Month: May 2021

10 Cops Got Qualified Immunity After Holding a Shackled Man Facedown Until He Died


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Nicholas Gilbert entered a cell in the custody of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) in December 2015 after officers arrested him for being in a condemned building and failing to appear in court for a traffic ticket. He would not leave alive.

The 10 cops who handcuffed, shackled, and subdued him facedown on the ground of that cell until he stopped breathing did not deploy excessive force and thus cannot be sued over the incident, a federal court ruled last year. The case now heads to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will reportedly announce in the coming days if the nine justices will consider hearing the appeal.

Gilbert attracted the attention of Officer Jason King on the evening of December 8, 2015, when King allegedly noticed Gilbert tying a piece of clothing around his neck and the bars of his cell. Officer Joe Stuckey entered the area to address the issue, and though he says he did not find Gilbert with any clothing around his neck, he proceeded to cuff him. Gilbert struggled and was eventually placed in leg shackles facedown on the floor with the help of Officers Paul Wactor, Michael Cognasso, Kyle Mack, Erich vonNida, Bryan Lemons, Zachary Opel, and Ronald Degregorio, along with Sergeant Ronald Bergmann, who at different points collectively sought to subdue Gilbert.

He would eventually stop breathing, and was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri awarded the officers qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that allows government officials to violate your constitutional rights without threat of civil suits if the precise way they violated those rights has not been outlined in a prior court precedent. (In practice, that means that two cops who allegedly stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant got qualified immunity, because there was no previous court ruling that said theft under those circumstances is unconstitutional.)

On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit upheld the ruling, writing that the force applied did not qualify as constitutionally excessive.

“Gilbert continued to violently struggle even after being handcuffed and leg-shackled,” wrote Circuit Judge Bobby E. Shepherd. “Specifically, after being handcuffed, he thrashed his head on the concrete bench, causing him to suffer a gash on his forehead, and he continued to violently thrash and kick after being leg-shackled. Because of this ongoing resistance, the Officers moved Gilbert to the prone position so as to minimize the harm he could inflict on himself and others.”

Jody Lombardo, Gilbert’s mother, is now asking that the Supreme Court consider whether or not a reasonable jury could find that the officers violated the Fourth Amendment when they pressed into his back until he died. Overcoming the above hurdles in federal court would not have vindicated her claim; it would merely give her family the right to plead her case in front of a jury. Unless the Supreme Court intervenes, she will not have that privilege.

The high court has relisted the petition around 20 times over the last several weeks as the justices continue to jockey behind closed doors over whether or not they will hear it. The repeated demurral perhaps suggests that one justice is writing a dissent to the denial of certiorari, though the Court recently went so far as to request the record from the 8th Circuit.

SCOTUS legislated qualified immunity into existence by fiat decades ago, but they have refused to reconsider the doctrine wholesale. Yet there have been subtler moves from the Supreme Court in recent months: In November, it reversed a ruling giving qualified immunity to a group of prison guards who locked a naked inmate in a cell covered with human feces and another with a sewage leak, and in February it rejected a decision giving qualified immunity to a corrections officer who pepper-sprayed an inmate without provocation.

Medical evaluators agree that Gilbert would still be alive had he not been subdued facedown that day, but they disagree on just how big a role it played. Post-mortem testing by the state found Gilbert “had a large amount of methamphetamine in his system and significant heart disease,” and that he died of “arteriosclerotic heart disease exacerbated by methamphetamine and forcible restraint.”

A conflicting expert report came to the opposite conclusion, finding that he died of “forcible restraint inducing asphyxia.” Seth Stoughton, an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina and a primary signatory of an amicus brief in the case, emphasizes that the prone position is exceedingly dangerous—something that medical experts once knew little about but have been increasingly attuned to in recent years. “This is a well-documented danger,” reads Lombardo’s petition. To that point, cops in San Antonio received qualified immunity after holding a man facedown in a hogtie position, leading to his death, although the appeals court thankfully overturned that decision.

“Over 25 years ago, the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice conducted an ‘analysis of in-custody deaths, [and] discovered evidence that unexplained in-custody deaths are caused more often than is generally known’ by asphyxia,” the petition continues. “The agency issued a bulletin to ‘alert officers to those factors found frequently in deaths involving positional asphyxia,’ to enable them ‘to respond in a way that will ensure the subject’s safety and minimize risk of death.'”

There are a few strange details that seem unaddressed by the officers’ account of what happened that day. Lemons testified that “when the resisting stopped, we stood up” and that he then “noticed that [Gilbert] wasn’t breathing.” Lombardo’s petition contends this demonstrates that Gilbert was not released from the position until after he had suffocated. That Gilbert put up an insurmountable struggle until the very moment he stopped breathing indeed seems odd.

In her petition, Lombardo likens Gilbert’s experience to George Floyd’s, the man who died in May of 2020 after he was held in the prone position while former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin dug his knee into Floyd’s neck. Chauvin was recently convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter.

Comparing use of force here is a bit thorny, as Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is granular and very factually specific. But there are still relevant parallels. Had Minneapolis chosen not to settle with the Floyd family, it’s likely they would have had to overcome qualified immunity, should they have wanted to proceed with a lawsuit.

“Derek Chauvin would have had a very plausible chance of getting the suit thrown out on qualified immunity grounds—even after being convicted of murder,” Clark Neily, senior vice president for criminal justice at the Cato Institute, told me last month. “There is no preexisting case in the 8th Circuit under which it was ‘clearly established’ that pinning a suspect under one’s knee for nearly 10 minutes until they lose consciousness and their heart stops beating violates the Fourth Amendment.”

