Month: July 2021

It comes as no surprise that after South Korean firm Hyundai finalized its acquisition of Boston Dynamics earlier this month, the internet’s favorite dancing four-legged robot, Spot, danced to a song by South Korean boy band BTS. 

The South Korean automotive giant now owns a controlling interest in the Massachusetts-based robotics company, previously belonging to SoftBank.

Last year, Hyundai and BTS partnered in a music video called “I’m On It” that featured an IONIQ, a new EV lineup brand of Hyundai. So it comes as no surprise that Hyundai would use BTS to pump up their new Spot robot in a video released Tuesday. 

Seven Spot robo-dogs can be seen dancing to the BTS song. 

Another video shows a couple of members of BTS dancing alongside Spot. 

Eric Whitman, a Boston Dynamics roboticist who had a role in the music video, said, “There were a lot of challenges around getting the vision of our choreographer, who’s used to dealing with human dancers, into our software.” 

Whitman said, “Everything had to be worked out in advance and scripted precisely. Robots have the advantage over humans in that they’re very repeatable: Once you get it right, it stays right. But they have the disadvantage that you have to tell them every little detail. They don’t improvise at all.”

Whitman said it had taken years to evolve Spot’s behavior and movements, such as reliable walking and climbing. 

“When we do these projects we always have two goals,” he said. “One is to use the video as motivation to improve the product. The secondary goal is to have fun making the video.”

Under South Korean ownership, we wonder what new tasks Hyundai will program Spot to do in the future. 

Meanwhile, China has released a robo-dog of their own. 

So the question remains: Will these robots end up in a war? 

To answer that, a top French military academy has already trained with Spot. 

So the answer could likely be yes. 

Authored (somewhat satirically) by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

So, the War on Reality is going splendidly. Societies all across the world have been split into opposing, irreconcilable realities. Neighbors, friends, and even family members are bitterly divided into two hostile camps, each regarding the other as paranoid psychotics, delusional fanatics, dangerous idiots, and, in any event, as mortal enemies.

In the UK, Germany, and many other countries, and in numerous states throughout the US, a “state of emergency” remains in effect. An apocalyptic virus is on the loose.

Mutant variants are spreading like wildfire. Most of society is still shut down or subject to emergency health restrictions. People are still walking around in public with plastic face shields and medical-looking masks. The police are showing up at people’s homes to arrest them for “illegally gathering outdoors.” Any deviation from official reality is being censored by the Internet corporations. Constitutional rights are still suspended. Entire populations are being coerced into being injected with experimental “vaccines.” Pseudo-medical segregation systems are being brought online. And so on … you’re familiar with the details.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, and a few other countries, and in various other states throughout the US, there is no apocalyptic pandemic.

People are just going about their lives as normal. OK, sure, there is a nasty virus going around, so people are taking common sense precautions, as people typically do for any nasty virus, but there is no “state of emergency” in effect, and no reason to radically transform society into a paranoid, pathologized-totalitarian dystopia.

This state of affairs, in which two contradictory, mutually-exclusive realities exist, is … well, it’s impossible, and so it cannot continue. Either there exists a devastating global pandemic that justifies a global “state of emergency,” the suspension of constitutional rights, and the other totalitarian “emergency measures” we have been subjected to since March of 2020 or there isn’t. It really is as simple as that.

Except that it isn’t as simple as that. It is easy to forget, given the last 16 months, that people have been bitterly divided, and inhabiting mutually-exclusive realities, and regarding people who don’t conform to their realities as enemies for the last five years. I’m not talking about political disagreements, or even socio-cultural differences. I’m talking about contradictory realities. Things that actually happened, or didn’t happen. Things that exist, or do not exist.

I’m not going rehash the whole War on Populism — I covered it extensively at the time — but that’s when the current global-capitalist War on Reality was officially launched. It wasn’t just the usual lies and propaganda. It was a full-scale ideological assault. By the end of it, people actually believed that (a) Donald Trump was a Russian agent, (b) that he was literally Hitler, and so was going to stage some sort of “coup,” declare himself American Führer, and launch the “Trumpian-White-Supremacist Fourth Reich,” and (c) that he had actually attempted this by sending a few hundred unarmed protesters — violent domestic extremist grandmothers, father-and-son kill squads, and bison hat loonies — to “storm the Capitol” and overthrow the government during the so-called “January 6 Insurrection.”

