Month: November 2020

Authored by Peter Koenig via GlobalResearch.ca,

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has just published (October 2020) a so-called White Paper, entitled “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda – in a Post-Covid World”.

This 31-page document reads like a blueprint on how to “execute” – because an execution (or implementation) would be – “Covid-19 – The Great Reset” (July 2020), by Klaus Schwab, founder and CEO (since the foundation of the WEF in 1974) and his associate Thierry Malleret.

They call “Resetting the Future” a White Paper, meaning it’s not quite a final version. It is a draft of sorts, a trial balloon, to measure people’s reactions. It reads indeed like an executioner’s tale. Many people may not read it – have no awareness of its existence. If they did, they would go up in arms and fight this latest totalitarian blueprint, offered to the world by the WEF.

It promises a horrifying future to some 80%-plus of the (surviving) population. George Orwell’s “1984” reads like a benign fantasy, as compared to what the WEF has in mind for humanity.

The time frame is ten years – by 2030 – the UN agenda 2021 – 2030 should be implemented.

Planned business measures in response to COVID-19:

• An acceleration of digitized work processes, leading to 84% of all work processes as digital, or virtual / video conferences.

• Some 83% of people are planned to work remotely – i.e. no more interaction between colleagues – absolute social distancing, separation of humanity from the human contact.

• About 50% of all tasks are planned to be automated – in other words, human input will be drastically diminished, even while remote working.

• Accelerate the digitization of upskilling / reskilling (e.g. education technology providers) – 42% of skill upgrading or training for new skills will be digitized, in other words, no human contact – all on computer, Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithms.

• Accelerate the implementation of upskilling / reskilling programs – 35% of skills are planned to be “re-tooled” – i.e. existing skills are planned to be abandoned – declared defunct.

• Accelerate ongoing organizational transformations (e.g. restructuring) – 34% of current organizational set-ups are planned to be “restructured’ – or, in other words, existing organizational structures will be declared obsolete – to make space for new sets of organizational frameworks, digital structures that provide utmost control over all activities.

• Temporarily reassign workers to different tasks – this is expected to touch 30% of the work force. That also means completely different pay-scales – most probably unlivable wages, which would make the also planned “universal basic salary” or “basic income” – a wage that allows you barely to survive, an obvious need. – But it would make you totally dependent on the system – a digital system, where you have no control whatsoever.

• Temporarily reduce workforce – this is projected as affecting 28% of the population. It is an additional unemployment figure, in disguise, as the “temporarily” will never come back to full-time.

• Permanently reduce workforce – 13% permanently reduced workforce.

• Temporarily increase workforce – 5% – there is no reference to what type of workforce – probably unskilled labor that sooner or later will also be replaced by automation, by AI and robotization of the workplace.

• No specific measures implemented – 4% – does that mean, a mere 4% will remain untouched? From the algorithm and AI-directed new work places? – as small and insignificant as the figure is, it sounds like “wishful thinking”, never to be accomplished.

• Permanently increase workforce – a mere 1% is projected as “permanently increased workforce”. This is of course not even cosmetics. It is a joke.

This is the what is being put forth, namely the concrete process of implementing The Great Reset.

The Great Reset also foresees, a credit scheme, whereby all personal debt would be “forgiven” – against handing over all personal assets to an administrative body or agency – could possibly be the IMF.

So, you would own nothing – and be happy. Because all your necessities will be provided for.

Also, it should not occur to you to disagree with the system, because – by now each one of you has been covid-vaccinated and nano-chipped – so that with 5G and soon to come 6G, your mind can be read and influenced.

Please do not call this a conspiracy theory. It is a White Paper, an “authoritative report” by the WEF.

DARPA – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is part of the Pentagon –and has years ago developed the technology. It is just a matter of time to implement it. And Implemented it will be, if We, The People, do not protest — Massive Civil Disobedience is of the order – and that rather sooner than later.

The more we wait with action, the more we sleepwalk into this absolute human disaster.

*  *  *

Social and human relations are being eviscerated.

This has several advantages for this novel “totalitarian” WEF approach to humanity – to controlling humanity.