There is at least one other key difference: You’ve likely heard of Floyd’s story. You probably haven’t heard of Gilbert’s. Whether or not the state’s story or Stoughton’s analysis would hold up in front of a jury remains to be seen. But Lombardo should have the opportunity to make that argument in front of one.

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Energy Companies Are Scrambling For Cyber Insurance

Energy Companies Are Scrambling For Cyber Insurance

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

U.S. energy companies are urgently building their cyberattack insurance coverage following the Colonial Pipeline network attack earlier this month, Reuters has reported, adding that premiums were likely to rise on this increased demand.

A ransomware attack shut down the largest fuel pipeline in the United States two weeks ago, causing panic buying of gasoline and diesel along the East Coast and a consequent shortage of fuels that shut down hundreds of filling stations. The pipeline was restarted after its operator paid the hackers some $4 million.

The Colonial pipeline is the biggest pipeline infrastructure in the United States, running 5,500 miles from Houston to Linden, New Jersey, carrying some 2.5 million barrels of gasoline and diesel daily.

The attack was a wake-up call for businesses and the government alike, showing the growing vulnerability of systems increasingly dependent on software. Now, everyone wants more insurance against cyberattacks.

As with other services where demand greatly outstrips supply, the spike in demand is sending prices higher, with insurers now preparing to increase premiums by as much as 25 to 40 percent, Reuters reports. The increase will not be only for the energy industry, the report also notes.

Currently, only some 50 percent of pipeline operators in the United States are insured against cyberattacks, according to Crum & Forster executive, as quoted by Reuters.

The cyber insurance industry is a growing one, the Insurance Journal noted in a recent report that also said last year had seen a more than 28-percent increase in standalone cyber policy premiums. Between 2017 and 2020, premiums grew at an average annual rate of 19 percent. Claims, meanwhile, grew a lot more, by 38 percent, the report also noted. In 2020, the cyber insurance market in the country hit $2.7 billion.

Ransomware attacks are quickly turning into a serious problem globally, Fitch Ratings noted following the Colonial Pipeline attack. In 2020 alone, they shot up by as much as 485 percent.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/28/2021 – 13:48

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/34t3hjc Tyler Durden

And Now Prices Are Really Soaring: May Rent Jump Is Biggest On Record

And Now Prices Are Really Soaring: May Rent Jump Is Biggest On Record

With BofA predicting that the US is facing a period of “transitory hyperinflation” as a result of soaring commodity prices in everything from metals to food…

…. and beyond, in what increasingly more warn is a stagflationary burst right out of the 1970s playbook…

… it makes sense that home prices are also surging thanks to trillions in stimmy checks, near-record low mortgage rates and an exodus away from cities, and as we noted two weeks ago that’s precisely what they are doing, with Redfin reporting an 18% jump in median home sale prices to an all time high…

… as a record 58% of all houses sell within two weeks of listing, of which 45% sell for more than their listing price, also a record.

Amid this dismal “transitorily hyperinflationary” landscape, where those whose incomes aren’t similarly hyperinflating find themselves at risk of being unable to afford a roof above their head, there was one ray of hope: renting, with rent prices tumbling in recent months and according to the BLS’ monthly CPI metric, rent inflation had just dropped to the lowest in a decade, just below 2.0% annually…

… which due to the way the CPI basket is weighted acted as a key anchor on overall CPI rates, and served to distort the broader inflationary picture. In short, the Fed would look at the relatively tame core CPI which was only tame thanks to “tumbling” rents and would conclude that there is nothing to worry about.

Only, as we first discussed three weeks ago, it now appears that not only was the government misrepresenting the actual data in hopes of extracting as much stimulus from the Biden regime by pretending inflation is low and “contained”, but that rents are in fact soaring once again.

As we reported at the start of May, American Homes 4 Rent, which owns 54,000 houses, increased rents 11% on vacant properties in April, the company reported in a statement:

… Continued to experience record demand with a Same-Home portfolio Average Occupied Days Percentage of 97.3% in the first quarter of 2021, while achieving 10.0% rental rate growth on new leases, which accelerated further in April to an Average Occupied Days Percentage in the high 97% range while achieving over 11% rental rate growth on new leases.

Invitation Homes, the largest landlord in the industry, also boosted rents by similar amount, an executive said on a recent conference call. Or, as Bloomberg puts it, record occupancy rates are emboldening single-family landlords to hike rents aggressively, testing the limits of booming demand for suburban rentals.

While soaring housing costs had put homeownership out of reach for most Americans, rents had been relatively tame for much of 2020. But in recent months, rents have also soared as vaccines fuel optimism about a rebound from the pandemic, and a reversal in the city-to-suburbs exodus.  The increases, as Bloomberg so eloquently puts it, “may add to concerns about inflation pressures.”

“Companies are trying to figure out how hard they can push before they start losing people,” said Jeffrey Langbaum, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “And they seem to be of the opinion they can push as far as they want.”

Fast forward to today when we have definitive proof that the companies were right.

According to the June Apartment List National Rent Report, the national rent index increased by 2.3% from April to May, the largest single month increase ever recorded in AL estimates, which begin in January 2017.  It was also the third straight month in which that record has been broken, following a 2.0 percent increase last month and a 1.4 percent increase in March.