So, when GloboCap rolled out the “New Normal” reality, they weren’t exactly starting from scratch.

Millions of people — not just Americans, because the War on Populism was a global campaign — were already living in a new reality in which facts no longer mattered at all, where things that never happened officially happened, and other things that obviously happened never happened, not officially, or were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.

But the goal of GloboCap’s War on Reality isn’t simply to deceive the masses and divide them into opposing camps. Rulers have been deceiving the masses and dividing them into opposing camps since the dawn of human civilization. This time, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

OK, bear with me now, because this gets kind of heady.

The War on Reality is not an attempt to replace reality with a fake reality. Or it is that, but that is only one part of it. Its real goal is to render reality arbitrary, to strip it of its epistemological authority, to turn it into a “floating signifier,” a word that has no objective referent, which, of course, technically, it already is. You cannot take a picture of reality. It is a concept. It is not a physical object that exists somewhere in time and space.

But let’s leave that last point for a later discussion. This is not the time to get lost in semiotics. For most people, for most practical purposes, reality is … well, reality. It’s objective. Material. It actually exists. It exists independent of our beliefs. It isn’t just an arbitrary, empty signifier that doesn’t actually refer to anything, but which we use, strategically, to assert authority, or to impose ideology on society. If that were the case, there would be no reality. Nothing would be true, everything would be permitted … which is a bunch of postmodern Marxist nonsense.

But just imagine, for a moment, if that were the case … if what determined reality was actually just a question of power rather than facts. Imagine that reality was just a concept that we used to mark the current limits of our knowledge and ideological beliefs. Our doctors — oncologists and virologists, for example, but they could be any kind of doctors or scientists — would be not all that different from medieval alchemists, who totally believed in their reality at the time, as did the patients they were treating, but which we know now was not reality at all, because our reality is the real reality. I mean, it’s not as if people, five hundred years from now, are going to look back at our medical practices and scientific knowledge, and laugh, like we do at those medieval alchemists, right?

Sorry, I got a little off track there. I was trying to explain the ultimate purpose of this global-capitalist War on Reality, and I wandered off into an ontological swamp, which isn’t going to get us anywhere. So, let’s get back to imagining reality, not as what we all know it is (i.e., an actual, material thing that exists), but as a construct people use to validate certain officially-sanctioned beliefs and perceptions and invalidate other beliefs and perceptions, more or less like a system of morals, except instead of dividing things into to “good” and “evil,” it divides things into “real” and “fake.”

Now imagine that you were an immensely powerful, globally hegemonic ideological system, and you wanted to impose your ideology on as much of the entire world as possible, but you didn’t have an ideology per se, or any actual values at all, because exchange value was your only real value, and so your mission was to erase all ideologies, and values, and truths, and belief systems, and so on, and transform everything and everyone in existence into de facto commodities that you could manipulate any way you wanted, because they had no inherent value whatsoever, because their only real value was assigned by the market.

How would you go about doing that, erasing all existing values, religious, cultural, and social values, and rendering everything a valueless commodity?

Well, you wouldn’t want to destroy reality completely, because people wouldn’t stand for that. They would freak right out. Things would get ugly. So, instead, you might want to go the other way, and generate a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive realities, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … which would still freak people out pretty badly.

Naturally, there would be one official reality that you would force everyone to rigidly conform to at any given moment in time, but you would change the official reality frequently, and force everyone to conform to the new one (and pretend that they’d never conformed to the old one), and then, once they had settled into that one, you would change the official reality again, until people’s brains just shut down completely, and they gave up trying to make sense of anything, and just tried to figure out what you wanted them to believe on any given day.

If you repeated that process long enough, eventually, nothing would mean anything anymore, because everything could potentially mean anything … at which point, you could basically tell people anything you wanted and they would go along with it, because what the hell difference would it make? A narcissistic billionaire ass-clown could be a Russian agent and literally Hitler. A half-assed riot could be an “insurrection.” Children could be born “systemically racist.” Men could menstruate. But wait … it’s gets better.

You could stage an apocalyptic global pandemic that only happened in certain countries, or in certain parts of certain countries, and that more or less mirrored natural mortality, and that didn’t drastically increase historical death rates, but was nonetheless totally apocalyptic.

Perfectly healthy people could become “medical cases.” You could count anyone who died of anything as having died of your apocalyptic virus. You could tell people in no uncertain terms that medical-looking masks will not protect them from viruses, and then turn around and tell them that they will, and then, later, publicly admit you were lying in order to manipulate them, and then deny you ever said that, and tell them to wear masks.