• We, The People, cannot rebel, we have no longer cohesion among ourselves,

• “We, The People”, will be played against each other – and there is an absolute digital control over humanity – executed by a small super elite.

• We have no access to this digital control – it is way beyond our reach. The idea is, that we will gradually grow into it – those of us who may survive. Within a generation or so, it is expected to become the New Normal.

The “survival angle” is an aspect not mentioned directly either in The Great Reset, or in the “Implementation Guide” – i.e. in the White Paper “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda – in a Post-Covid World”.

Bill Gates, the Rockefellers, Kissinger et al, have never made a secret out of their strong opinion that the world is over-populated and that the number of people has to be literally reduced. We are dealing with eugenicists.

A perfect method for reducing the world population, are Bill Gates initiated, and WHO-supported vaccination programs. Scandals of such disastrous vaccine programs resulting in children’s death were recorded in India (in the 1990s), Kenya (2014 and thereafter) and other parts of the world.

See also a very revealing TedTalk by Bill Gates of February 2010, “Innovating to Zero”, just about at the time when the “2010 Rockefeller Report” was issued – the very report that has given us so far, the “Lock Step Scenario” – and we are living it now. Hardly protesting it – the entire world – 193 UN member countries – has been coopted or coerced into following this abject human rights abuse on a global scale.

What either report, The Great Reset and the “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda” fails to mention is who is going to enforce these draconian new rules? – They are supposedly the same forces which now are being trained for urban warfare and for suppressing riots and social unrest – they are the police and the military.

Part of our People’s Organization of Civil Disobedience, will be on how to focus on and talking to,  educating, informing the police and military of what they will be used for by this small elite, and that in the end they are also just human beings, like the rest of us, therefore they better stand up in defense of the people, of humanity. The same needs to be done to teachers and medical personnel – information, the unfettered truth.

That’s the challenge. If we succeed – the game is over. But it’s a long way.

Media disinformation is brutal and powerful and hard to contradict for “us”, without a sizable budget for counter-propaganda, and as a group of people, which is ever more divided by the very media. The mandatory wearing masks and social distancing – has already made enemies of what we used to be, colleagues, friends, even within families.

This very diktat has managed to create rifts, divisions and discord within our societies

No fear – but shredding “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda” and the “The Great Reset” literally to pieces – with a human alternative that would do away with organizations like the WEF, and coopted UN agencies, like WHO, UNICEF, WTO, World Bank, IMF – and maybe even the entire UN system. Political and business leaders behind this project must be confronted. The fundamental principles of international law including Nuremberg must be applied.

*  *  *

Read the full WEF paper below:

The bull market in hot urban retail and commercial real estate markets lasted for pretty much the entire post-crisis recovery period. But COVID has turned things around, and as people flee to the suburbs, it’s worth taking a look at how valuations have declined.

While urban real-estate markets have taken a hit as people flee to the suburbs and more space, it’s worth taking a look at how much space costs in different cities around the world. While foreign cities are of course cheaper than the top American metropolises, the numbers in some cases might surprise you.

The median American home price, which is roughly $300,000, can buy a whopping 2,100 square feet in Houston, and nearly 1.5x that in Johannesburg. But in San Francisco and Singapore, that number buys just 300 square feet.

• The median U.S. home price, $300,000, buys almost 5,000 square feet in Delhi, but only 144 square feet in Hong Kong.
• Looking at the two extremes in America, homebuyers in Houston could get seven times more space compared to their fellow house-hunters in San Francisco.
• In Canada, Ottawa offers the most space for $300,000, while Lisbon, Portugal would be a buyer’s best bet of all the European cities included in the analysis.

Hong Kong’s infamously tiny apartments are probably not the ideal place for riding out a pandemic. But that’s why the city’s real estate market has taken such a hit (well, at least that’s one reason).

In the US, Houston appears to be the city that offers the best value, as buyers get the highest ratio of square footage per dollar. With the added bonus of living in one of America’s largest and most economically vital cities.

As the formerly city-loving millennial generation sets its sights on the suburbs, and young adults who have fallen on hard times move back in with their middle-class parents, is it possible that cities like NYC could see the economic progress of the last 30 years slip away? Crime is already rising at an alarming rate, and not only in New York.