In March, prices rebounded to their pre-pandemic levels. This month, we hit a new milestone — our national index is now above the level where we project it would have been if the pandemic-related price declines of 2020 had never occurred at all.

After this recent spike, year-over-year rent growth now stands at 5.4% nationally, and prices are now above the level where rents would have been if the pandemic-related price declines of 2020 had never occurred at all.

In the chart above, AL plots the national median rent from 2018 to present. The data for 2018 and 2019 depicts the smooth seasonality of a typical year, in which prices peak during the summer busy season and then dip slightly in the winter off-season. Overall, prices increased by 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.1 percent in 2019. 2020 represents a clear break from this trend, with rents declining in the early months of the pandemic during what is normally peak-season. The dashed line in the chart represents a projection of how rents would have changed over the past year in the absence of the pandemic. This projection is based on an average of the growth rates that we observed in 2018 and 2019. Actual rent growth had been trailing this projection since the start of the pandemic, but this month’s record setting growth has now put actual rents ahead of the projection. Year-over-year rent growth now stands at 5.4 percent, another record.

To be sure, there is significant regional variation in rent trends, and prices in a number of markets are still well below pre-pandemic levels. That said, even in these markets, prices are rebounding rapidly. San Francisco headlines throughout the pandemic for the staggering 26.6 percent drop in rents from March 2020 through January 2021, but since January, San Francisco rents have increased by 13.4 percent. Although rents in San Francisco are still 16.8 percent below pre-pandemic levels, the market has clearly turned a corner, and the best deals appear to be behind us.

San Francisco aside, there is a similar trend across the rest of the country where rents had been falling fastest. Nine of the ten cities with the sharpest year-over-year rent declines have now experienced positive rent growth for four consecutive months. Four of these cities — San Jose, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Minneapolis — have seen rents increasing for five consecutive months. The following chart shows month-over-month rent growth from 2018 to present for six of the cities that have been hit hardest by the pandemic:

As AL notes, in each of the six cities shown, the fastest single-month rent increase has taken place in 2021. Rents are still below pre-COVID levels in each of these cities, but they’re quickly catching up. Nowhere is the trend stronger than in Boston, where prices have increased by an average of 3.4 percent per month in 2021 –  if that pace continues, Boston rents will surpass March 2020 levels by mid-summer.

But if prices are rebounding sharply in traditional coastal markets, the market is nothing short of frenzied across another group of mid-sized markets. The pandemic and remote work spurred demand for the space and affordability that these cities offered, and in response, rent prices grew even as the surrounding economy struggled. But while rent declines in expensive markets have reversed course, the cities where rents have been growing fastest are continuing to boom. For the clearest example, no further than Boise, ID where the average rent has soared by 31% in the past year!

As ApartmentList notes, Boise, ID is leading the list, where rents grew by a staggering 6.6% over just the past month. This is the fastest month-over-month growth rate among the nation’s 100 largest cities, and Boise also continues to rank #1 for fastest year-over-year growth, which now stands at 30.8 percent. All of the 10 cities where rents have grown fastest since the start of the pandemic continued to see increases this month.

Many of these markets had been heating up prior to the pandemic. For example, from January 2017 to January 2020, rents in Mesa, AZ increased by 25.5 percent, the fastest growth in the nation over that period. Fresno ranked third for fastest rent growth from 2017 to 2020, while Chandler, AZ ranked sixth. Eight of the ten cities with the biggest pandemic booms were in the top 20 for pre-pandemic growth from 2017 to 2020. The pandemic did not necessarily start a new trend in these markets, so much as accelerate an existing one. This stands in contrast to what has happened in the expensive markets discussed above, for which the rent declines of the past year were a complete aberration. Given this longer-term context, as well as the continued upward trajectory in rent trends, it seems that Boise and cities like it have yet to hit their peaks.

As the Apartment List concludes, the pandemic created some truly “transitory” softness in the rental market last year, and in response, 2021 has seen some of the fastest rent growth we have on record in our data. Nationally, rents have now surpassed the level where they would have been if rent growth had not been disrupted by the pandemic. In markets like San Francisco where rents had been falling fastest, prices have turned a corner and are now rebounding. At the same time, booming markets like Boise continue to see prices climb. More broadly, rental inventory across the nation remains tight, and as vaccine distribution continues to gain momentum, we may be seeing even higher prices as a result of released pent up demand from renters who had been delaying moves due to the pandemic. Whereas last year’s peak moving season was halted by the pandemic, this year’s seasonal spike appears to be making up for lost time.

Summary: surging rents – the “missing piece” from both the CPI and PCE baskets – are back with a vengeance, and the result is that no matter which official inflation metric one uses, we are about to see some truly epic numbers in the coming weeks.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/28/2021 – 13:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3i27a6G Tyler Durden

Lisey’s Story: Bad Stephen King Book Gets Terrible Apple TV Adaptation


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Lisey’s Story. Available Friday, June 4, on Apple TV.

“Every marriage has its own secrets,” reads the epigraph on Apple TV’s new Stephen King series Lisey’s Story. To which many a viewer is going to add: “If only.”

Adapted exclusively by King from his own 2006 novel, Lisey’s Story is a mess in almost every conceivable way. It’s drawn from a leaden and forgettable novel, and King’s ponderous attempt at a screenplay has done nothing to improve it. Neither has Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s painfully arty translation of the written word into video. And while Lisey’s Story is loaded with female star power—Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Allen play sisters—King and Larrain have given them little to do except look head-bangingly anguished or (in Allen’s case) catatonic.