You could experimentally “vaccinate” millions of people whose risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from your apocalyptic virus was minuscule or non-existent, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands in the process, and the people whose brains you had methodically broken would thank you for murdering their friends and neighbors, and then rush out to their local discount drugstore to experimentally “vaccinate” their own kids and post pictures of it on the Internet.

At that point, you wouldn’t really have to worry about “populist uprisings,” or “terrorism,” or any other type of insurgent activity, because the vast majority of the global population would be scramble-headed automatons who were totally incapable of independent thought, and who had no idea what was real and what wasn’t, so just repeated whatever new script you fed them like customer-service representatives on Haldol.

It doesn’t get much better than that for globally hegemonic ideological systems!

OK, sorry, I think I got lost there again. I’m not sure what I was trying to say. I’ve been a little foggy lately. I’m not sleeping so well. It’s probably Long Covid. Or maybe it’s just that time of month. Whatever. It’s not like it matters anyway. Still, I think I’ll go down to my former local bookshop and get myself tested.

Have a nice day in … you know, reality!

The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) The Great Reset plan includes a complete transformation of the global food and agricultural industries and the dieting of humans. The architects behind this plan are preparing for a meatless society with the introduction of cell-based, slaughter-free meat. 

Before this decade is over, we’re all going to be eating some form of slaughter-free meat, including chicken, pork and lamb, and beef. The point of all this is to generate fewer greenhouse emissions at cattle farms, use less land for farming, and reduce the use of freshwater and grains for the traditional process of growing livestock. 

The aim is for a sustainable future, and already we’ve noted a few companies producing cell-based, slaughter-free meat. However, these facilities are operating at limited output as it is costly to produce fake meat. 

That’s where Future Meat Technologies of Israel comes into play with their brand new facility able to pump out 500 kilograms (1,102 pounds) of cultured meat products per day, or the equivalence about 5,000 hamburgers per day. 

“This facility opening marks a huge step in Future Meat Technologies’ path to market, serving as a critical enabler to bring our products to shelves by 2022,” said Rom Kshuk, CEO of Future Meat Technologies. “Having a running industrial line accelerates key processes such as regulation and product development.”

Kshuk said the facility produces cultured chicken, pork, and lamb products, and beef production will be coming online soon.

Here’s the company’s production facility located in Rehovot, Israel.

The company’s platform enables fast production cycles—about 20 times shorter than traditional farming.

Yaakov Nahmias, the company’s founder and chief scientific officer, said, “our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone, while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations.” 

It seems as Nahmias’ roadmap for commercializing lab-grown meat plays into the “great reset” plan orchestrated by WEF. 

So we don’t confuse readers, cultured meat products are different from plant-based imitation meat companies, such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. 

Future Meat Technologies could end up on US store shelves in 2022, pending regulatory approval. The company is also examining several locations for future plants in the States. 

So there you have it, one part of the great reset by global elites is to transform the food industry and ensure that everyone eats fake meat by the end of this decade to save the planet from cow burps. 

Opinion authored by Conrad Black via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Biden-Harris administration is now in an extended levitation of credibility. Except for Donald Trump, who entered office in the midst of a public relations terror campaign against him and had no trace of a political honeymoon, all incoming presidents arrive with a favoring wind of bipartisan goodwill behind them.

Especially as President Biden came into office promising a quieter and more genteel atmosphere and has largely done that, it is not surprising that his general popularity has been sustained at somewhat above 50 percent these first five months. But for a long time the Democrats have not had any war-cry except “We’re not Trump” and “That is racism.”

In service to that credo, from Inauguration Day they have taken the position that they would do the reverse of anything Trump did: outright reaction unsupported by any analysis. Nothing else is conceivable as an explanation for their southern border policy.

As Vice President Harris checked the box by going to El Paso, 800 miles away from the more agitated areas of illegal southern entry last week, she repeated the mantra that this administration inherited a mess. The polls are unanimous in indicating that the public realizes they did not inherit a mess; they inherited the almost complete end of illegal immigration and they squandered it instantly and jubilantly by effectively inviting the world to enter while having the hapless Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas repeat like a Disney World self-propelled puppet “The border is closed.”

