a 21-page edited version, please email me: josh-at-josh-blackman-dot-com.) My final prediction for the pre-Corona cases was very, very wrong. I speculated that Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Breyer would write Espinoza, and reach some sort of narrow ruling. I completely whiffed here.
Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion is a full and resounding victory for the Petitioners. There is some uncertainty about the remedy–what exactly is the Montana Supreme Court supposed to do on remand? But Roberts touches all the bases, and does not squish out on any of the key points. I will have much more to say about the specific mechanics in later posts. (I still have several other posts still in the hopper about June Medical and Seila Law).
Here, I’d like to place Espinoza in the larger context of Blue June. To date, social conservatives lost every big case: immigration (DACA), abortion (June Medical), and Title VII (Bostock). And in each case, the Chief was in the majority with the Court’s four progressives. But on the last day of June, the Chief authored a solid opinion that will have tangible benefits for people of faith in 30-odd states. This decision puts Blaine Amendments nationwide in constitutional doubt. Coupled with the Chief’s whittling away of Whole Woman’s Health in June Medical, some conservatives may feel a shot of adrenaline. A rosy end to Blue June, indeed.
There are about eight remaining cases, including the Little Sisters of the Poor latest challenge to the ACA. On Sunday, I was fairly confident the Chief would hold the administration’s feet to the fire and demand some precise level of APA-inspired seppuku to disembowel the Obama-era regulations. But my predictions have shifted. I think the Court reverses the Third Circuit.
What about the tax return cases? After the Chief’s unitarian decision in Seila Law, I don’t think he’ll find that the House’s subpoena is enforceable. I still think he will split the difference and allow the state grand jury proceeding to go forward. Roberts knows well that the grand jury proceedings will likely not be unsealed until Trump is out of office, and can be indicted. At that point, no one will really care.
Finally, my prediction about the other case decided today was on point. Justice Ginsburg wrote the majority decision in Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com B. V. I’m sure she was happy to give her former clerk, Lisa Blatt, another win. It was an excellent argument.
Much more to come.
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