I’ve been a fan of King since I first read his when-high-school-bullying-goes-wrong novel Carrie in 1975. (Consumer tip: Don’t try this alone in your first night in your first house.) But in recent years, his books more and more often read like legal briefs written by somebody bidding for conservatorship of his estate: lots of dull prose and too-familiar storylines. The novel Lisey’s Story was a good example, a dreary autopsy on a marriage that was a lot more interesting dead than alive, filled with stuff recycled from his other books: spooky hotel a la The Shining, a private graveyard like the one in Pet Sematary, a homicidal fan strikingly like the one in Misery.

The creepiest thing about the book was that King thought it was one of his best. The second-creepiest was King’s explanation of what triggered it: Coming home from a prolonged hospital stay, he discovered his wife had redecorated his writing studio and all his books and papers were gone from the shelves, stored in boxes.  To King, it seemed like he was witnessing the clean-up after his own death.

And that is exactly the kick-off point for Lisey’s Story. Two years after a King-like horror novelist named Scott Landon (Clive Owen, The Knick) was gunned down by a crazed fan, his wife Lisey (Moore) is trying, though not very hard, to catalog his papers, including some unpublished stories and books. She is increasingly annoyed by a college professor (Ron Cephas Jones, This Is Us) who specializes in the study of Landon’s work and wants access to the papers.

But that seems like a small problem compared to the mental collapse of Lisey’s sister Amanda (Allen), who reverts to her old habit of slashing herself at the news that her ex-husband has remarried. But wait! That acquisitive college professor enlists a young goon (Dane DeHaan, In Treatment) to assist him in getting hold of Landon’s manuscripts, using knives and torches and such to help.

That little summary I just provided was assembled only by heroic effort on my part, given that Lisey’s Story is a mélange of inscrutable noir photography, flashback, flashbacks within flashbacks, hallucinations, mystic visions, alternate universes, nightmares—pretty much everything but a random guy punching Dan Rather in the face while screaming, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” When the show threatens to lapse into coherence (don’t worry, it doesn’t happen often), the characters start conducting expository conversations through mouthfuls of mushy fried chicken.

Not that comprehensibility is entirely desirable in Lisey’s Story. King has littered the screenplay (and before that, the book) with a maddening baby-talk language among the sisters, in which they call one another “babyluv” and worse. Worst of all is the constant reference to “bool hunts”—a sort of weird scavenger hunt that Landon set up for his wife before his death, the grand prize being, well, nothing—and an alternate universe known as “Boo’ya Moon,” which makes even less sense than the regular one. King’s objective seems to have been to see how many times “bool” and “Boo’ya” can be spoken aloud before viewers begin projectile vomiting at the screen; I don’t know what the number is, but I can tell you it’s reached in the first seven minutes of the first episode.

All the foregoing aside, there are a few lessons that can be drawn from Lisey’s Story. One is that studio executives need to start slapping the teeth out of screenwriters and directors who believe that the illiteracy of films can be masked if you stuff them with enough undifferentiated flashbacks.

Another is that God provided us with studio lighting for a purpose—that is, to light studios. Shooting everything in abject blackness is not arty, it’s stupid.

And third is that Jennifer Jason Leigh is a wittily mean actress, as she has proved in everything from Weeds to The Hudsucker Proxy. Putting her in TV show just to stand around for 10 hours is a bunch of bool.

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10 Cops Got Qualified Immunity After Holding a Shackled Man Facedown Until He Died


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Nicholas Gilbert entered a cell in the custody of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) in December 2015 after officers arrested him for being in a condemned building and failing to appear in court for a traffic ticket. He would not leave alive.

The 10 cops who handcuffed, shackled, and subdued him facedown on the ground of that cell until he stopped breathing did not deploy excessive force and thus cannot be sued over the incident, a federal court ruled last year. The case now heads to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will reportedly announce in the coming days if the nine justices will consider hearing the appeal.

Gilbert attracted the attention of Officer Jason King on the evening of December 8, 2015, when King allegedly noticed Gilbert tying a piece of clothing around his neck and the bars of his cell. Officer Joe Stuckey entered the area to address the issue, and though he says he did not find Gilbert with any clothing around his neck, he proceeded to cuff him. Gilbert struggled and was eventually placed in leg shackles facedown on the floor with the help of Officers Paul Wactor, Michael Cognasso, Kyle Mack, Erich vonNida, Bryan Lemons, Zachary Opel, and Ronald Degregorio, along with Sergeant Ronald Bergmann, who at different points collectively sought to subdue Gilbert.

He would eventually stop breathing, and was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri awarded the officers qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that allows government officials to violate your constitutional rights without threat of civil suits if the precise way they violated those rights has not been outlined in a prior court precedent. (In practice, that means that two cops who allegedly stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant got qualified immunity, because there was no previous court ruling that said theft under those circumstances is unconstitutional.)

On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit upheld the ruling, writing that the force applied did not qualify as constitutionally excessive.

“Gilbert continued to violently struggle even after being handcuffed and leg-shackled,” wrote Circuit Judge Bobby E. Shepherd. “Specifically, after being handcuffed, he thrashed his head on the concrete bench, causing him to suffer a gash on his forehead, and he continued to violently thrash and kick after being leg-shackled. Because of this ongoing resistance, the Officers moved Gilbert to the prone position so as to minimize the harm he could inflict on himself and others.”

