Polish Influencer Sells Her “Digital Love” As An NFT For $250,000
In what is likely going to be cited as Central Banks’ most recent proof that there’s nary a sign of a bubble to be seen anywhere, a Polish influencer just sold her “digital love” as an NFT for $250,000.
26 year old Marta Rentel sold the non-fungible token on July 13 and, as a result, committed to going on one date with the anonymous buyer – who we’re guessing is going to be extremely bummed when he (or she) finds out that the quarter of a million dollar purchase likely isn’t going to buy them any sack time with Rentel.
Rentel has 654,000 followers on Instagram, the NY Post noted, and insists that her online identity of Marti Renti, is different from that of her real-life person. “Nothing on the internet is physical, it’s a part of my online persona,” she commented, likely trying to piece together a fancy sounding pseudo explanation for “fairly” selling thin air to an anime-watching computer nerd who “uses” her photos for 250 grand.
Renti’s website says: “My name is Marti Renti. It’s not my ‘real’ name though, it’s the digital version of it, coming from the parallel world where the internet is my stage.”
The “love” sale represents the first of many coming intangible assets she plans on selling. And hey, if there’s a bid there, far be it for us to tell her not to sell everything she can into it. She’ll also be selling “original image files and videos,” the Post wrote.
“Digital love is transactional, but so is marrying a man just because he is wealthy and stable, right?” she told Insider last week.
And one bubble transaction begets another: Renti says she was “inspired” by the NFT sale of an invisible sculpture by Italian artist Salvatore Garau for $18,300 back in May.
“If I manage to successfully mint my Digital Love and find my second half, then why shouldn’t other feelings and emotions just follow?” she wrote on her website. Renti said she was seeking “anyone who’s crazy enough to travel with me to this infinite galaxy of digital emotions.”
China’s Ministry of Culture is preparing a list of songs that will be banned in karaoke bars. In a statement on its website, the agency said karaoke bars must remove any songs that: “endanger national unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity, or harm national security, honor or interests” or that “incite ethnic hatred.” The statement said only “healthy” songs that “promote positive energy” should be performed.
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Burundi Has The Lowest GDP-Per-Capita In The World, US The Highest
GDP per capita has steadily risen globally over time, and, as Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop notes, in tandem, the standard of living worldwide has increased immensely.
This map using data from the IMF shows the GDP per capita (nominal) of nearly every country and territory in the world.
GDP per capita is one of the best measures of a country’s wealth as it provides an understanding of how each country’s citizens live on average, showing a representation of the quantity of goods and services created per person.
The Standard of Living Over Time
Looking at history, our standard of living has increased drastically. According to Our World in Data, from 1820 to 2018, the average global GDP per capita increased by almost 15x.
Literacy rates, access to vaccines, and basic education have also improved our quality of life, while things like child mortality rates and poverty have all decreased.
For example, in 1990, 1.9 billion people lived in extreme poverty, which was 36% of the world’s population at the time. Over the last 30 years, the number has been steadily decreasing — by 2030, an estimated 479 million people will be living in extreme poverty, which according to UN population estimates, will represent only 6% of the population.
That said, economic inequality between different regions is still prevalent. In fact, the richest country today (in terms of nominal GDP per capita), Luxembourg, is over 471x more wealthy than the poorest, Burundi.
Here’s a look at the 10 countries with the highest GDP per capita in 2021:
However, not all citizens in Luxembourg are extremely wealthy. In fact:
29% of people spend over 40% of their income on housing costs
31% would be at risk of falling into poverty if they had to forgo 3 months of income
The cost of living is expensive in Luxembourg — but the standard of living in terms of goods and services produced is the highest in the world. Additionally, only 4% of the population reports low life satisfaction.
Emerging Economies and Developing Countries
Although we have never lived in a more prosperous period, and poverty rates have been declining overall, this year global extreme poverty rose for the first time in over two decades.
About 120 million additional people are living in poverty as a result of the pandemic, with the total expected to rise to about 150 million by the end of 2021.
Many of the poorest countries in the world are also considered Least Developed Countries (LDCs) by the UN. In these countries, more than 75% of the population live below the poverty line.
Here’s a look at the 10 countries with the lowest GDP per capita:
Life in these countries offers a stark contrast compared to the top 10. Here’s a glance at the quality of life in the poorest country, Burundi:
1 in 3 Burundians are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance
Average households spend up to two-thirds of their income on food
However, many of the world’s poorest countries can also be classified as emerging markets with immense economic potential in the future.
In fact, China has seen the opportunity in emerging economies. Their confidence in these regions is best exemplified in the Belt and Road initiative which has funneled massive investments into infrastructure projects across multiple African countries.
Continually Raising the Bar
Prosperity is a very recent reality only characterizing the last couple hundred years. In pre-modern societies, the average person was living in conditions that would be considered extreme poverty by today’s standards.
Overall, the standard of living for everyone today is immensely improved compared to even recent history, and some countries will be experiencing rapid economic growth in the future.
Craig Murray, a former ambassador to Uzbekistan, the father of a newborn child, a man in very poor health and one who has no prior convictions, handed himself over to the Scottish police on Sunday morning.
He becomes the first person ever to be imprisoned on the obscure and vaguely defined charge of “jigsaw identification”.
Murray is also the first person to be jailed in Britain for contempt of court for their journalism in half a century – a period when such different legal and moral values prevailed that the British establishment had only just ended the prosecution of “homosexuals” and the jailing of women for having abortions.