Television viewers can switch channels from that almost daily pronunciamento to see illegal immigrants swarming across by land and through water. Illegal immigration is now running at the rate of two million a year, which is an unsustainable level of entry of almost entirely unskilled people who will severely strain the social and educational and public security services of the southern border states.

It is a crisis closing in upon a disaster, and the public can already see it approaching. All that can be said for the vice president’s visit to El Paso, where she was welcomed by the gushy local Democratic congresswoman to the “21st Century Ellis Island,” (where people arrived legally and some were rejected), is that it was nothing like as great a fiasco as her visit to Mexico and Guatemala three weeks ago.

There she conspicuously failed to excite the enthusiasm of the American public to deluge more billions of dollars into those improvident areas in order to tackle “the sources of the problem”—the ancient liberal death wish of turning America’s pockets inside out to fight poverty in poor foreign countries by enriching their avaricious politicians.

Inflation

The tsunami of crises that are about to break over this administration do not stop at the southern border. It is no longer possible to disguise that inflation is stoking up. Awareness of this has been clouded and deferred because the composition of the index does not necessarily reflect the needs of average families.

If the figures are broken out and averaged in traditional ways, the current rate of inflation appears to be something like eight or 9 percent and it will continue to remain high while the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, which was solely responsible for the so-called Biden-Sanders Unity Program, is sticking to its guns.

It demands and may force trillions more dollars to be thrown out of the windows of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve in an instant and artificial expansion of the money supply. The president’s latest wheeze for trying to satisfy Sanders while making a gesture to advocates of sane fiscal policy was his professed agreement on a bipartisan infrastructure bill, which almost everyone agrees is needed and is a good thing, followed a couple of hours later by the assertion that it would not be approved if not accompanied by a much larger “virtual infrastructure” measure.

The Republicans who had agreed the bipartisan measure rose in revolt and the president, as is his custom, (and as is made plausible by his frequently turgid inarticulation), announced that he had been misunderstood. For the first time he is under some pressure to work himself out of one of the jams that he has blundered into, instead of just shrugging it off and relying on the docile media to ignore it.

If he retains any of his old Senate bargaining skill, he may be able to come through it with his credibility intact. But he is trying to govern from a high wire, a very hazardous procedure for so unsteady a leader.

Crime

Even more urgent than the surging immigration and imminent inflation crises is the entirely predictable and much predicted crime wave. Violent crime is up everywhere and especially in Democratic-governed cities that cravenly bowed to the outrageous demands in the “peaceful protests” of last summer that injured 2000 police personnel, killed approximately 50 people, and caused over $2 billion of property damage.

The rioters, almost none of whom would have been Republican voters, demanded that the police be defunded and “reimagined” and this was done in many cities, generating violent crime increases of from 25 to 150 percent.

All Biden’s nonsense about shooting to hit people in the leg and enlisting social workers and psychologists to go out on 911 calls is vanishing in the vast cauldron of skyrocketing violent crime. Many formerly feasible neighborhoods are terrorized by gangs and conditions are undoubtedly aggravated by sluggish work from police forces that are tired of being the scapegoats for racist urban terrorists. The ranks of American urban police are thinning rapidly as the people in blue can easily find less hazardous and more highly appreciated work.

The president’s address on crime on June 23 took refuge in the usual Democratic arguments about gun control. No doubt the gun laws can be better enforced, but the counter-argument that in such lawless conditions, the existence of firearms in most American homes is a factor of deterrence of crime and not an incitement to it.

Chicago has tough gun laws but its worst areas are shooting galleries where the arrest rates are so low that it is obvious that the police are either compromised by their association with violent gangs or confining themselves to the perimeters of the most crime-ridden areas and have abandoned the core of those areas to the Darwinian masters of them, (and these desperate conditions are certainly not confined to Chicago).

The president was correct in his plan to give greater assistance to criminals returning to civilian life and to prison reform in general, but that will work better with nonviolent people who are generally chronically over-sentenced, and who are much less likely to be repeat offenders than their violence-prone fellow inmates.

Possible Fixes

This is a problem that disconcerts and frightens scores of millions of Americans. When the administration comes to its collective senses, it can go back to the Trump methods of protecting the southern border while giving their policy a name that connotes reform.

Biden can also stop being intimidated by Sanders and (Congresswoman) Ocasio Cortez and be assured of a large number of the reasonable majority with any serious gesture of fiscal restraint, at least up until the midterm elections. It might not be too late to damp down the psychology of inflation.