Jody Lombardo, Gilbert’s mother, is now asking that the Supreme Court consider whether or not a reasonable jury could find that the officers violated the Fourth Amendment when they pressed into his back until he died. Overcoming the above hurdles in federal court would not have vindicated her claim; it would merely give her family the right to plead her case in front of a jury. Unless the Supreme Court intervenes, she will not have that privilege.

The high court has relisted the petition around 20 times over the last several weeks as the justices continue to jockey behind closed doors over whether or not they will hear it. The repeated demurral perhaps suggests that one justice is writing a dissent to the denial of certiorari, though the Court recently went so far as to request the record from the 8th Circuit.

SCOTUS legislated qualified immunity into existence by fiat decades ago, but they have refused to reconsider the doctrine wholesale. Yet there have been subtler moves from the Supreme Court in recent months: In November, it reversed a ruling giving qualified immunity to a group of prison guards who locked a naked inmate in a cell covered with human feces and another with a sewage leak, and in February it rejected a decision giving qualified immunity to a corrections officer who pepper-sprayed an inmate without provocation.

Medical evaluators agree that Gilbert would still be alive had he not been subdued facedown that day, but they disagree on just how big a role it played. Post-mortem testing by the state found Gilbert “had a large amount of methamphetamine in his system and significant heart disease,” and that he died of “arteriosclerotic heart disease exacerbated by methamphetamine and forcible restraint.”

A conflicting expert report came to the opposite conclusion, finding that he died of “forcible restraint inducing asphyxia.” Seth Stoughton, an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina and a primary signatory of an amicus brief in the case, emphasizes that the prone position is exceedingly dangerous—something that medical experts once knew little about but have been increasingly attuned to in recent years. “This is a well-documented danger,” reads Lombardo’s petition. To that point, cops in San Antonio received qualified immunity after holding a man facedown in a hogtie position, leading to his death, although the appeals court thankfully overturned that decision.

“Over 25 years ago, the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice conducted an ‘analysis of in-custody deaths, [and] discovered evidence that unexplained in-custody deaths are caused more often than is generally known’ by asphyxia,” the petition continues. “The agency issued a bulletin to ‘alert officers to those factors found frequently in deaths involving positional asphyxia,’ to enable them ‘to respond in a way that will ensure the subject’s safety and minimize risk of death.'”

There are a few strange details that seem unaddressed by the officers’ account of what happened that day. Lemons testified that “when the resisting stopped, we stood up” and that he then “noticed that [Gilbert] wasn’t breathing.” Lombardo’s petition contends this demonstrates that Gilbert was not released from the position until after he had suffocated. That Gilbert put up an insurmountable struggle until the very moment he stopped breathing indeed seems odd.

In her petition, Lombardo likens Gilbert’s experience to George Floyd’s, the man who died in May of 2020 after he was held in the prone position while former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin dug his knee into Floyd’s neck. Chauvin was recently convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter.

Comparing use of force here is a bit thorny, as Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is granular and very factually specific. But there are still relevant parallels. Had Minneapolis chosen not to settle with the Floyd family, it’s likely they would have had to overcome qualified immunity, should they have wanted to proceed with a lawsuit.

“Derek Chauvin would have had a very plausible chance of getting the suit thrown out on qualified immunity grounds—even after being convicted of murder,” Clark Neily, senior vice president for criminal justice at the Cato Institute, told me last month. “There is no preexisting case in the 8th Circuit under which it was ‘clearly established’ that pinning a suspect under one’s knee for nearly 10 minutes until they lose consciousness and their heart stops beating violates the Fourth Amendment.”

There is at least one other key difference: You’ve likely heard of Floyd’s story. You probably haven’t heard of Gilbert’s. Whether or not the state’s story or Stoughton’s analysis would hold up in front of a jury remains to be seen. But Lombardo should have the opportunity to make that argument in front of one.

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Former State Department Official Says Idea COVID-19 Emerged Naturally Is “Ridiculous”

Former State Department Official Says Idea COVID-19 Emerged Naturally Is “Ridiculous”

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

A former State Department official says that the idea the COVID-19 virus emerged naturally out of a zoonotic situation is “ridiculous.”

David Asher told Fox News that the scientific community consensus that the virus emerged in Wuhan as a result of a mutation in animals is completely inaccurate.

“We were finding that despite the claims of our scientific community, including the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID organization, there was almost no evidence that supported a natural, zoonotic evolution or source of COVID-19,” said the former State Department official.

“The data disproportionately stacked up as we investigated that it was coming out of a lab or some supernatural source,” he added.

Asher spearheaded a team to investigate whether a zoonotic source or a lab leak was the most likely scenario for the outbreak of the pandemic and they concluded that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was overwhelmingly the likely culprit.

“That was the epicenter of synthetic biology in the People’s Republic of China, and they were up to some very hairy stuff with synthetic biology and so-called gain-of-function techniques,” said Asher.

He concluded that the zoonotic explanation was “ridiculous” and that the odds of a natural origin were “extremely long.”

As we highlighted earlier, a “raft” of evidence that U.S. intelligence agencies have been sitting on concerning Chinese communications and the movement of Wuhan lab workers points to the lab leak origin being a likely explanation.

While the mainstream media and social media networks treated the lab leak theory as “dangerous misinformation” for the best part of a year, they are now having to backpedal, with Facebook announcing it will no longer censor lab leak information.

Yesterday, China predictably blasted the entire premise as a “conspiracy theory” and demanded an global investigation into U.S. bioweapons labs.