Authored by Chris Farrell via The Gatestone Institute,

A Biden administration means two dramatic and dangerous reversals on Trump policies that will endanger the American public: 1. Termination of President Trump’s signature 2016 campaign issue — The Wall; and 2. Loosening of immigration restrictions.

“There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration, No. 1,” Biden told National Public Radio earlier this year.

“I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it.”

Biden is not really promising any border protection at all. It sounds good, but it is a hollow falsehood. Most of the American public does not know about or has forgotten the $30 billion dollar disaster known as “SBInet.” We have been down this “high-tech virtual wall” road before. The only winners were defense contractors. The virtual wall does nothing to deter or prevent unlawful entry across the border. It merely provides surveillance and recording of the illegal activity. Thousands of hours of video recordings of such crossings are available on the internet right now. Technology contractors are encouraged that a Biden administration would like to continue watching and recording millions of people entering the country illegally.

The Americans paying the very high price for Biden/Harris reckless open borders policy are in border communities. Biden’s reversals spell doom for overloaded (and closed) hospitals, schools, public housing, and courts. Remember: Biden (and the rest of the Democratic presidential field) promised free healthcare to all illegal aliens.

Biden will reverse Trump policies and rules governing legal immigration. He will — no doubt — cancel Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” that barred immigrants from certain countries and curtailed legal immigration, including restrictions on asylum claims.

Biden has a long public record, so you will not be surprised to learn that a few years ago he was proudly in favor of building 700 miles of border fence. Biden had a border hawk position back on November 27, 2006 at a Q&A with a Columbia, SC Rotary Club meeting. Notably, Biden has faced criticism for his past track record on immigration issues. Obama/Biden deported 3 million illegal aliens. The Trump administration deported fewer than 1 million over the last 3+ years.

Court battles will continue, of course. Some Trump administration initiatives are still working their way through the judicial process. Biden has committed to restoring the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which gives deportation relief and work permits to those brought illegally to the U.S. as children. Please remember, many of those “children” are now in their early 30s. The Trump administration tried to end the program, but that effort was blocked by the Supreme Court.

Biden has also glommed onto the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” mantra, and vowed to initiate a complete system overhaul not accomplished since Reagan’s well-intentioned error of 1986. While making that pledge, Biden disavowed workplace enforcement raids and sees no reason why illegal aliens cannot immediately begin receiving public assistance from taxpaying Americans.

Setting aside big national policy considerations, let us focus again on the border communities and the Americans directly at risk. Almost seven years into a Judicial Watch investigation dealing with Mexican Cartel penetration of federal, state and municipal law enforcement organizations in the El Paso, Texas region, we uncovered facts that resulted in the Department of Justice Inspector General taking direct action. Corrupt law enforcement officials at the federal, state and municipal level were removed. Other corrupt officials were effectively “neutralized” through exposure and pressure, even if they were not publicly acted against criminally or administratively. We also uncovered and exposed an El Paso-based narco-terror ring headed by Al Qaeda’s director of operations for North America, Adnan El Shukrijuma (deceased), targeting Chicago landmarks. A 48-minute documentary explaining the plot, “The Sun City Cell,” can be found on YouTube.

What are Americans in El Paso, Texas, Nogales, Arizona, and San Diego, California concerned about with respect to Biden administration border security? Over the past two weeks, in emails and phone interviews, border residents provided the following observations:

• “Whenever Obama was in there, drug cartels were so bad that it didn’t seem like anybody was fighting the drug cartels… the cartels ruled everything. They ran the dope, they trafficked the young girls, and there were so many more killings.”

• “Trump had more Customs and Border Patrol agents at the border. Cattle crossings from Mexico were checked, inspected and limited. The cartels have used cattle to move dope for years. Now they’ll go back to moving cattle and laundering money back through the crossing here [Santa Teresa, NM] with less law enforcement. It will be a serious step backwards.”