But there is no quick fix to violent crime. It will soon be impossible to hide from the necessity to intervene directly to finance the recruitment and proper training of at least 100,000 more police personnel.

The methods for reducing violent urban crime in the United States are now well known and were demonstrated by the mayoral regime of Rudolph Giuliani in New York (1993–2001), and there is no alternative but to return to them and the federal government can incentivize that.

The embarrassment to the Democrats in such a course will be as nothing to the embarrassment they will receive at the polls next year if they do not take serious anti-crime measures.

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world. He’s the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and, most recently, “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other,” which has been republished in updated form. You can hear more of Conrad’s thoughts on his podcast “Scholars & Sense” alongside his co-hosts Bill Bennett and Victor Davis Hanson at ScholarsAndSense.buzzsprout.com.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem tweeted Monday that she’s sending 50 of her state’s National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas and will be paid for by a private donation, according to Axios. 

Noem said, “I’m officially announcing up to 50 National Guard troops to Texas to help secure our border.” She said President Biden has forgotten that a secured border is critical to maintaining a sovereign nation. “We shouldn’t be making our own communities vulnerable by sending police to fix Biden’s border crisis.” 

The funding for the troop deployment is coming from a “Tennessee billionaire and high-dollar Republicans,” Axios said. 

Noem spokesperson Ian Fury told Axios the funds are coming from a foundation run by billionaire Willis Johnson. There was no word on the size of the donation or the exact mission the troops would be conducting. 

Johnson has spent millions of dollars to bankroll several political campaigns, including former President Trump’s reelection campaign. 

The eventual deployment of the troops, funded by republicans, could optically tarnish Biden’s image when it comes to border security because his administration has been chipping away at law and order on the border. 

Other Republicans, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, announced they would send state law enforcement units to Texas to secure the border to clean up Biden’s disastrous border policies that have resulted in absolute chaos. 

Texas Gov. Abbott has frequently fought with the Biden administration on border issues. 

America is a melting pot of cultures. The most sustainable way to blend the world’s people is through a fair and orderly immigration system—something the Biden administration has failed to do. 

The chaos on the southern border is terrible optics for Biden as Republicans swarm in with law enforcement and privately funded troops to fix the mess. Certainly, the border will be a huge debate issue in the next presidential election cycle. 

By Mark Solomon of FreightWaves,

President Joe Biden has thrust a dagger into the heart of the federal motor fuels tax and, with it, the trust fund that’s long been dedicated to paying for highway projects.

So says Randy Mullett, a multi-decade veteran of the inside-the-beltway transportation wars and head of a Virginia-based consultancy. Biden’s staunch opposition to an increase in the federal fuels tax — which hasn’t been raised since 1993 — sends a clear message to Congress that the Highway Trust Fund, which for decades has used fuel tax proceeds to funnel money to states for road infrastructure projects, has reached the end of its useful life, Mullett said. The Trust Fund was created in 1956 to fund the interstate highway system and other road projects.

“The days of a dedicated highway trust fund are finished,” Mullett said Tuesday afternoon during a virtual session at the SMC3 annual summer meeting.

House Democrats had been tinkering with the idea of raising the fuel tax by indexing it to inflation, Mullett said. Biden’s pronouncement quashed those efforts, he said. From now on, every infrastructure project will compete with other federal spending initiatives for the same pot of money, a prospect no one in the transport ecosystem relishes, Mullett said.

Bereft of federal money, states will be pressured to continue hiking their fuel taxes, Mullett said. Over the past three decades, states have repeatedly raised fuel taxes and related fees to pay for necessary infrastructure improvements.

Perhaps the oldest unresolved issue in official Washington has been how to pay for infrastructure improvements absent any increases in the federal fuels tax. The tax has sat at 22.4 cents per gallon on diesel and 18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline since President Bill Clinton’s first year in office. Groups including shippers, carriers and the 3 million-strong U.S. Chamber of Commerce have repeatedly endorsed measures to raise fuel taxes. However, the Obama administration consistently rejected it as a regressive tax, a position that Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president, has adopted. The Trump administration talked early on about supporting a fuel tax hike, but nothing ever materialized.

Adding to the cost squeeze is the administration’s refusal to support taxes or user fees on the use of electric-powered vehicles (EV), which currently escape levies because they don’t require fossil fuels. Though still a distinct minority of the nation’s truck and auto fleets, EVs will become much more commonplace on American roads over the next 20 years. Hardly anyone disputes the need to capture EV activity and tax their use. The question is how it will be done.

The urgency behind the “how-do-we-pay-for-this” question has reached a crescendo, with the administration and a bipartisan group of senators agreeing to an eight-year, $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, and with the House and Senate dueling over how to reauthorize the 2015 FAST Act, the last federal transport-spending bill. It is expected that the legislation, if a version gets enacted, will cost an additional $500 billion to $600 billion depending on its duration.

With costs running far ahead of revenues due to years of inaction at the federal level, the trust fund regularly runs out of money and requires periodic capital transfers from the general treasury to meet its commitments. The House’s reauthorization bill, which is set to be voted on by the full chamber later this week, contains $148 billion in transfers over the next five years. The Senate is still putting together its version.

It is unclear whether the administration-backed initiative and the reauthorization legislation will be consolidated or will move forward on different tracks. Either way, there is more infrastructure funding on the table than at any time in recent history.

Panelists at the session said transport and business interests need to be on guard for any form of revenue-raising coming out of both branches. The Biden administration has proposed hiking the corporate income tax rate to 28% from 21% to pay for infrastructure programs, a move that would be a “huge hit” on retailers, said Jonathan Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation (NRF), the world’s largest retail industry trade group. 

There has also been bipartisan talk of a bill-of-lading tax, which would have a direct and enormous impact on all of logistics. Mullett said the broad strokes of the measure are “ill-defined” and that it’s unlikely to go anywhere. However, anything is possible when the executive and legislative branches are “scrambling for dollars,” he said.

Now that the Covid panic is starting to subside, the “boom” is beginning. Especially in the luxury goods market.

The surge in spending is indicative of the tailwind that loosening lockdowns, combined with trillions of dollars in stimulus, has created. 

One person experiencing the spending binge firsthand is travel agent Dottie Williford, who told The Washington Post that the company’s luxury offerings are being sold out first: “People don’t usually spend $20,000 to go to the Bahamas, but my clients are. The first things to sell out were the top category on the ship.”

As a result, businesses are going to start catering further to the wealthy, the report notes. This is due to the fact that the wealthiest Americans will be the driving force behind a lot of the recovery in retail spending. 

As of now, “nearly 40 percent of overall consumer spending comes from the top fifth of earners — households that earn at least $120,000 a year,” WaPo notes. The bottom 20% of households account for just 9% of spending – and that gap is set to widen. The wealthiest 10% of Americans added more than $8 trillion to their net worth in 2020, despite the entire economy essentially shutting down and most of the country being in lockdown.

Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Harvard University, said: “Higher-income folks are accumulating a lot of savings. They will spend more going forward and that will further create an incentive for companies to cater to higher-income folks even more.”

High income consumer spending is now 11% higher than pre-covid levels and consumer spending could grow at the fastest pace since 1946, the report notes. As a result, names like J.Crew and Uniqlo are specifically raising their price points heading into the new season, the report notes. Names like Gucci and Louis Vuitton are also raising prices. 

Kayla Marci, a market analyst at retail-data firm EDITED, said: “Prices are rising. We’re also seeing these mass markets aligning their prices with luxury or expanding the offering of high-end products.”

The hospitality and travel indsutry is also feeling robust demand. Lindblad Expeditions, a cruise line that normally offers 35 day Antarctic cruises for $50,000 each, said it may expand into a “diverse high end travel aggregate” heading into 2021. 

Its CEO, Sven Lindblad, said in April: “We are well-prepared to start up again. We have excellent financial reserves, a couple of new companies under our umbrella and a marketing machine that is vastly strengthened for growth.”

Similarly, Oceania Cruises’ 2023 world cruise, which is called “Around the World in 180 Days,” and costs between $46,000 and $160,000 per guest, sold out in a single day.

CEO Frank Del Rio said: “We believe this achievement, along with multiple booking records we have announced in recent months, demonstrates the pent-up demand that exists from our mature and affluent cruisers even for long and exotic voyages once the severe impact of the pandemic subsides.”

Robertico Croes, director of the Dick Pope Sr. Institute for Tourism Studies at the University of Central Florida, echoed the bullish sentiments for the industy: “The post pandemic will see a very strong movement toward the most affluent in terms of product development and services, and so on, compared to those who don’t have the affluence needed to engage in travel. Travel is inherently a luxury item.”