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Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/28/2021 – 13:05

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Lisey’s Story: Bad Stephen King Book Gets Terrible Apple TV Adaptation


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Lisey’s Story. Available Friday, June 4, on Apple TV.

“Every marriage has its own secrets,” reads the epigraph on Apple TV’s new Stephen King series Lisey’s Story. To which many a viewer is going to add: “If only.”

Adapted exclusively by King from his own 2006 novel, Lisey’s Story is a mess in almost every conceivable way. It’s drawn from a leaden and forgettable novel, and King’s ponderous attempt at a screenplay has done nothing to improve it. Neither has Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s painfully arty translation of the written word into video. And while Lisey’s Story is loaded with female star power—Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Allen play sisters—King and Larrain have given them little to do except look head-bangingly anguished or (in Allen’s case) catatonic.

I’ve been a fan of King since I first read his when-high-school-bullying-goes-wrong novel Carrie in 1975. (Consumer tip: Don’t try this alone in your first night in your first house.) But in recent years, his books more and more often read like legal briefs written by somebody bidding for conservatorship of his estate: lots of dull prose and too-familiar storylines. The novel Lisey’s Story was a good example, a dreary autopsy on a marriage that was a lot more interesting dead than alive, filled with stuff recycled from his other books: spooky hotel a la The Shining, a private graveyard like the one in Pet Sematary, a homicidal fan strikingly like the one in Misery.

The creepiest thing about the book was that King thought it was one of his best. The second-creepiest was King’s explanation of what triggered it: Coming home from a prolonged hospital stay, he discovered his wife had redecorated his writing studio and all his books and papers were gone from the shelves, stored in boxes.  To King, it seemed like he was witnessing the clean-up after his own death.

And that is exactly the kick-off point for Lisey’s Story. Two years after a King-like horror novelist named Scott Landon (Clive Owen, The Knick) was gunned down by a crazed fan, his wife Lisey (Moore) is trying, though not very hard, to catalog his papers, including some unpublished stories and books. She is increasingly annoyed by a college professor (Ron Cephas Jones, This Is Us) who specializes in the study of Landon’s work and wants access to the papers.

But that seems like a small problem compared to the mental collapse of Lisey’s sister Amanda (Allen), who reverts to her old habit of slashing herself at the news that her ex-husband has remarried. But wait! That acquisitive college professor enlists a young goon (Dane DeHaan, In Treatment) to assist him in getting hold of Landon’s manuscripts, using knives and torches and such to help.

That little summary I just provided was assembled only by heroic effort on my part, given that Lisey’s Story is a mélange of inscrutable noir photography, flashback, flashbacks within flashbacks, hallucinations, mystic visions, alternate universes, nightmares—pretty much everything but a random guy punching Dan Rather in the face while screaming, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” When the show threatens to lapse into coherence (don’t worry, it doesn’t happen often), the characters start conducting expository conversations through mouthfuls of mushy fried chicken.

Not that comprehensibility is entirely desirable in Lisey’s Story. King has littered the screenplay (and before that, the book) with a maddening baby-talk language among the sisters, in which they call one another “babyluv” and worse. Worst of all is the constant reference to “bool hunts”—a sort of weird scavenger hunt that Landon set up for his wife before his death, the grand prize being, well, nothing—and an alternate universe known as “Boo’ya Moon,” which makes even less sense than the regular one. King’s objective seems to have been to see how many times “bool” and “Boo’ya” can be spoken aloud before viewers begin projectile vomiting at the screen; I don’t know what the number is, but I can tell you it’s reached in the first seven minutes of the first episode.

All the foregoing aside, there are a few lessons that can be drawn from Lisey’s Story. One is that studio executives need to start slapping the teeth out of screenwriters and directors who believe that the illiteracy of films can be masked if you stuff them with enough undifferentiated flashbacks.

Another is that God provided us with studio lighting for a purpose—that is, to light studios. Shooting everything in abject blackness is not arty, it’s stupid.

And third is that Jennifer Jason Leigh is a wittily mean actress, as she has proved in everything from Weeds to The Hudsucker Proxy. Putting her in TV show just to stand around for 10 hours is a bunch of bool.

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US Mint Delays Silver Shipments Due To “Global Silver Shortage”

US Mint Delays Silver Shipments Due To “Global Silver Shortage”

Interest in silver is soaring (both for industrial use and financial investment), echoing 2013’s crisis, as a recent report from the Silver Institute, silver demand for printed and flexible electronics is forecast to increase 54% over the next 10 years.

Demand for silver in this rapidly developing sector is forecast to come in at 48 million ounces this year. By 2030, the demand is expected to surge to 615 million ounces.

And silver prices are back near recent highs as monetizing debt

And according to the New York Times, the U.S. Mint even upped its coin production in mid-2020 after shortages of coins have been reported in the U.S. as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, but demand over the past few months from coin hodlers appears to have overwhelmed the US Mint.

As they just warned that they are halting sales due to a global silver shortage leaving them unable to meet orders…

The full statement from the US Mint (via Facebook):

The United States Mint is committed to providing the best possible online experience to its customers.

The global silver shortage has driven demand for many of our bullion and numismatic products to record heights. This level of demand is felt most acutely by the Mint during the initial product release of numismatic items. Most recently in the pre-order window for 2021 Morgan Dollar with Carson City privy mark (21XC) and New Orleans privy mark (21XD), the extraordinary volume of web traffic caused significant numbers of Mint customers to experience website anomalies that resulted in their inability to complete transactions.