• “What happens when the next ‘caravan’ from Honduras and Guatemala shows up? Does everyone gain immediate access to the country and get free healthcare, no questions asked? That’s what they promised. They show crying women and children on the news, but that is a tiny percentage of the people in the ‘caravans’ — they are almost all young men — but the media lies about that and doesn’t show the real story. God, help us!”

U.S. Customs Service Officer Patricia Cramer, president of the Arizona chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union, revealed in an interview that persons crossing into the United States from Mexico are not health-screened in any way. No temperature taken, no cursory visual exam, nothing. The “locked-down border” under President Trump is a lie. Now, imagine the health and safety conditions under a Biden administration. Remember: In “COVID-world,” you cannot go to the gym, and you must “social distance” in absurd ways — but the border is open, and no one is screened.

The (purportedly incoming) Biden administration is promoting a 4 to 6 week national lockdown. The country is in the midst of an “Alice in Wonderland” public health crisis — and the Biden administration is promoting border security and immigration policies that are completely contradictory to what American citizens are enduring.

Is this what we all have to look forward to over the next four years?

President Trump has granted a pardon to his former national security advisor Michael Flynn in a rare act of clemency. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russian officials and he was fired after just 23 days on the job.

However, despite the media uproar over Trump’s actions with Flynn, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that throughout his time in the White House, Trump has used pardons, commutations and other forms of leniency less frequently than other presidents, particularly his direct predecessor.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As one of the final acts of his eight years in office, President Obama announced that he was commuting the sentences of 330 prisoners, most of whom had been serving time for minor drug offences. Just before his second term ended, the White House announced that Obama had granted more commutations than any president in U.S. history.

In terms of total executive clemency actions, Obama granted the most since Harry S. Truman, according to Department of Justice data published by the Pew Research Center. He primarily focused on commutations, orders that cut somebody’s prison sentence short. These are different to pardons, which are usually granted after a person has served their time, a forgiveness gesture which also restores somebody’s rights (which a commutation does not do).

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

In my entire lifetime, there has never been a Thanksgiving like this.  39 million Americans don’t have enough to eat right now, more than 70 million claims for unemployment benefits have been filed so far during this calendar year, and people are waiting in line for hours at food banks all over the nation just for some Thanksgiving handouts.  If you and your family have plenty of turkey to eat, you should be very thankful, because many Americans can no longer even take Thanksgiving dinner for granted these days. 

On Tuesday, vehicles were lined up for hours in New Jersey as people waited to receive prepackaged Thanksgiving meals at a local food bank…

Video obtained by CNN on Tuesday from the Meadowlands entertainment complex in New Jersey showed residents waiting for several hours to obtain prepackaged boxes of meals for the Thanksgiving holiday.

“If it wasn’t for this place, we wouldn’t know where we would get our food,” one distraught woman told CNN of the food bank in East Rutherford, N.J.

Of course we have been seeing similar wait times all over the nation.  At one food bank in Texas, demand for Thanksgiving meals was more than eight times higher than normal…

Food bank officials in Dallas, Texas, have also noticed a staggering increase in demand for food assistance. North Texas Food Bank representatives told the Dallas Morning News that they handed out roughly 8,500 meals to local families during a giveaway on Saturday that in years past has seen fewer than 1,000 show up for donations.

You can see a stunning photograph of vehicles lined up for that food distribution event right here.

There are a lot of really nice vehicles in that picture.  Many of those individuals are probably accustomed to living comfortable middle class lifestyles, but just like I warned in my new book they are “suddenly” in need of food because this economic downturn has turned their worlds completely upside down.

Yes, there have always been hungry people in America, but what we are witnessing now is hard to fathom.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 12 percent of all Americans did not have enough food to eat between October 28th and November 9th…

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to surge, more Americans are reporting going hungry, a Washington Post analysis found.

In data collected by the Census Bureau between Oct. 28 and Nov. 9, around 12 percent of all American adults reported not having enough food to eat, a figure higher than at any other point since the pandemic began earlier this year.

It is estimated that the current population of the United States is 328 million.

If you take 12 percent of 328 million, you get more than 39 million Americans that are going hungry right now.

And this is just the beginning.  Thanks to the new lockdowns that are being instituted all over the country, the number of Americans that are filing for unemployment benefits is starting to rise again…

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose last week to 778,000, evidence that the U.S. economy and job market remain under strain as coronavirus cases surge and colder weather heighten the risks.