Additionally, live entertainment spending is up 60% this year, amusement park trips and recreation are up 54% this year and membership clubs are up 45% this year. Those three fastest growing categories are usually dominated by high income Americans. 

Demand for second homes has also “more than doubled” during the pandemic and was up a scorching 178% in April and 48% in May. 

If the post-Great Recession spending data is any indicator, the economic recovery could only be getting started:

In the five years after spending by the top 20 percent hit bottom during that recession, their share of all spending on care services such as day care, preschool and eldercare jumped 9 percentage points to 56 percent of overall spending in that area. The story was similar in education spending, such as college and private schools, as their share jumped 5 percentage points to 54 percent overall.

Discretionary spending by the top 20 percent on fun purchases like pets, toys and hobbies rose 3.4 percentage points to 38.5 percent of that overall category. In another category that includes hotels and vacation homes, where the top 20 percent were already dominant, they gained even more ground, reaching 59 percent of spending overall.

Authored by Bruce Abramson via RealClearPolitics.com,

Critical race theory has exploded into public consciousness. Millions of American parents are just coming to realize that our schools have become woke indoctrination centers preaching divisiveness, bigotry, discrimination, and disdain for American history. Most of them are wondering how we got here.

The answer is simple: Slowly. Incrementally. One step after another, over the course of decades. It’s hardly just K-12 education. An incentive system of “incremental outrageousness” has taken every aspect of American culture dangerously far from reality into the orgy of radical leftist hatred known as progressivism.

How did it happen without anyone noticing?

Turns out, we’ve reached the endgame of a strategy the radical left put in play in the 1960s: the long march through the institutions. The onslaught began in higher education—an institution particularly well suited for a takeover because it functions without external market signals. Success in academia hinges entirely on peer approval. Faculty members make all decisions concerning the hiring, firing, and promotion of junior colleagues, curriculum design, publication in prestigious journals, the appropriate paths for research, and the availability of public and private research funding.

The surest way to succeed as an academic is thus to flatter the senior folks charged with making decisions about your career. The best way to do that (within the bounds of legality and propriety) is to “build upon” their work—that is, by taking it one step further in the recommended direction. Senior academics select the direction. Junior academics bolster the prestige of their seniors whenever they make a new “scientific discovery” along the designated path. In one fell swoop these junior academics show how important past work has been and tie their own egos, prestige, and careers to those of their seniors.

This process calcifies conventional wisdom while divorcing each new “discovery” from everything other than the step that immediately preceded it. Each small step in the approved direction represents a small step away from the reality that originally grounded it.

Incremental outrageousness. Consider, for example, the well-grounded observation that it might be worthwhile to study history from the perspective of the peasants and/or the conquered rather than of royalty and/or the victorious.  Fast-forward a few decades and many incremental steps. Now, perspective implies sympathy; those who study the oppressed are compassionate, while those who study the oppressors are cruel. Fast-forward a few more decades. Critical theory reduces all human interactions into conflicts between oppressors and oppressed.

Finally, fast-forward to present. Today, “science has proved” that the nuclear family is a tool of oppression—hence the opposition of Black Lives Matter and its ideological allies—and that the biggest problem facing America is a white supremacism so pervasive that it can boast exactly zero organizations of any size or influence.

How did science prove such things? One day at a time, building incrementally upon the scientific frontier of the day before.

Outrageous? Absolutely. But the path from a grounded, reasonable observation to a hateful fantasy capable of undermining the republic was so methodical, so incremental, and so organic that few noticed it happening. Millions of individuals, over the course of decades, responded rationally to the incentives they faced. Prestigious “experts” told them what they had to do, say and join to succeed. Most young people arriving on campus or beginning work in the prestige professions complied; those who did not had short, unhappy experiences and limited career success.

Meanwhile, decent, colorblind, patriotic Americans trusted our nation’s institutions to police themselves. That trust was badly misplaced. The radical left hollowed out our institutions and took them over—first academia, then the media, then the civil service, K-12 education, the professional organizations, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. In 2021, even corporate America is more interested in being woke than in maximizing profits.

Social media was the final blow. Social media made incremental outrageousness the dominant incentive system driving American society. Viral posts invariably move one step beyond yesterday’s outrage—familiar enough to seem plausible, but still pushing forward in the approved direction. The conventional wisdom dominating American culture is dangerously divorced from reality.

The organic nature of incremental outrageousness is responsible for today’s “social progressives”: The folks committed to progressivism despite having no understanding of progressive ideology. The folks who provide cover and support for anti-American radicals despite believing quite deeply that they’re supporting traditional American concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality. The folks we need to wake up if we’re to secure the support necessary to sustain the American republic.

Those of us committed to that republic must undertake a program of strategic education and commitment. Tools and techniques for waking them and changing their incentives are available and teachable. By all appearances, however, very few of our leaders or our fighters have mastered them. That’s going to have to change—soon—if we have any hope of restoring America.

No one said it was going to be easy.

Months ago, we told readers “ghost guns,” which are untraceable to the federal government and can either be made from 80% percent lower kits or 3D printers were popping up all across Baltimore City. Now the number of ghost guns the Baltimore City Police Department (BCPD) expects to seize this year is set to be more than double what it was last year. 

Baltimore police are on track to seize at least twice as many privately manufactured firearms — often called “ghost guns” — as they did in 2020, Sheree Briscoe, the city’s deputy police commissioner, said Tuesday.

At a virtual conversation moderated by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, Briscoe said the department has seen an increase in its recovery of privately manufactured firearms in the last few years.

The department recovered 29 ghost guns in 2019; 126 in 2020; and 83 from January to mid-May this year.

“We’re on pace to surpass last year’s numbers and potentially come in between 250 to 300 privately made firearms that will make their way to the streets of Baltimore in the hands of various age groups [and] communities,” she said.

According to Briscoe, 15 ghost gun seizures were “directly linked” to homicide or shooting investigations in 2020.

“…To some that may not be a large percentage, but any percentage that’s attributed to a gun that is not legally registered, legally manufactured with serial numbers, is a challenge because then you run the difficulty of trying to find out where did that come from, who may ever possess that gun,” said Briscoe. – Maryland Matters

With more than 300 homicides for six consecutive years, 2021 murders are estimated to be over 300.

BCPD Commissioner Michael Harrison has blamed the rise in violent crime on several issues, including an officer shortage. 

Last year, liberal city officials defunded BCPD, but as violent crime soared, newly elected Mayor Brandon Scott reversed their measure to increase funding.

The situation in the metro area is so severe that Governor Larry Hogan had a recent meeting with Mayor Scott and Police Commissioner Michael Harrison. The governor said the meeting was “productive” but attributed the lack of consequences for petty crime to the surge in violence. 

“When crime’s being committed right in front of police officers, when the state’s attorney refuses to prosecute half the crimes, we’re not going to fix the problem, regardless of how many meetings we’re going to have,” Hogan said, referring to Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby halting the prosecution of minor traffic violations, prostitution, drug possession, and other minor offenses during the virus pandemic. In March, Mosby held a press conference to declare that rough policing doesn’t prevent more violent crimes. Months later, her policing strategies have failed. 

Last Wednesday, Mayor Scott sat down with President Biden at a roundtable discussion on gun violence. The mayor and Biden discussed new efforts to address violent crime. 

“Today’s conversation with Mayor Scott of Baltimore, for example, echoed what we know to be the case and hear from mayors all across the country. Mayors have the power to help shape and enforce the laws in their cities, but they can’t control the laws in neighboring cities and states even though the gun legally bought there often ends up in their streets. Mayor Scott says that 80% of the guns in Baltimore were acquired outside the city. There’s nothing he can do about that, so we have to act,” Biden said.

The president has been an advocate for banning ghost guns and crushing the NRA. 

When someone can create an entire 3D-printed ghost gun at their home for under $350, including the cost of the printer, it seems Biden’s ambitions for more gun control could be a losing battle. 

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”

– George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21, 1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.

Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.

Orwell understood what many Americans are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs.

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell

Even our ability to speak and think freely is being regulated.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons.

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.

In my debut novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the dystopian future that George Orwell predicted for 1984 has finally arrived, 100 years late and ten times as brutal. In this post-apocalyptic world where everyone marches to the beat of the same drummer and words like “freedom” are taboo, Erik Blair—Orwell’s descendant and unwitting heir to his legacy—isn’t volunteering to be anyone’s hero. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always go according to plan. To save all that he loves, Orwell will have to travel between his future self and the past.

And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity. 

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter. 

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has been working on an artificial intelligence system designed to anticipate your every move. Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence) has been designed to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS.

What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw. Just look at what happened to Julian Assange.

So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

We’re running out of options.

Whether you’re dealing with fact or fiction, as I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.