In the interest of properly rectifying the situation, the Mint is postponing the pre-order windows for the remaining 2021 Morgan and Peace silver dollars that were originally scheduled for June 1 (Morgan Dollars struck at Denver (21XG) and San Francisco (21XF)) and June 7 (Morgan Dollar struck at Philadelphia (21XE) and the Peace Dollar (21XH)).

While inconvenient to many, this deliberate delay will give the Mint the time necessary to obtain web traffic management tools to enhance the user experience. As the demand for silver remains greater than the supply, the reality is such that not everyone will be able to purchase a coin. However, we are confident that during the postponement, we will be able to greatly improve on our ability to deliver the utmost positive U.S. Mint experience that our customers deserve. We will announce revised pre-order launch dates as soon as possible.

For now, according to generic data from Bloomberg, the physical premium over paper prices has somewhat normalized…

But a quick check of actual prices in the real world shows silver bullion trading at a huge premium…

Source: APMEX

All of which makes us wonder about what GoldMoney’s Alasdair Macleod warns is the potentially imminent end to paper silver markets as the likely consequences of the Bank for International Settlements’ introduction of the net stable funding requirement (NSFR) for bank balance sheets.

If they are introduced as proposed, banks will face significant financing penalties for taking trading positions in derivatives. The problem is particularly important for the London gold market, as described in last week’s article on this subject. Therefore they are likely to withdraw from providing derivative liquidity and associated services. This article delves into the consequences of the NSFR leading to the end of the London forward markets in gold and silver. Replacement demand for physical metal appears bound to rise, and an assessment is therefore made of available gold not tied up in jewellery and industrial uses. An analysis of gold leasing by central banks, leading to double ownership of physical gold, is included. The conclusion is that unless the BIS has an ulterior motive to trigger a chaotic financial reset of some sort, it is a case of regulators not understanding the market consequences of their actions.

As Peter Schiff recently noted, along with increased silver demand for printed and flexible electronics, analysts expect the solar energy and automotive sectors to demand more silver in the coming years. But at its core, silver is a monetary metal. It tends to track with gold over time. Looking at the big picture, the biggest driver for precious metals continues to be Federal Reserve monetary policy. In order to turn bearish on gold and silver, you have to believe the Federal Reserve is actually going to tighten monetary policy and the dollar is going to remain strong. But given the massive dose of monetary heroin the central bank has injected into the economy, the Fed really has no way out. There is no exit strategy from this extreme monetary policy. That bodes well for both silver and gold in the long term.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/28/2021 – 12:45

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Vote Bear


Bear_YT

The California recall election is coming. Will you vote for Gov. Gavin Newsom? Caitlyn Jenner? That guy with a bear? Or maybe just vote for the damn bear.

Bear won’t raise your taxes. Bear won’t greenlight a poorly-thought-out high-speed rail project. Bear won’t violate his own mandates and eat indoors at a fancy restaurant.

He’s a bear. He’s just going to do bear things.

The only hole bear will dig himself is the one he sleeps in all winter long, helping conserve energy and limiting the need for rolling blackouts.

Bear doesn’t want to interfere in your life. Bear doesn’t want to be near people at all. You mind your business, Bear will mind his. Doesn’t that sound nice for a change?

Maybe wear a bell or something, just in case.

Vote for Bear: I mean, he’s already on the damn flag.

Written and produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg

Image credits: Renée C. Byer/TNS/Newscom; WENN / WENN English Top Features/Newscom; K.C. Alfred/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; John Gastaldo/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom

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Senate Republicans Block Jan 6 Capitol Riot Commission

Senate Republicans Block Jan 6 Capitol Riot Commission

As was largely expected, The Senate failed to reach the 60 votes necessary to advance a bill creating a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, voting 54-35 as Republicans invoked the first legislative filibuster of the Biden presidency.

Schumer asked Republicans in a speech on Friday, moments before the vote:

“What are you afraid of, the truth? Are you afraid that Donald Trump’s Big Lie will be dispelled?”

“The Department of Justice is deep into a massive criminal investigation,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) countered.

“I do not believe the additional, extraneous ‘commission’ that Democratic leaders want would uncover crucial new facts or promote healing. Frankly, I do not believe it is even designed to.”

Six Republicans who voted in favor of the commission were Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mitt Romney (Utah), and Ben Sasse (Neb.).

Former President Trump, who remains the most popular figure in the GOP, has condemned the proposed commission as “partisan” and demanded investigations into left-wing political violence during racial-justice protests last year.

House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) previously told reporters that Democrats would likely pursue a select committee if the bill fell short in the Senate.

This vote comes as James Bovard warns, via The Mises Institute, that the bogus Jan 6th Commission posed a real threat to freedom.

“Truth will out” is the most popular fairy tale in Washington. Members of Congress are clashing over whether politicians will appoint an “independent” commission to reveal the facts behind the January 6 Capitol ruckus. Proponents are portraying the issue as a simple choice between “truth or Trump.”

Recent history provides no reason to expect a politically controlled process to expose facts that undermine powerful politicians. Congress has long been worse than useless as a fact-finding agency. “Oversight” is a euphemism for stupefying congressional procedures designed to avoid discovering information that might embarrass their allies. A senior House Republican admitted in 2004: “Our party controls the levers of government. We’re not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to cause heartburn.” Most members of Congress are more likely to grovel before federal agencies than to challenge their power. “How are you so great and how can we help you?” is the usual response when the FBI director testifies, as Guardian columnist Trevor Timm noted in 2016.