The Labor Department’s report Wednesday said jobless claims climbed from 748,000 the week before. Before the virus struck hard in mid-March, weekly claims typically amounted to roughly 225,000.

Overall, more than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed in 2020.

As I discussed yesterday, we have never seen anything like this before in all of U.S. history.

At this point, even Hollywood is conducting mass layoffs.  More job loss announcements just keep rolling in with each passing day, and I expect that to continue all throughout the very dark winter ahead.

Other economic numbers also tell us that the U.S. economy is definitely heading in the wrong direction…

The data firm Womply says that 21% of small businesses were shuttered at the start of this month, reflecting a steady increase from June’s 16% rate. Consumer spending at local businesses is down 27% this month from a year ago, marking a deterioration from a 20% year-over-year drop in October, Womply found.

If you think that anyone is going to be able to wave a magic wand and fix this mess, you are just being delusional.

There are millions upon millions of Americans that have already been pushed to the breaking point by this pandemic.  One of those individuals is a 38-year-old California resident named Andrew Lee…

“I’ve exhausted all of my unemployment benefits. I’ve had to resort to food stamps and [California’s Medicaid program] for the first time in my life. I’m backdated on my rent and my credit has been ruined,” said 38-year-old Andrew Lee, who lives in a suburb of Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

Lee lost his job as a business development director several months before the pandemic. But once it hit, it became that much harder to find work. And he didn’t initially qualify for any pandemic-related unemployment benefits.

His car has been repossessed and his wife’s car has also been repossessed.

So even if they could find jobs, how are they supposed to get to work?

Lee is just like so many other hurting Americans.  First he ran through all of his savings, and then he started relying on his credit cards.

Now that his unemployment benefits have been exhausted, he is out of options, and his family is a step or two from becoming homeless.

In the months ahead, tens of millions of others will find themselves facing similar scenarios.

This is what an economic collapse looks like.  The United States hasn’t had to face anything like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and what we have experienced so far is just the start.

In 2019, I received quite a bit of criticism because the economy was relatively stable and to many people it seemed like an “economic collapse” was not even remotely a possibility.

But now an economic collapse has officially arrived, and all of the things that I have been warning about are starting to happen one right after the other.

The “perfect storm” is upon us, and most Americans still do not understand the horrors that lie ahead.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Russia’s foreign ministry said Friday that it’s lodged a formal protest with the United States over this week’s incident in the Sea of Japan, calling it a “provocation designed to disturb the peace”. 

Russia further said Friday it’s military won’t hesitate to “respond” the next time the US Navy brazenly violates its maritime borders. During the Tuesday encounter a Russian warship was described as chasing the US destroyer out of the area.

“We warn the US not to repeat the violation. We reserve the right to respond in the future,” a foreign ministry statement said.

The incident happened Tuesday and involved a Russian destroyer threatening to ram the USS John S McCain warship which the Kremlin alleged violated sovereign Russian waters by up to 2km:

According to the Russian defense ministry, its Pacific Fleet destroyer the Admiral Vinogradov used an international communications channel to warn the US ship about “the possibility of using ramming to get the intruder out of the territorial waters”.

“The Russian Federation’s statement about this mission is false,” said a spokesman for the US Navy’s 7th Fleet, Lt Joe Keiley. “USS John S McCain was not ‘expelled’ from any nation’s territory.”

It’s essentially a matter of the border not being recognized by the United States.

The US Navy early this week had responded bluntly: “By conducting this operation, the United States demonstrated that these waters are not Russia’s territorial sea and that the United States does not acquiesce in Russia’s claim that Peter the Great is a ‘historic bay’ under international law.”

The US 7th Fleet confirmed it was “approached aggressively” by the Russian ship and condemned the provocative behavior.