📢PRESS RELEASE: Craig Murray to be first person incarcerated in the UK over media contempt case in 50 years, setting dangerous legal precedent for freedom of speech and equality before the law.
— Craig Murray Justice campaign (@cmurrayjustice) July 29, 2021
Murray’s imprisonment for eight months by Lady Dorrian, Scotland’s second most senior judge, is of course based entirely on a keen reading of Scottish law rather than evidence of the Scottish and London political establishments seeking revenge on the former diplomat. And the UK supreme court’s refusal on Thursday to hear Murray’s appeal despite many glaring legal anomalies in the case, thereby paving his path to jail, is equally rooted in a strict application of the law, and not influenced in any way by political considerations.
Murray’s jailing has nothing to do with the fact that he embarrassed the British state in the early 2000s by becoming that rarest of things: a whistleblowing diplomat. He exposed the British government’s collusion, along with the US, in Uzbekistan’s torture regime.
His jailing also has nothing to do with the fact that Murray has embarrassed the British state more recently by reporting the woeful and continuing legal abuses in a London courtroom as Washington seeks to extradite Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, and lock him away for life in a maximum security prison. The US wants to make an example of Assange for exposing its war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and for publishing leaked diplomatic cables that pulled the mask off Washington’s ugly foreign policy.
Murray’s jailing has nothing to do with the fact that the contempt proceedings against him allowed the Scottish court to deprive him of his passport so that he could not travel to Spain and testify in a related Assange case that is severely embarrassing Britain and the US. The Spanish hearing has been presented with reams of evidence that the US illegally spied on Assange inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he sought political asylum to avoid extradition. Murray was due to testify that his own confidential conversations with Assange were filmed, as were Assange’s privileged meetings with his own lawyers. Such spying should have seen the case against Assange thrown out, had the judge in London actually been applying the law.
Actually what I found most shocking about that was the peculiar determination of the judges to make sure that, during the three weeks we have to lodge the appeal, I am not allowed to go to Spain to testify in the criminal prosecution for the CIA spying on Assange’s legal team.
— Craig Murray – 1st day in prison (@CraigMurrayOrg) May 11, 2021
Similarly, Murray’s jailing has nothing to do with his embarrassing the Scottish political and legal establishments by reporting, almost single-handedly, the defence case in the trial of Scotland’s former First Minister, Alex Salmond. Unreported by the corporate media, the evidence submitted by Salmond’s lawyers led a jury dominated by women to acquit him of a raft of sexual assault charges. It is Murray’s reporting of Salmond’s defence that has been the source of his current troubles.
And most assuredly, Murray’s jailing has precisely nothing to do with his argument – one that might explain why the jury was so unconvinced by the prosecution case – that Salmond was actually the victim of a high-level plot by senior politicians at Holyrood to discredit him and prevent his return to the forefront of Scottish politics. The intention, says Murray, was to deny Salmond the chance to take on London and make a serious case for independence, and thereby expose the SNP’s increasing lip service to that cause.
Relentless attack
Murray has been a thorn in the side of the British establishment for nearly two decades. Now they have found a way to lock him up just as they have Assange, as well as tie Murray up potentially for years in legal battles that risk bankrupting him as he seeks to clear his name.
And given his extremely precarious health – documented in detail to the court – his imprisonment further risks turning eight months into a life sentence. Murray nearly died from a pulmonary embolism 17 years ago when he was last under such relentless attack from the British establishment. His health has not improved since.
At that time, in the early 2000s, in the run-up to and early stages of the invasion of Iraq, Murray effectively exposed the complicity of fellow British diplomats – their preference to turn a blind eye to the abuses sanctioned by their own government and its corrupt and corrupting alliance with the US.
Later, when Washington’s “extraordinary rendition” – state-sponsored kidnapping – programme came to light, as well as its torture regime at places like Abu Ghraib, the spotlight should have turned to the failure of diplomats to speak out. Unlike Murray, they refused to turn whistleblower. They provided cover to the illegality and barbarism.
For his pains, Murray was smeared by Tony Blair’s government as, among other things, a sexual predator – charges a Foreign Office investigation eventually cleared him of. But the damage was done, with Murray forced out. A commitment to moral and legal probity was clearly incompatible with British foreign policy objectives.
Murray had to reinvent his career, and he did so through a popular blog. He has applied the same dedication to truth-telling and commitment to the protection of human rights in his journalism – and has again run up against equally fierce opposition from the British establishment.
Two-tier journalism
The most glaring, and disturbing, legal innovation in Lady Dorrian’s ruling against Murray – and the main reason he is heading to prison – is her decision to divide journalists into two classes: those who work for approved corporate media outlets, and those like Murray who are independent, often funded by readers rather than paid big salaries by billionaires or the state.
According to Lady Dorrian, licensed, corporate journalists are entitled to legal protections she denied to unofficial and independent journalists like Murray – the very journalists who are most likely to take on governments, criticise the legal system, and expose the hypocrisy and lies of the corporate media.
In finding Murray guilty of so-called “jigsaw identification”, Lady Dorrian did not make a distinction between what Murray wrote about the Salmond case and what approved, corporate journalists wrote.
That is for good reason. Two surveys have shown that most of those following the Salmond trial who believe they identified one or more of his accusers did so from the coverage of the corporate media, especially the BBC. Murray’s writings appear to have had very little impact on the identification of any of the accusers. Among named individual journalists, Dani Garavelli, who wrote about the trial for Scotland on Sunday and the London Review of Books, was cited 15 times more often by respondents than Murray as helping them to identify Salmond’s accusers.
The polling was conducted by Panelbase as an extra question in one of their standard Scottish opinion polls. I paid for the question but there was no mechanism by which I could affect the results. Is showed Dani Garavelli as by far the biggest source of identification. https://t.co/sAqY9tbJw0pic.twitter.com/D1D6o9A7i7
— Craig Murray – 1st day in prison (@CraigMurrayOrg) February 3, 2021
Rather, Lady Dorrian’s distinction was about who is awarded protection when identification occurs. Write for the Times or the Guardian, or broadcast on the BBC, where the audience reach is enormous, and the courts will protect you from prosecution. Write about the same issues for a blog, and you risk being hounded into prison.
In fact, the legal basis of “jigsaw identification” – one could argue the whole point of it – is that it accrues dangerous powers to the state. It gives permission for the legal establishment to arbitrarily decide which piece of the supposed jigsaw is to be counted as identification. If the BBC’s Kirsty Wark includes a piece of the jigsaw, it does not count as identification in the eyes of the court. If Murray or another independent journalist offers a different piece of the jigsaw, it does count. The obvious ease with which this principle can be abused by the establishment to oppress and silence dissident journalists should not need underscoring.
And yet this is no longer Lady Dorrian’s ruling alone. In refusing to hear Murray’s appeal, the UK supreme court has offered its blessing to this same dangerous, two-tiered classification.
Credentialed by the state
What Lady Dorrian has done is to overturn traditional views of what constitutes journalism: that it is a practice that at its very best is designed to hold the powerful to account, and that anyone who engages in such work is doing journalism, whether or not they are typically thought of as a journalist.
That idea was obvious until quite recently. When social media took off, one of the gains trumpeted even by the corporate media was the emergence of a new kind of “citizen journalist”. At that stage, corporate media believed that these citizen journalists would become cheap fodder, providing on-the-ground, local stories they alone would have access to and that only the establishment media would be in a position to monetise. This was precisely the impetus for the Guardian’s Comment is Free section, which in its early incarnation allowed a varied selection of people with specialist knowledge or information to provide the paper with articles for free to increase the paper’s sales and advertising rates.
The establishment’s attitude to citizen journalists, and the Guardian’s to the Comment is Free model, only changed when these new journalists started to prove hard to control, and their work often highlighted inadvertently or otherwise the inadequacies, deceptions and double standards of the corporate media.
Now, Lady Dorrian has put the final nail in the coffin of citizen journalism. She has declared through her ruling that she and other judges will be the ones to decide who is considered a journalist and thereby who receives legal protections for their work. This is a barely concealed way for the state to license or “credentialise” journalists. It turns journalism into a professional guild with only official, corporate journalists safe from legal retribution by the state.
If you are an unapproved, uncredentialed journalist, you can be jailed, as Murray is being, on a similar legal basis to the imprisonment of someone who carries out a surgical operation without the necessary qualifications. But whereas the law against charlatan surgeons is there to protect the public, to stop unnecessary harm being inflicted on the sick, Lady Dorrian’s ruling will serve a very different purpose: to protect the state from the harm caused by the exposure of its secret or most malign practices by trouble-making, sceptical – and now largely independent – journalists.
Journalism is being corralled back into the exclusive control of the state and billionaire-owned corporations. It may not be surprising that corporate journalists, keen to hold on to their jobs, are consenting through their silence to this all-out assault on journalism and free speech. After all, this is a kind of protectionism – additional job security – for journalists employed by a corporate media that has no real intention to challenge the powerful.
But what is genuinely shocking is that this dangerous accretion of further power to the state and its allied corporate class is being backed implicitly by the British journalists’ union, the NUJ. It has kept quiet over the many months of attacks on Murray and the widespread efforts to discredit him for his reporting. The NUJ has made no significant noise about Lady Dorrian’s creation of two classes of journalists – state-approved and unapproved – or about her jailing of Murray on these grounds.
But the NUJ has gone further. Its leaders have publicly washed their hands of Murray by excluding him from membership of the union, even while its officials have conceded that he should qualify. The NUJ has become as complicit in the hounding of a journalist as Murray’s fellow diplomats once were for his hounding as an ambassador. This is a truly shameful episode in the NUJ’s history.
Calling all NUJ Members – When a country’s main union for journalists polices the Overton window, you are in a society well on the way to authoritarianism. For four months I have been excluded from the National Union of Journalists and, despite repeated https://t.co/RrdjiXUmmo
— Craig Murray – 1st day in prison (@CraigMurrayOrg) July 16, 2020
Free speech criminalised
But more dangerous still, Lady Dorrian’s ruling is part of a pattern in which the political, judicial and media establishments have colluded to narrow the definition of what counts as journalism, to exclude anything beyond the pap that usually passes for journalism in the corporate media.
Murray has been one of the few journalists to report in detail the arguments made by Assange’s legal team in his extradition hearings. Noticeably in both the Assange and Murray cases, the presiding judge has limited the free speech protections traditionally afforded to journalism and has done so by restricting who qualifies as a journalist. Both cases have been frontal assaults on the ability of certain kinds of journalists – those who are free from corporate or state pressure – to cover important political stories, effectively criminalising independent journalism. And all this has been achieved by sleight of hand.