There is no reason to presume that a commission investigating January 6 would not be hogtied official stonewalling. Former Senate Intelligence Committee staff director Andy Johnson observed in 2014: “The fog of secrecy made a mockery of oversight” of the CIA torture scandal. The Obama administration did not object even when the CIA illegally spied on a congressional committee to thwart the torture investigation. Both Bush and Obama administration officials repeatedly lied during congressional testimony on war on terror policies but faced no consequences. But everything would be different in this investigation, right?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her team want a congressionally appointed commission in lieu of disclosing what actually happened on January 6. Cameras posted in and around the Capitol recorded fourteen hundred hours of film on January 6, but very little of the evidence has been publicly disclosed. Fourteen news organizations have requested that the Justice Department publicly release key videos on the federal court’s electronic dockets but no such luck. Capitol Police chief lawyer Thomas DiBiase warned that “providing unfettered access to hours of extremely sensitive information to defendants who already have shown a desire to interfere with the democratic process will … [cause that information to be] passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again.” But it is also “interfering with the democratic process” to withhold evidence of actions which have been endlessly demonized by the president, top congressional leaders, and their media allies. 

Disclosing the video could settle the question of whether most protestors behaved like violent attackers or gaping tourists. Julie Kelly, writing for American Greatness, recently posted a forty-five-second video clip of protestors after they entered the Capitol that day. Capitol Police officer Keith Robishaw tells a group of protestors:

“We’re not against … you need to show us … no attacking, no assault, remain calm.”

The citizens shown in that clip don’t appear to have been hell-bent on overthrowing the government that day.

The media is touting the fact that Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the cochairs of the 9/11 Commission, have endorsed a commission to investigate January 6. But invoking Kean and Hamilton is like relying on the Three Stooges as references for a job application at a pie factory. 

Kean and Hamilton issued a joint statement boasting about the 9/11 Commission: 

“We put country above party to examine, without bias, the events before, during, and after the attacks…. The January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol was one of the darkest days in our history. Americans deserve an objective and accurate account of what happened. As we did in the wake of September 11, it is time to set aside partisan politics and come together as Americans in common pursuit of truth and justice.”

The 9/11 Commission “pursued truth and justice” by permitting the White House to edit the final version of their report before it was publicly released. Despite its canonization inside the Beltway, that report would not be admissible in a court of law, because it relied on torture for many of its key assertions. The New York Times’s Philip Shenon, the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, noted that “more than a quarter of the report’s footnotes—441 of some 1,700—referred to detainees who were subjected to the CIA’s ‘enhanced’ interrogation program.” Shenon reported that commission members “forwarded questions to the CIA, whose interrogators posed them on the panel’s behalf. The commission’s report gave no hint that harsh interrogation methods [including waterboarding] were used in gathering information.” The commission’s report was released months after shocking photos from Abu Ghraib and key Justice Department and Pentagon memos leaked out, exposing the Bush administration’s torture regime. Yet, as Shenon noted, “The commission demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions.” The 9/11 Commission became profoundly complicit in the torture at the same time it pretended to objectively judge the Bush record.

The commission report was released in July 2004 at the same time that Bush was exploiting the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War for his reelection campaign. The commission ignored evidence compiled by a joint House-Senate investigation revealing that Saudi government agents bankrolled multiple Saudi hijackers in the US prior to the attacks (fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis). But the Bush administration suppressed those twenty-eight pages of that congressional report and they were not released until 2016. Bush embraced Saudi leaders while insisting that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was somehow to blame for 9/11. If the 9/11 Commission had quoted the 2002 FBI memo stating that there was “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these [9/11 hijacker] terrorists within the Saudi Government,” Bush might have been seriously damaged, but 9/11 commissioners chose to serve the White House rather than truth. Kean and Hamilton remain venerated by the media, because their kowtowing buttressed public trust in the political system.

Would an investigation of January 6 be more honest than the investigation of September 11? President Biden and Democratic congressional leaders are vested in the “terrorist attack/Pearl Harbor” narrative that they established within hours of the fracas. Democrats still refer to the protestors murdering a Capitol Police officer long after the belated revelation that he died of natural causes. The New York Times noted that that advocates of a January 6 commission insist it is “an ethical and practical necessity to fully understand the most violent attack on Congress in two centuries.” Tell that to the Puerto Rican nationalists who shot up Congress in 1954 or to Congressman Steve Scalise and two other Capitol employees who were shot by a Democratic Party zealot in 2017. If such “facts” are the baseline for accuracy, then citizens can start scoffing long before a commission issues a final report.

The biggest illusion behind the push for a January 6 commission is that there is a political constituency in Washington for truth. But that hasn’t been the case for decades. As French essayist Paul Valery warned long ago, “At every step, politics and freedom of mind exclude each other.”

In the same way that it took almost fifteen years for some key facts about the 9/11 attacks to be revealed, it may be months or years until key damning revelations about the Capitol clash are extracted from federal agencies or private individuals and groups. Creating a pseudoindependent commission is more likely to codify a deceptive but politically profitable storyline than to expose facts that undercut powerful Washingtonians or government agencies. 

A façade of political “truth” can be more dangerous than no disclosure at all. Biden and congressional Democrats are seeking to turbocharge their push for a new domestic terrorism law to permit widespread federal crackdowns on their opponents. Any rigged commission would likely pour gasoline on a fire that could singe far more American rights and liberties.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 05/28/2021 – 12:26

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