Here’s how the US 7th Fleet framed the question of the maritime border dispute in its formal response to the Russian charge:

In 1984, the U.S.S.R declared a system of straight baselines along its coasts, including a straight baseline enclosing Peter the Great Bay as claimed internal waters. This 106-nautical mile (nm) closing line is inconsistent with the rules of international law as reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention to enclose the waters of a bay. By drawing this closing line, the U.S.S.R. attempted to claim more internal waters – and territorial sea farther from shore – than it is entitled to claim under international law. Russia has continued the U.S.S.R. claim.

While it’s not the first time an intercept incident has occurred in disputed waters in the Sea of Japan, this latest certainly marks a severe escalation given the rare Russian direct threat of ramming.

Submitted by RealClearEducation, authored by Samuel Abrams, professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article is part of a series of opinion essays on the topic of free speech on campus, coinciding with the launch of the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings…

When it comes to making news about protests and action for liberal causes, schools in New England seem to dominate the news. We’ve seen violence and protests surrounding visits from Charles Murray and Ryszard Legutko at Middlebury College. Brown University spent hundreds of millions of dollars in response to student protests related to questions of diversity and inclusion. Yale has seen numerous protests and student arrests and students there attacked and harassed a faculty couple who headed a residential college in 2015 claiming that they felt unsafe because of an email message about Halloween costumes.

While protests in other parts of the county do make news, such as the recent troubles relating to the police at Northwestern, it appears that students in New England are far more likely to engage in such actions.

Thanks to new data behind the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings from RealClearEducation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and survey firm College Pulse – representing the largest study of student attitudes toward speech to date – we know that students enrolled in the higher education institutions in New England are appreciably more liberal and open to shutting down speech and expression than the overwhelming majority of college students.

With almost 20,000 students in FIRE survey sample, it is possible to break the national sample down into regional groups and the data makes it abundantly clear that those enrolled in New England are notably different.

The General Social Survey shows that political ideology in the United States has been remarkably consistent since the 1970s and that liberals are not dominant. In the most recent sample, the survey found that 28% of Americans identify as liberal, 31% as conservative, and the balance of 37% are in the middle as moderates. In contrast, 50% of college students are liberal, 26% are conservative and the minority – 23% – are moderates. College students demonstrate a significant liberal lean.

But this lean is not uniform. In New England, the data reveal that college students live in a huge bubble where there are 5 liberals for every 1 conservative. 71% of New England college students identify as liberal and just 15% conservative and 14% moderate. This is by far the most lopsided region in the nation.

The most similar regions to New England, ideologically, are the West Coast and Mid-Atlantic regions. 59% of students in both regions identify as liberal with just a fifth of their students holding conservative views, meaning there are three liberal undergraduates for every conservative student in those regions. This breakdown is far off the national average.

Looking at other regions in the United States, the liberal student dominance disappears. Take the Mountain region – 8 states that are mixed ideologically with rural areas and big and growing cities such as Denver and Phoenix – and the ideological balance is far less extreme. Here about a quarter of students are moderate and in the middle with a little more than a third identifying as conservative and 41% stating that they are liberal. In fact, if one excludes the three extreme liberal regions, the remaining 6 divisions are far more diverse with 46% of students being liberal, a quarter moderate, and about a third (30%) conservative.

The differences between some schools are striking. At the University of Arizona in Tempe there are 1.5 liberals for every conservative. But Brown in Rhode Island has 12 liberal students for every conservative.

Ideological imbalance is problematic in and of itself if you value viewpoint diversity in the classroom, but it is also the case that students in New England are far more likely to believe that actions to shut down speech are acceptable.

When asked whether it is ever appropriate to shout down or try to prevent someone from speaking on campus, 61% of students found that this was acceptable, nationally. But in New England 70% of students thought preventing a speaker was talking was justified in at least some circumstances. This is in stark comparison to regions like East South Central, home to the Universities of Tennessee and Alabama, where just half of the students found such behavior acceptable.

Similarly, when asked about the acceptability of blocking other students from entering a campus event, almost half (48%) of New England students thought this tactic would be an acceptable way to protest a campus speaker. About 30% of students in the East South Central, the Mountain, West North Central, and West South Central – a nearly 20-point difference – felt that blocking an entrance was acceptable.