In Assange’s case, Judge Vanessa Baraitser largely assented to US claims that what the Wikileaks founder had done was espionage rather than journalism. The Obama administration had held off prosecuting Assange because it could not find a distinction in law between his legal right to publish evidence of US war crimes and the New York Times and the Guardian’s right to publish the same evidence, provided to them by Wikileaks. If the US administration prosecuted Assange, it would also need to prosecute the editors of those papers.
Donald Trump’s officials bypassed that problem by creating a distinction between “proper” journalists, employed by corporate outlets that oversee and control what is published, and “bogus” journalists, those independents not subject to such oversight and pressures.
Trump’s officials denied Assange the status of journalist and publisher and instead treated him as a spy who colluded with and assisted whistleblowers. That supposedly voided the free speech protections he constitutionally enjoyed. But, of course, the US case against Assange was patent nonsense. It is central to the work of investigative journalists to “collude” with and assist whistleblowers. And spies squirrel away the information provided to them by such whistleblowers, they do not publicise it to the world, as Assange did.
Notice the parallels with Murray’s case.
Judge Baraitser’s approach to Assange echoed the US one: that only approved, credentialed journalists enjoy the protection of the law from prosecution; only approved, credentialed journalists have the right to free speech (should they choose to exercise it in newsrooms beholden to state or corporate interests). Free speech and the protection of the law, Baraitser implied, no longer chiefly relate to the legality of what is said, but to the legal status of who says it.
A similar methodology has been adopted by Lady Dorrian in Murray’s case. She has denied him the status of a journalist, and instead classified him as some kind of “improper” journalist, or blogger. As with Assange, there is an implication that “improper” or “bogus” journalists are such an exceptional threat to society that they must be stripped of the normal legal protections of free speech.
“Jigsaw identification” – especially when allied to sexual assault allegations, involving women’s rights and playing into the wider, current obsession with identity politics – is the perfect vehicle for winning widespread consent for the criminalisation of the free speech of critical journalists.
Corporate media shackles
There is an even bigger picture that should be hard to miss for any honest journalist, corporate or otherwise. What Lady Dorrian and Judge Baraitser – and the establishment behind them – are trying to do is put the genie back in the bottle. They are trying to reverse a trend that over more than a decade has seen a small but growing number of journalists use new technology and social media to liberate themselves from the shackles of the corporate media and tell truths audiences were never supposed to hear.
Don’t believe me? Consider the case of Guardian and Observer journalist Ed Vulliamy. In his book Flat Earth News, Vulliamy’s colleague at the Guardian Nick Davies tells the story of how Roger Alton, editor of the Observer at the time of the Iraq war, and a credentialed, licensed journalist if ever there was one, sat on one of the biggest stories in the paper’s history for months on end.
In late 2002, Vulliamy, a veteran and much trusted reporter, persuaded Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA official who still had security clearance at the agency, to go on record that the CIA knew there were no WMD in Iraq – the pretext for an imminent and illegal invasion of that country. As many suspected, the US and British governments had been telling lies to justify a coming war of aggression against Iraq, and Vulliamy had a key source to prove it.
But Alton spiked this earth-shattering story and then refused to publish another six versions written by an increasingly exasperated Vulliamy over the next few months, as war loomed. Alton was determined to keep the story out of the news. Back in 2002 it only took a handful of editors – all of whom had risen through the ranks for their discretion, nuance and careful “judgment” – to make sure some kinds of news never reached their readers.
Social media has changed such calculations. Vulliamy’s story could not be quashed so easily today. It would leak out, precisely through a high-profile independent journalist like Assange or Murray. Which is why such figures are so critically important to a healthy and informed society – and why they, and a few others like them, are gradually being disappeared. The cost of allowing independent journalists to operate freely, the establishment has understood, is far too high.
First, all independent, unlicensed journalism was lumped in as “fake news”. With that as the background, social media corporations were able to collude with so-called legacy media corporations to algorithm independent journalists into oblivion. And now independent journalists are being educated about what fate is likely to befall them should they try to emulate Assange or Murray.
Asleep at the wheel
In fact, while corporate journalists have been asleep at the wheel, the British establishment has been preparing to widen the net to criminalise all journalism that seeks to seriously hold power to account. A recent government consultation document calling for a more draconian crackdown on what is being deceptively termed “onward disclosure” – code for journalism – has won the backing of Home Secretary Priti Patel. The document implicitly categorises journalism as little different from espionage and whistleblowing.
In the wake of the consultation paper, the Home Office has called on parliament to consider “increased maximum sentences” for offenders – that is, journalists – and ending the distinction “between espionage and the most serious unauthorised disclosures”. The government’s argument is that “onward disclosures” can create “far more serious damage” than espionage and so should be treated similarly. If accepted, any public interest defence – the traditional safeguard for journalists – will be muted.
Anyone who followed the Assange hearings last summer – which excludes most journalists in the corporate media – will notice strong echoes of the arguments made by the US for extraditing Assange, arguments conflating journalism with espionage that were largely accepted by Judge Baraitser.
None of this has come out of the blue. As the online technology publication The Register noted back in 2017, the Law Commission was at the time considering “proposals in the UK for a swingeing new Espionage Act that could jail journalists as spies”. It said such an act was being “developed in haste by legal advisers”.
It is quite extraordinary that two investigative journalists – one a long-term, former member of staff at the Guardian – managed to write an entire article in that paper this month on the government consultation paper and not mention Assange once. The warning signs have been there for the best part of a decade but corporate journalists have refused to notice them. Similarly, it is no coincidence that Murray’s plight has also not registered on the corporate media’s radar.
Assange and Murray are the canaries in the coal mine for the growing crackdown on investigative journalism and on efforts to hold executive power to account. There is, of course, ever less of that being done by the corporate media, which may explain why corporate outlets appear not only relaxed about the mounting political and legal climate against free speech and transparency but have been all but cheering it on.
In the Assange and Murray cases, the British state is carving out for itself a space to define what counts as legitimate, authorised journalism – and journalists are colluding in this dangerous development, if only through their silence. That collusion tells us a great deal about the mutual interests of the corporate political and legal establishments, on the one hand, and the corporate media establishment on the other.
Assange and Murray are not only telling us troubling truths we are not supposed to hear. The fact that they are being denied solidarity by those who are their colleagues, those who may be next in the firing line, tells us everything we need to know about the so-called mainstream media: that the role of corporate journalists is to serve establishment interests, not challenge them.
People can tell themselves that they didn’t see where things have been heading for the last 17 months, but they did.
They saw all the signs along the way. The signs were all written in big, bold letters, some of them in scary-looking Germanic script. They read …
“THIS IS THE ROAD TO TOTALITARIANISM.”
I’m not going to show you all those signs out again. People like me have been pointing them out, and reading them out loud, for 17 months now. Anyone who knows anything about the history of totalitarianism, how it incrementally transforms society into a monstrous mirror image of itself, has known since the beginning what the “New Normal” is, and we have been shouting from the rooftops about it.
We have watched as the New Normal transformed our societies into paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian dystopias where people now have to show their “papers” to see a movie or get a cup of coffee and publicly display their ideological conformity to enter a supermarket and buy their groceries.
We have watched as the New Normal transformed the majority of the masses into hate-drunk, hysterical mobs that are openly persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” the official “Untermenschen” of the New Normal ideology.
We have watched as the New Normal has done precisely what every totalitarian movement in history has done before it, right by the numbers. We pointed all this out, each step of the way. I’m not going to reiterate all that again.
I am, however, going to document where we are at the moment, and how we got here … for the record, so that the people who will tell you later that they “had no clue where the trains were going” will understand why we no longer trust them, and why we regard them as cowards and collaborators, or worse.
Yes, that’s harsh, but this is not a game. It isn’t a difference of opinion. The global-capitalist ruling establishment is implementing a new, more openly totalitarian structure of society and method of rule. They are revoking our constitutional and human rights, transferring power out of sovereign governments and democratic institutions into unaccountable global entities that have no allegiance to any nation or its people.
That is what is happening … right now. It isn’t a TV show. It’s actually happening.
The time for people to “wake up” is over. At this point, you either join the fight to preserve what is left of those rights, and that sovereignty, or you surrender to the “New Normal,” to global-capitalist totalitarianism. I couldn’t care less what you believe about the virus, or its mutant variants, or the experimental “vaccines.” This isn’t an abstract argument over “the science.” It is a fight … a political, ideological fight. On one side is democracy, on the other is totalitarianism. Pick a fucking side, and live with it.
Anyway, here’s where we are at the moment, and how we got here, just the broad strokes.
It’s August 2021, and Germany has officially banned demonstrations against the “New Normal” official ideology. Other public assemblies, like the Christopher Street Day demo (pictured below), one week ago, are still allowed. The outlawing of political opposition is a classic hallmark of totalitarian systems. It’s also a classic move by the German authorities, which will give them the pretext they need to unleash the New Normal goon squads on the demonstrators tomorrow.
In Australia, the military has been deployed to enforce total compliance with government decrees … lockdowns, mandatory public obedience rituals, etc. In other words, it is de facto martial law. This is another classic hallmark of totalitarian systems.
In France, restaurant and other business owners who serve “the Unvaccinated” will now be imprisoned, as will, of course, “the Unvaccinated.” The scapegoating, demonizing, and segregating of “the Unvaccinated” is happening in countries all over the world. France is just an extreme example. The scapegoating, dehumanizing, and segregating of minorities — particularly the regime’s political opponents — is another classic hallmark of totalitarian systems.
We didn’t get here overnight. Here are just a few of the unmistakable signs along the road to totalitarianism that I have pointed out over the last 17 months.
And now, here we are, where we have been heading all along, clearly, unmistakably heading … directly into The Approaching Storm, or possibly global civil war. This isn’t the end of the road to totalitarianism, but I’m pretty sure we are in the home stretch. It feels like things are about to get ugly. Very ugly. Extremely ugly. Those of us who are fighting to preserve our rights, and some basic semblance of democracy, are outnumbered, but we haven’t had our final say yet … and there are millions of us, and we are wide awake.
So pick a side, if you haven’t already. But, before you do, maybe look back at the history of totalitarian systems, which, for some reason, never seem to work out for the totalitarians, at least not in the long run. I’m not a professional philosopher or anything, but I suspect that might have something to do with some people’s inextinguishable desire for freedom, and our willingness to fight for it, sometimes to the death.
This kind of feels like one of those times.
Sorry for going all “Braveheart” on you, but I’m psyching myself up to go get the snot beat out of me by the New Normal goon squads tomorrow, so I’m a little … you know, overly emotional.
Seriously, though, pick a side … now … or a side will be picked for you.
Can Masturbation Boost Your Immune System to Fight COVID?
With COVID-19 and the Delta variant spreading worldwide, people have been exploring ways to boost their immune systems. Immunity-boosting supplements, exercising, eating healthy, reducing stress, and quitting smoking are some common strategies to boost the immune system, but now masturbating could be added to the list, according to The Sun.
Jennifer Landa, M.D., a specialist in hormone therapy, has said masturbating might strengthen the body’s natural defense forces.
“Masturbation can produce the right environment for a strengthened immune system,” Landa told Men’s Health.
Men’s Health also cited a 2004 study that showed men had more white blood cells 45 minutes after they had a solo orgasm. For those who don’t know, white blood cells are part of the body’s immune system that help fight infection and other diseases.
According to the study by the Department of Medical Psychology, University Clinic of Essen, Germany, “these findings demonstrate that components of the innate immune system are activated by sexual arousal and orgasm.”
Touching oneself might not prevent infection, but orgasms generally help people relax and elevate mood that is key to a healthy immune system.
Dr. Felice Gersh, a gynecologist and obstetrician who specializes in women’s health, said chronic masturbation might not prevent COVID, but “it’s not going to create harm.”
“I think the takeaway message is that there are no negatives from it,” Gersh said.
Further research needs to be done to see if masturbation can supercharger the immune system and provide an extra layer of defenses against viruses.
100 years ago last week – on July 29, 1921 – Adolph Hitler was elected leader of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, later known as the Nazi Party. The combustible Army corporal succeeded the party’s original leader, Anton Drexler, whom Hitler originally been sent to spy on, but whose ideas he came to admire (he may even have shaved his mustache to emulate his predecessor). The 533-1 delegate vote set in motion a series of events that would dominate the next two and a half decades of world history.
Hitler, pre-mustache change.
A young Jewish Internet commentator named Manny Marotta wanted to call attention to the date, for educational purposes. Marotta has been maintaining popular accounts on both Twitter and Instagram called 100 Years Ago Live. His simple, clever, and enlightening mission is to describe history as an actual contemporary might have, in the language of modern social media tools. It’s popular, earning 26,000 followers on Twitter.
Marotta’s accounts remind us that the past was once news, that stories we now remember as ossified, fixed narratives captured in black and white were once fresh, suspenseful events, that filled contemporaries with excitement, and uncertainty.
Whether it’s a snapshot of a socialist congress in Lille, France that at the time might have seemed the beginning of a global Western revolution, or a cartoon showing both sides of the prohibition debate that showed how extremes of opinion dominated discourse even back then, Marotta has a nice touch for putting readers in the mood of the era, while keeping our thoughts in the present. He is very much the opposite of a Nazi or a fascist, and posts about history in the hope that people will learn from it. “I have a step-grandmother who’s a Holocaust survivor,” he says. “That’s part of the reason I started the account.”
His Instagram post on Hitler’s ascension to the status of leader of the Nazi Party looked like this:
A tweet marking the same event appeared as follows:
After the war, disillusioned and bankrupt, the odd little Corporal worked as an intelligence agent for the government. While gathering information on the new German Workers’ Party, he grew fond of it and joined it. Today, he’s become its leader. pic.twitter.com/1NDSMdCV3U
There is no politicking or advocacy observable here, not as standalone posts and still less in the context of hundreds of other entries about other scenes as disparate as Thomas Edison taking a nap under a tree, a woman on Tremont Street in Boston turning heads by wearing pants, or a Soviet ship shelled in the Russian Civil War.
Nonetheless, Instagram pulled Marotta’s post on Hitler’s election, saying it violated “community guidelines.” When he appealed the decision, the rejected him again, saying his content went against their guidelines on “violence or dangerous organizations”:
Since the beginning of the “content moderation” movement, a major problem has become apparent. Human beings simply create too much content on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram for other human beings to review. Machines have proven able to identify clearly inappropriate content like child pornography (though even there the algorithms occasionally stumbled, as in the case of Facebook’s removal of the famous “Running Girl” photo).
But asking computer programs to sort out the subtleties of different types of speech — differences between commentary and advocacy, criticism and incitement, reporting and participation — has proven a disaster. A theme running through nearly all of the “Meet the Censored” articles is this problem of algorithmic censorship systematically throwing out babies with bathwater.
Whether it’s YouTube cracking down on videographer Ford Fischer for covering events involving Holocaust deniers or white supremacists, the same platform zapping footage of the January 6th riots shot by Jon Farina of Status Coup, or Matt Orfalea being punished for violating a “criminal organizations policy” for a spoof coffee commercial involving a mass-murderer, Internet carriers have consistently shown they cannot or will not distinguish between, say, being a Nazi and criticizing one, joking about one, even warning about one.
The frightening thing about the 100YearsAgoLive incident is that it’s not hard to see this becoming a trend, where history itself is deemed to violate common decency. The whole idea of historical education is to prevent future horrors via graphic warnings from the past. Survivors of the Holocaust have always been adamant that we must “Never Forget,” that places such as Auschwitz must never be buried or hidden away but instead displayed prominently, made into lasting cultural artifacts whose purpose is to be so conspicuous as to prevent the natural human impulse to whitewash our sadly expansive history of evil.
In the name of combating hate speech, violence, conspiracy theory, etc., Internet platforms are removing not just advocacy, but knowledge, in a wide-ranging effort that may help the companies create a more frictionless, commercially successful product, but will impede the past from chastening the present. If the aim is preventing the spread of hateful ideas, nothing could be more counter-productive that cleaning away the record of their real-world impact.
This 100YearsAgoLive episode seems like a silly glitch at first, a parody of Internet censorship, but it’s no joke — if we’re going to put machines in charge of cleaning our mental universes, the past is going to be one of the first casualties.
I reached out to Marotta:
TK: Can you tell us a little about the idea behind “100 Years Ago Live”?
Marotta: I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh two years ago. While there, in January 2018, I became interested in WWI history and decided to create a Twitter account that would “live-tweet” the events of the final year of WWI, as if I was a reporter on the ground. While there are certainly Twitter accounts that deal with historical subjects, none put themselves in the first-person, and act as if they are experiencing history, and so I decided to do that.
The account caught on and many people enjoyed the format. Its mission is to provide historical education in a fun and engaging way. I have had to report on some sensitive subjects. Most notably, this past May/June, there occurred the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. I took care to do thorough research on the subject and report on it in real-time with the utmost objectivity and respect for the victims. There was no censorship of this reporting.
Yesterday’s tweet/Instagram post was the first time in which the social media platform removed the post, accusing it of promoting hate. Hitler’s rise to power is, of course, one of the hallmark historical events of the 1920s and 1930s, and I intend to cover it often. This will be difficult if I cannot post the man’s name and image in any place.
TK: What happened yesterday?
Marotta: The purpose of this account is to provide historical education by reporting events from 100 years ago in real time. With that said, we espouse no extremist nor hateful views, even if they were expressed 100 years ago. 100 years ago yesterday, Adolf Hitler was made Führer of the Nazi Party. We reported on this story with the same caption for both Twitter and Instagram, explaining that Hitler had become Fuhrer and a little background information. There was no hateful imagery or view espoused in reporting on this objective fact. Within 20 minutes, Instagram took down the photo of Hitler, with the note that the post promoted hate speech and extremism. Given that it was literally a photograph of Hitler with the caption that he was made Führer, I appealed the decision. They struck it down once again.
TK: Do you think this was a human being making a decision, or a machine?
Marotta: This appears to be a result of an algorithm failing to distinguish between images used in an educational context, and images used in a hateful context. I believe that no human reviewed my case, and that the algorithm blindly struck it down because of the word “Hitler” and a depiction of the man.
TK: What do you think the rationale behind this kind of moderation is? If you have any idea, what’s your opinion on this brand of speech regulation?
Marotta: I believe that Instagram does this to protect their advertising viability, and because they cannot moderate each and every case, an automatic algorithm is applied. However, this serves as a detriment to historical education. I am Jewish, and Holocaust education is vital to my beliefs system. If I cannot provide context on Hitler’s rise to power, then Holocaust education becomes difficult.
TK: Can history violate “community guidelines”?
Marotta: There are certain situations in which I could understand a decision like that. If you had a violent or gratuitous image from the past, I could perhaps understand… But there is no situation in which you can justify suppressing just the image of a human being who happened to be an evil dictator. That is censorship of education itself.
Apple on Saturday removed a dating app for unvaccinated people. Allegedly, the app violated Apple’s policies for COVID content.
Considered the “Tinder for anti-vaxxers,” Unjected is a dating-and-community app for unvaccinated people. In May, the app was launched after top dating websites, such as Bumble and Tinder, partnered with the White House and encouraged users to get vaccinated.
Apple removed the dating app from its App Store after being contacted by Bloomberg. In an email to Unjected, Apple said the app “inappropriately refers to the Covid-19 pandemic in its concept or theme.”
Apple requires all apps related to Covid-19 provide credible health and safety information and only come from recognized entities including government organizations, health-focused non-profits and medical or educational institutions.
Apple had originally denied Unjected during the initial review process and approved the app after it made changes to comply with Covid-19 policies, an Apple spokesperson said. Since then, “the developer has made statements externally to its users as well as updates to the app that once again bring it out of compliance,” Apple said, adding that Unjected encouraged users to avoid using certain words to avoid detection. “This is a violation of our guidelines, which make it clear: ‘If you attempt to cheat the system…your apps will be removed from the store.'”
Unjected’s views on vaccines have also resonated on Instagram where its account has almost 25,000 followers. The growing member base defies efforts by public health officials to boost vaccination rates as the highly contagious Covid-19 delta variant spreads across the U.S. -Bloomberg
In response to the de-platforming, one of the Unjected co-founders posted a video on Instagram saying, “apparently, we’re considered ‘too much’ for sharing our medical autonomy and freedom of choice… So, of course, Apple removed us.”
Making matters worse, Unjected is under review at the Google Play store for posts that claim vaccines are “experimental mRNA gene modifiers,” “bioweapons” and “nano-technology microchips.” As of 1323 ET Sunday, the app is still available on Play.
“We are looking into ways to get off of Apple and Google,” she said. “But the easiest transition for us might be to make the website as great as possible since they can’t shut that down like the app.”
Apple and Google are making it clear that anti-vax content will not be displayed on their platforms. This sort of dystopic censorship would make George Orwell turn over in his grave.
Remember what Silicon Valley did to conservative social media platform “Parler”?
YouTube has temporarily suspended Sky News Australia from posting on its video platform, issuing a first strike to the popular conservative news channel over “COVID-19 misinformation,” according to a statement.
The tech giant said its decision to issue a strike was based on local and global health authority guidance, which Sky News Australia challenged are constantly “subject to change” alongside updates to guidance from the various authorities.
Sky News Australia added that the suspension was over “old videos” posted on its channel.
The strike means that Sky News Australia is suspended for a week from uploading content to its 1.85 million subscribers on its YouTube account.
“Specifically, we don’t allow content that denies the existence of COVID-19 or that encourages people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus,” YouTube said in an early version of its statement that was sent to local media.
“We do allow for videos that have sufficient countervailing context, which the violative videos did not provide.”
Sky News Australia said it “expressly rejects that any host has ever denied the existence of COVID-19 as was implied, and no such videos were ever published or removed.”
It added that the network acknowledges YouTube’s right to enforce its own policies and “looks forward to continuing to publish its popular news and analysis content back to its audience.”
“We support broad discussion and debate on a wide range of topics and perspectives which is vital to any democracy,” a spokesperson for the network added.
“We take our commitment to meeting editorial and community expectations seriously.”
Local media reported the strike came into effect on July 29.
According to YouTube’s policies, three strikes within a 90 days period will see a channel banned permanently from the platform.
One of Sky News’ news reporters has consistently been the first to cover controversial updates on global efforts to track down the origins of COVID-19, some of which were initially dismissed as “conspiracy theories” by other outlets but have since gained wider recognition as possible explanations.
Sky News Australia investigative reporter Sharri Markson was among the first to report on existing footage of bat research from inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, dating back to May 2017, while members of the World Health Organizations investigative team continued to deny that live bats had ever been housed at the facility.
Earnings Have To Grow At 3.8% In Perpetuity For Stock Prices To Make Sense
In a world where an entire generation of traders is convinced that market moves are detached from fundamentals, cash flows and actual news and only the Fed’s balance sheet matters (and they are not wrong; the Fed has indeed broken the “market” irreparably and nothing but the Fed’s QE matters) SocGen’s head of global asset allocation Alain Bokobza has taken a walk down financial memory lane to remind his readers that in the long run it’s all about earnings, and long after the Fed has destroyed the monetary system with its murderous market manipulation, it will still be about earnings. But what will be the new S&P baseline?
That’s the $640 trillion question, because one day traders will have to reasses the upside for stocks without the Fed, and therein lies the rub because as Bokobza has calculated, for the S&P to trade at the current level of ~4,400, corporate profits will have to rise at 3.8%… in perpetuity.
As the SocGen strategist begins his masterclass in valuation (the way stuff like this was done before the Fed took over the entire market), equity valuation is driven by earnings growth expectations and – as such – we normally derive the fair value of equity by calculating the present value of all future dividends (we use the dividend discount model for equity valuation). The future dividends are based on assumptions as to the earnings trajectory and dividend payout ratio.
Now normally, in SocGen’s 4-stage dividend discount model, the bank uses a combination of consensus earnings estimates, historical earnings growth and long-term nominal GDP growth rate to forecast earnings. It then uses the 10y moving average of the dividend payout ratio to forecast the dividend stream.
But to perform his latest analysis, Bokobza had inverted the process and instead of using assumptions about earnings growth, he calculates the earnings growth needed for a given level of total return from equity. Specifically, he uses consensus earnings for the next year and assumes that earnings grow at a constant rate thereafter.
Which brings us to the key question: what returns to expect from equities?
While SocGen would have ideally wanted to use past returns as the first factor on which to anchor return expectations, it quickly encountered a problem: past returns were delivered during a very different context in terms of bond yield and growth, destroying any hope for uniformity. For example, US equity delivered a 10.7% annualized total return between January 1990 and July 2021 and the average annualized 10y rolling return is 10.9% over the period. However, the potential long-term return based on SocGen’s cost of equity approach is 5.7%. One can also use the average equity risk premium and our expectation of the 10y government bond yield to frame our expected return from equities. As per the risk premium model, the average equity risk premium for the US equity market is 4%. And since SocGen’s forecast for the 10y UST yield for 4Q21 is 2%, based on the average equity risk premium and its near-term forecast of the 10y government bond yield, investors could demand a total return of 6% from US equity. However, as SocGen’s economics team notes, the neutral rate for 10y USTs is 3.5%. This would suggest a 7.5% annualized return from the US equity over the long term.
The next question is what growth is implied in current level of the US equity market.
Here Bokobza calculates the rate of earnings growth for a given level of return from the US equity market. In the left-hand chart below, he plots the required earnings growth for different levels of return. So, if US equity market were to deliver an annualized return of 8% over the long term, the earnings CAGR required would be ~6%. In the right-hand chart below, he calculates the required earnings growth such that the long-term annualized return from equity is equal to the latest cost of equity (5.7%). In the early 1990s, US equity needed to grow earnings at around 1.5% every year to deliver a return of 5.7%. Compared to that, the earnings growth now required for a 5.7% return is 3.8%. The higher the earnings required to deliver the same level of return, the more expensive the market.
Bottom line: when seeking to answer what growth is in the price in the US, the answer is that while the US equity market has historically delivered high returns, the current cost of equity (expected return) at 5.7% is near its lows. Clearly, the expected return is much lower than the realized return. However, to deliver this level of expected return, the US equity market needs to grow earnings at 3.8% perpetually.