Put somewhat differently, 51% of Yale students would approve of tactics which would prevent students from hearing an opinion on their campus, but just 35% at the Universities of Missouri – which itself made national attention when a faculty member and students tried to forcibly block the press from covering a demonstration – would be willing to block others from attending an event.

New England schools are collectively an outlier in terms of both student liberalism and their willingness to shut down speech. And the perception that protests against speakers are more common in New England is born out in the data. This lopsided liberal trend matches earlier work, which revealed a similar imbalance, where liberal professors outnumber conservative professors 28 to 1 for New England colleges and universities. And while finding a conservative professor in New England is exceedingly rare and far out of step with the national ratio of 6 to 1, many regions in the country are not as homogenous.

Ideological imbalance among students is a problem, especially in New England. It is crucial that students of all ideological backgrounds encounter a multitude of ideas in college.

But it’s important to note that the student imbalance in New England is far less one-sided than the faculty imbalance there. And faculty imbalance may be a far more pressing problem if one values viewpoint diversity. It’s more readily fixable too, if schools would only prioritize the hiring of a more ideologically diverse faculty and work to ensure that all faculty strive to present a multitude of views and intellectual traditions in their classrooms.

China has drastically ramped up its trade conflict with Australia, on Friday slapping a whopping 200% tax on all Australian wine, in a move being widely described as the first shot fired in what went from behind-the-scenes bureaucratic punitive actions to now an open trade war.

“The Ministry of Commerce imposed import taxes of up to 212.1%, effective Saturday, which Australia’s trade minister said make Australian wine unsellable in China, his country’s biggest export market,” the AP reports. The lead industry body Wine Australia, said the country’s total shipments to China in the first nine months of 2020 accounted for 39% of all Australian wines.

Australia has been among those countries, foremost among them the United States under Trump, leading the charge of criticism aimed at Beijing over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, lately calling for a formal international probe into the deadly virus’ origins there. 

“This is a very distressing time for many hundreds of Australian wine producers, who have built, in good faith, a sound market in China,” Australia trade minister Simon Birmingham responded on Friday.

The growing tensions between the two trade partners has also included tit-for-tat travel restrictions and in a couple notable cases the detention of journalists with dual nationality by Chinese security services. This amid China taking measures early this month to block a wide array of key Australian exports from lobsters to coal.

But as one analyst cited by AP has observed of what’s increasingly obvious, Australia has become a “one-trick pony export-wise to China” and thus Beijing holds all the cards, with Canberra scrambling to play on the defensive while China extracts political concessions by threatening to torpedo Australia’s commodities exports.

China’s Ministry of Commerce justified the wine tariffs as a necessary response after rampant complaints that Chinese producers were hurt by improperly low-priced Australian imports.

Of all the Australian wines hit w/ huge Chinese tariffs today, one – Auswan – was singled out for the softest tariff of 107%. Much lower than all the others. It just happens to be the label of former ambassador Geoff Raby, a consistent critic of Aus gov’t’s handling of China ties pic.twitter.com/nAJNV0ZZ9w

— Bill Birtles (@billbirtles) November 27, 2020

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has lately slammed Beijing practicing blatant “economic coercion” with regard to an increasing array of its exports being held up at port for what are seen as contrived inspections procedures, which sometimes end in large shipments going bad, such as lobster. 

Beijing has also recently began taking aim at Australia’s tourism industry by discouraging tourists and students from visiting the country.

Via Trading Economics: Australia exports to China was US$103 Billion during 2019, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade. 

On news of this latest 200% wine tax Australia’s main stock market index fell by 0.5%. China’s foreign ministry was quick to capitalize by demanding Australia “do something conductive” to change course and improve relations but without diving into details:

“Some people in Australia adhering to the Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice have repeatedly taken wrong words and deeds on issues concerning China’s core interests,” said the spokesman, Zhao Lijian.

Australia should “take China’s concerns seriously, instead of harming China’s national interests under the banner of safeguarding their own national interests,” Zhao said.

Further fueling China’s dramatic actions is Australia’s impending mutual defense treaty with Japan which is still being deeply negotiated.

Japan is of course a prime strategic rival to China heavily involved in pressing anti-China rhetoric on its expansion of militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea.