Marijuana Arrests Plunged Last Year, Reflecting the Impact of Legalization


cannabis-leaves-20-MIS-Photography

Last year, according to data the FBI published this week, police in the United States made about 350,000 arrests for marijuana offenses, the lowest level recorded in three decades. The 36 percent drop in 2020, which follows an 18 percent decrease in 2019, reflects the impact of ballot initiatives and legislation that eliminated penalties for low-level possession last year or earlier. It may also reflect the impact of COVID-19 restrictions that drove cannabis consumers indoors, where they were less likely to be noticed by police.

As usual, the vast majority of marijuana arrests in 2020 (91 percent) were for simple possession, as opposed to cultivation or distribution. “As more states move toward the sensible policy of legalizing and regulating cannabis, we are seeing a decline in the arrest of non-violent marijuana consumers nationwide,” says Erik Altieri, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), in a press release. “The fight for legalization is a fight for justice. While these numbers represent a historic decline in arrests, even one person being put into handcuffs for the simple possession of marijuana is too many.”

There is reason to expect marijuana arrests to decline again this year. In seven states that recently legalized possession—Arizona, Connecticut, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia, with a combined population of more than 50 million—the laws did not take effect until late 2020 or this year. All told, more than two-fifths of Americans live in the 18 states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use—a policy supported by about two-thirds of Americans, according to the latest Gallup poll. Nearly all of those states also allow commercial production and distribution or will soon.

Marijuana arrests did not initially follow the trajectory you might expect after Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational use in 2012. Total arrests dropped in 2013, rose slightly in 2014, fell in 2015, then rose modestly for three consecutive years before falling substantially in 2019 and 2020.

Since possession had been legalized in eight states—including California, the most populous—by 2017, it may seem surprising that marijuana arrests continued to rise until 2019. But in California, possession of an ounce or less for personal use had been treated as a citable offense punishable only by a $100 fine since 2011. So while California accounts for 12 percent of the U.S. population, it accounted for less than 2 percent of marijuana arrests in 2016, the year that voters approved legalization there.

Four of the other jurisdictions that legalized marijuana in 2012, 2014, or 2016—D.C., Maine, Massachusetts, and Oregon—likewise had already decriminalized possession of small amounts. In Alaska, Nevada, and Washington, possession was still a misdemeanor, while Colorado treated it as a “petty offense.” Another thing to keep in mind: Public marijuana use and possession of amounts above a specified threshold can lead to arrests even in states that have legalized possession, cultivation, and distribution.

Still, the increases in marijuana arrests after these jurisdictions legalized recreational use suggest that other states picked up the slack. Last year, NORML reported that “much of the national decline resulted from a drop-off in marijuana arrests in Texas in 2019, which experienced over 50,000 fewer marijuana-related arrests last year” than in 2018. In Texas, the second-most populous state, possession of two ounces or less is still a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a maximum fine of $2,000.

When you take a longer view, the 2020 total looks like a reversion to the arrest numbers recorded in the early 1990s, before a surge in pot busts that continued for a decade and a half. Marijuana arrests rose threefold from 1991 until their peak in 2007, while the U.S. population grew by 19 percent. Last year’s arrest total is still about 22 percent higher than the number recorded in 1991.

U.S. Marijuana Arrests

While the odds that any given cannabis consumer will be arrested have always been low, they are getting lower. Possession arrests in 2007 represented about 3 percent of marijuana users that year, judging from survey data. Last year, based on survey data for 2019, that number was down to about 0.7 percent.

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Marijuana Arrests Plunged Last Year, Reflecting the Impact of Legalization


cannabis-leaves-20-MIS-Photography

Last year, according to data the FBI published this week, police in the United States made about 350,000 arrests for marijuana offenses, the lowest level recorded in three decades. The 36 percent drop in 2020, which follows an 18 percent decrease in 2019, reflects the impact of ballot initiatives and legislation that eliminated penalties for low-level possession last year or earlier. It may also reflect the impact of COVID-19 restrictions that drove cannabis consumers indoors, where they were less likely to be noticed by police.

As usual, the vast majority of marijuana arrests in 2020 (91 percent) were for simple possession, as opposed to cultivation or distribution. “As more states move toward the sensible policy of legalizing and regulating cannabis, we are seeing a decline in the arrest of non-violent marijuana consumers nationwide,” says Erik Altieri, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), in a press release. “The fight for legalization is a fight for justice. While these numbers represent a historic decline in arrests, even one person being put into handcuffs for the simple possession of marijuana is too many.”

There is reason to expect marijuana arrests to decline again this year. In seven states that recently legalized possession—Arizona, Connecticut, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Virginia, with a combined population of more than 50 million—the laws did not take effect until late 2020 or this year. All told, more than two-fifths of Americans live in the 18 states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use. Nearly all of those states also allow commercial production and distribution or will soon.

Marijuana arrests did not initially follow the trajectory you might expect after Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational use in 2012. Total arrests dropped in 2013, rose slightly in 2014, fell in 2015, then rose modestly for three consecutive years before falling substantially in 2019 and 2020.

Since possession had been legalized in eight states—including California, the most populous—by 2017, it may seem surprising that marijuana arrests continued to rise until 2019. But in California, possession of an ounce or less for personal use had been treated as a citable offense punishable only by a $100 fine since 2011. So while California accounts for 12 percent of the U.S. population, it accounted for less than 2 percent of marijuana arrests in 2016, the year that voters approved legalization there.

Four of the other jurisdictions that legalized marijuana in 2012, 2014, or 2016—D.C., Maine, Massachusetts, and Oregon—likewise had already decriminalized possession of small amounts. In Alaska, Nevada, and Washington, possession was still a misdemeanor, while Colorado treated it as a “petty offense.” Another thing to keep in mind: Public marijuana use and possession of amounts above a specified threshold can lead to arrests even in states that have legalized possession, cultivation, and distribution.

Still, the increases in marijuana arrests after these jurisdictions legalized recreational use suggest that other states picked up the slack. Last year, NORML reported that “much of the national decline resulted from a drop-off in marijuana arrests in Texas in 2019, which experienced over 50,000 fewer marijuana-related arrests last year” than in 2018. In Texas, the second-most populous state, possession of two ounces or less is still a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a maximum fine of $2,000.

When you take a longer view, the 2020 total looks like a reversion to the arrest numbers recorded in the early 1990s, before a surge in pot busts that continued for a decade and a half. Marijuana arrests rose threefold from 1991 until their peak in 2007, while the U.S. population grew by 19 percent. Last year’s arrest total is still about 22 percent higher than the number recorded in 1991.

U.S. Marijuana Arrests

While the odds that any given cannabis consumer will be arrested have always been low, they are getting lower. Possession arrests in 2007 represented about 3 percent of marijuana users that year, judging from survey data. Last year, based on survey data for 2019, that number was down to about 0.7 percent.

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Texas Acquires COVID-19 Monoclonal Antibodies, Bypassing Biden HHS Limits: Governor

Texas Acquires COVID-19 Monoclonal Antibodies, Bypassing Biden HHS Limits: Governor

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday announced his state has obtained its own supply of monoclonal antibodies, a type of treatment for COVID-19, in a move that bypasses the Biden administration’s limits.

“Texas has obtained its own separate allocation of these monoclonal antibody treatments working around the limitations that President Biden has put on us so that we will be able to ensure that anybody in the state of Texas that wants access to these special treatments, that they will be able to get it,” Abbott, a Republican, said during an interview with radio host Dana Loesch.

The governor also wrote on Twitter that Texans who get the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus and get a referral from a doctor are eligible for monoclonal antibody treatment.

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) moved to ration COVID-19 treatment via monoclonal antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies distribution sites previously could order the treatment directly from manufacturers.

The federal government-directed change now requires states to use HHS as a middleman to obtain the antibody treatments and places caps on how many each state can obtain.

The Texas Department of State Health Services told news outlets this week that it obtained some 4,700 doses from drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline. The Epoch Times has contacted the agency for comment.

Previously, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, announced he ordered thousands of doses of the treatment from GlaxoSmithKline after HHS’s rule change. The governor then called on the Biden administration to restore Florida’s supply of the drug.

“We should be doing everything we can to get patients monoclonal antibody treatments, not cutting allocations of treatment like the Biden Administration has done,” he said in a statement issued last week.

“Despite the cuts by the federal government, we want any Floridians that could benefit from this treatment to have access to it. Florida is going to leave no stone unturned when finding treatment for our state, and we are encouraged to have secured a shipment of monoclonal antibody treatments from GlaxoSmithKline.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) proposed legislation that would prevent HHS from creating rules to block health care providers and hospitals from purchasing monoclonal antibody treatments.

But the White House said that the change is necessary to make sure states all across the country get access to the treatment.

“Just seven states are making up 70 percent of the orders. Our supply is not unlimited, and we believe it should be equitable across states across the country,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said earlier in September.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/30/2021 – 13:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3uEOIp3 Tyler Durden

‘Equity,’ ‘Multiculturalism,’ and ‘Racial Prejudice’ Among Concepts That Could Be Banned in Schools by Wisconsin Bill


dpamood036352

Equity. Multiculturalism. Patriarchy. Social justice. White supremacy. Uttering any of these words or phrases in a school could land Wisconsinites in trouble, if the state’s Republican-led Assembly gets its way.

On Tuesday, the Assembly passed legislation that Wisconsin Republicans are touting as a ban on teaching “critical race theory.”

Lately, such bills have become a popular—and problematic—conservative agenda item, despite the mockery they sometimes make of free speech and free inquiry. Often, these proposals ban so much as discussing certain concepts related to race and cut off educational examinations of historical events and injustices. In other cases, the measures seem largely performative, purporting to ban the buzzwordy “critical race theory” while in reality prohibiting much narrower and more controversial concepts that there’s no evidence schools are actually condoning (such as the view that one race is better than another).

At first blush, the Wisconsin measure—Assembly Bill (A.B.) 411, passed by a party-line vote of 60–38—seems to fall into the latter category. The bill would ban public schools and independent charter schools from teaching students “that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” that “an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of the individual’s race or sex,” that “an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by the individual’s race or sex,” and several related concepts. It would also ban schools from training employees in these concepts.

But the bill would actually go further than most, allowing parents to sue “a school district or operator of a charter school for violation of the prohibitions” and, according to co-sponsoring Rep. Chuck Wichgers (R–Muskego), banning nearly 100 words, phrases, and concepts related to culture, race, and sex.

Last month during a joint hearing on education, Wichgers shared a list of terms that could violate A.B. 411 if taught.

These are “terms associated with critical race theory or…part of the praxis of the theory,” he told colleagues in an August 11 letter. Yes, it’s extensive and you can tell a lot of this was created in legal academia, but the point of this legislation is to prohibit it from being taught in our government schools.”

The frighteningly broad list includes a plethora of perfectly neutral or basic terms—the kinds of words or phrases used to teach about ideas, not necessarily advocate for any particular ones. Wichgers’ list is also rife with concepts far from the academic or political fringe.

For instance, multiculturalism—which just means the presence or support of “several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary—and cultural awareness (being cognizant that cultural differences can exist) make the list.

Equity, defined as “the quality of being fair and impartial,” is also on there, along with equitable. So are diversity training, hegemony, intersectionality, marginalized identities, normativity, patriarchy, racial justice, restorative justice, structural bias, systemic bias, and woke.

Wichgers told colleagues his proposal was meant to prevent government schools from violating” the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, not prevent educators from simply teaching about racism. But it’s hard to see how this assertion jibes with the long list of words and concepts—colorism, racial prejudice, race essentialism, white supremacy—that he claims his legislation could ban.

You can find the full list of words that Wichgers submitted to the Wisconsin Legislature here. These are “terms and concepts…that either wholly violate the above clauses, or which may if taught through the framework of any of the prohibited activities defined above, partially violate the above clauses,” states a note at the top of the list.

Fortunately, Wichgers’ overreaching bill has little chance of becoming law, for now. It’s not yet passed the state’s Senate and—even if it does—would likely be vetoed by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor.

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage Might Be the Worst Movie of the Year


venom-carnage-large

Asked for his definition of a great movie, director Howard Hawks supposedly responded: “three good scenes and no bad ones.” Somehow, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is the precise opposite—a handful of truly godawful scenes, and no good ones. The movie is an ugly, unpleasant, nearly unwatchable mess, and the only movie I have actively regretted seeing in a theater this year. 

In that, at least, it follows through on the promise of its predecessor, the 2018 Spider-Man-adjacent comic book film Venom. Based on a fan-favorite Spidey antagonist, who also appeared in Sam Raimi’s unfortunate Spider-Man 3, Venom was a disaster on nearly every level. The character, who in the comics typically plays either a villain or an odd bedfellow-frenemy role, felt lost without the friendly neighborhood web-slinger around. Tom Hardy’s antic performance as the title character veered between cringe and camp, turning the gator-mouthed alien symbiote into a clownish rendition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The whole production was pointlessly dark and brooding, and the highlights, or at least the parts that weren’t quite as bad, consisted of intendedly comic slap fights between Hardy and a toothy glob of talking computer-generated black and white goop. LOL, sure. 

Clunky scripts and incoherent stories are of course commonplace in Hollywood. But the underlying craftwork tends to be reasonably competent, if not always thrilling, especially at higher budget levels. Yet rarely have I seen a film as tedious, turgid, unpleasant, ill-conceived, and downright horrid looking. Even with a budget reportedly somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million, the movie simply looked like garbage—expensive, elaborate, computer-generated garbage, perhaps—but garbage nonetheless.

Naturally, the studio made another one. And somehow it’s even worse.

The slap fights and comic hijinks have returned in louder, more obnoxious form. Indeed, Venom is even more of a comic-relief character than ever, though it’s hard to call anything in this film funny. He spends the middle of the film at some sort of costume party rave, where no one notices that he is an eight-foot-tall computer-animated monster. “Cool costume!” is all anyone will say, as if globular animated tentacles are a perfectly ordinary part of everyday cosplay. The movie’s attempts to make him sympathetic are bizarre at best: He wants to eat brains and feel personally validated by a bunch of kids dressed in wearable glow sticks. Who can’t relate?

The new villain, Carnage, is a sort of son-of-Venom character—another alien symbiote, this one bonded with a murderous serial killer by the name of Cletus Kasady (a smirking, inessential Woody Harrelson). Carnage has many of the same goopy, gloopy abilities as Venom, except that he’s bigger, red, and looks even shoddier when rendered on screen than his progenitor. He changes size from shot to shot, never looks like he’s actually interacting with his surroundings, and moves with the herky-jerky digitized weightlessness of a Playstation 2 cut scene.

Yes, Let There Be Carnage looks even worse than the original. With a budget of about $110 million, it doesn’t look cheap, exactly, just crappy. It’s not just that the effects work is of such low quality, either. It’s that every shot, every cut, every image in the movie has been constructed with a brutal and almost overwhelming thoughtlessness.

There is, however, something fitting about all of this. The character of Venom sprung up in the 1980s, during the runup to the comic book boom of the early 1990s. For a period of time, Spider-Man wore a black suit, which turned out to be an alien symbiote that wanted to bond; when Spidey rejected the bond, the suit turned to a new host, Eddie Brock, a newspaper-world rival of Spider-Man’s plainclothes alter-ego, Peter Parker. Thus, Venom was a dark mirror of Spider-Man turned back on him; he viewed himself as good, but was driven to madness and villainy by his hatred of the Parker/Spider-Man pair.

Carnage, in turn, came about at the peak of the early 1990s comic-book boom. He was an even darker version of Venom, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He was just a murderous psychopath—bigger, louder, and meaner than Venom, created only after Marvel’s bosses wouldn’t let a writer proceed with plans to kill off Venom, who had become a high-selling fan favorite. So for reasons of corporate strategy, fans got a grosser, cruder version of the original, a kind of violent parody of a character who was already a violent parody of his heroic source character.

Let There Be Carnage is a rotten film from start to finish; it exists only because Spider-Man remains popular, and the first Venom was something of a hit, thus necessitating a sequel. In a movie landscape still in the throes of a superhero boom, there is something strangely appropriate about the sheer crudeness of this hackneyed sequel to a comic book spinoff given that it is based on a comic book character who was, at the time of his inception, an uglier, crasser derivative of an already ugly, crass derivative.

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‘Equity,’ ‘Multiculturalism,’ and ‘Racial Prejudice’ Among Concepts That Could Be Banned in Schools by Wisconsin Bill


dpamood036352

Equity. Multiculturalism. Patriarchy. Social justice. White supremacy. Uttering any of these words or phrases in a school could land Wisconsinites in trouble, if the state’s Republican-led Assembly gets its way.

On Tuesday, the Assembly passed legislation that Wisconsin Republicans are touting as a ban on teaching “critical race theory.”

Lately, such bills have become a popular—and problematic—conservative agenda item, despite the mockery they sometimes make of free speech and free inquiry. Often, these proposals ban so much as discussing certain concepts related to race and cut off educational examinations of historical events and injustices. In other cases, the measures seem largely performative, purporting to ban the buzzwordy “critical race theory” while in reality prohibiting much narrower and more controversial concepts that there’s no evidence schools are actually condoning (such as the view that one race is better than another).

At first blush, the Wisconsin measure—Assembly Bill (A.B.) 411, passed by a party-line vote of 60–38—seems to fall into the latter category. The bill would ban public schools and independent charter schools from teaching students “that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” that “an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of the individual’s race or sex,” that “an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by the individual’s race or sex,” and several related concepts. It would also ban schools from training employees in these concepts.

But the bill would actually go further than most, allowing parents to sue “a school district or operator of a charter school for violation of the prohibitions” and, according to co-sponsoring Rep. Chuck Wichgers (R–Muskego), banning nearly 100 words, phrases, and concepts related to culture, race, and sex.

Last month during a joint hearing on education, Wichgers shared a list of terms that could violate A.B. 411 if taught.

These are “terms associated with critical race theory or…part of the praxis of the theory,” he told colleagues in an August 11 letter. Yes, it’s extensive and you can tell a lot of this was created in legal academia, but the point of this legislation is to prohibit it from being taught in our government schools.”

The frighteningly broad list includes a plethora of perfectly neutral or basic terms—the kinds of words or phrases used to teach about ideas, not necessarily advocate for any particular ones. Wichgers’ list is also rife with concepts far from the academic or political fringe.

For instance, multiculturalism—which just means the presence or support of “several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary—and cultural awareness (being cognizant that cultural differences can exist) make the list.

Equity, defined as “the quality of being fair and impartial,” is also on there, along with equitable. So are diversity training, hegemony, intersectionality, marginalized identities, normativity, patriarchy, racial justice, restorative justice, structural bias, systemic bias, and woke.

Wichgers told colleagues his proposal was meant to prevent government schools from violating” the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, not prevent educators from simply teaching about racism. But it’s hard to see how this assertion jibes with the long list of words and concepts—colorism, racial prejudice, race essentialism, white supremacy—that he claims his legislation could ban.

You can find the full list of words that Wichgers submitted to the Wisconsin Legislature here. These are “terms and concepts…that either wholly violate the above clauses, or which may if taught through the framework of any of the prohibited activities defined above, partially violate the above clauses,” states a note at the top of the list.

Fortunately, Wichgers’ overreaching bill has little chance of becoming law, for now. It’s not yet passed the state’s Senate and—even if it does—would likely be vetoed by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor.

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Former Goldman Compliance Officer Busted For Insider Trading

Former Goldman Compliance Officer Busted For Insider Trading

Is it just us, or are we starting to see a pattern here?

After a former UBS compliance officer was jailed after being convicted of an insider trading scheme in the UK, yet another compliance officer – this time, working for Goldman Sachs – has been swept up in another insider trading scandal, this time in the US.

The SEC complaint filed on Wednesday accused Jose Luis Casero Sanchez, 35, who worked for Goldman as a senior compliance analyst out of the bank’s office in Warsaw, of earning more than $471,000 from the trades.

His role as a compliance analyst gave him access to “highly sensitive” information linked to mergers and other deals between September 2020 and March 2021. Sanchez allegedly “abused that position of trust” by making at least 45 trades based on confidential information gleaned through his position at Goldman.

Some of the companies Sanchez allegedly traded in include pet retailer Petco Health and Wellness, US-headquartered Norwegian Cruise Line and the British company GW Pharmaceuticals, per court documents.

Joseph Sansone, chief of the SEC’s market abuse unit, said in a statement the agency had “exposed gross violations of duty by a compliance professional who exploited the sensitive information he was hired to protect.” Sanchez allegedly restricted the size of his trades and used four separate US-based brokerage accounts under his parents’ names to try and avoid detection.

Both Sanchez and his parents are believed to be living in Spain, according to the FT.

While Goldman wasn’t named in the complaint – it referred instead to a “prominent United States-based investment bank”, the firm confirmed to the FT that Sanchez was a Goldman employee.

Goldman, which has always held its compliance officials in the highest regard, as the bank’s involvement in the 1MDB scandal made clear, said in a statement that “we condemn this egregious behavior and are fully co-operating with the SEC,” Goldman said.

Sanchez didn’t respond to the FT’s requests for comment, but as the FT points out, a recent study by a transnational cabal of academics estimated that instances of insider trading happen 4x more frequently than prosecutions.

Another recent report – this one by Bloomberg – appeared to show that insider trading is alive and well, and has even taken on a dint of respectability – so long as it’s the real “insiders” who are doing the trading.

Perhaps Sanchez would have managed to avoid this trouble with the SEC if he had been a CEO, not a senior compliance analyst.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/30/2021 – 13:10

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage Might Be the Worst Movie of the Year


venom-carnage-large

Asked for his definition of a great movie, director Howard Hawks supposedly responded: “three good scenes and no bad ones.” Somehow, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is the precise opposite—a handful of truly godawful scenes, and no good ones. The movie is an ugly, unpleasant, nearly unwatchable mess, and the only movie I have actively regretted seeing in a theater this year. 

In that, at least, it follows through on the promise of its predecessor, the 2018 Spider-Man-adjacent comic book film Venom. Based on a fan-favorite Spidey antagonist, who also appeared in Sam Raimi’s unfortunate Spider-Man 3, Venom was a disaster on nearly every level. The character, who in the comics typically plays either a villain or an odd bedfellow-frenemy role, felt lost without the friendly neighborhood web-slinger around. Tom Hardy’s antic performance as the title character veered between cringe and camp, turning the gator-mouthed alien symbiote into a clownish rendition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The whole production was pointlessly dark and brooding, and the highlights, or at least the parts that weren’t quite as bad, consisted of intendedly comic slap fights between Hardy and a toothy glob of talking computer-generated black and white goop. LOL, sure. 

Clunky scripts and incoherent stories are of course commonplace in Hollywood. But the underlying craftwork tends to be reasonably competent, if not always thrilling, especially at higher budget levels. Yet rarely have I seen a film as tedious, turgid, unpleasant, ill-conceived, and downright horrid looking. Even with a budget reportedly somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million, the movie simply looked like garbage—expensive, elaborate, computer-generated garbage, perhaps—but garbage nonetheless.

Naturally, the studio made another one. And somehow it’s even worse.

The slap fights and comic hijinks have returned in louder, more obnoxious form. Indeed, Venom is even more of a comic-relief character than ever, though it’s hard to call anything in this film funny. He spends the middle of the film at some sort of costume party rave, where no one notices that he is an eight-foot-tall computer-animated monster. “Cool costume!” is all anyone will say, as if globular animated tentacles are a perfectly ordinary part of everyday cosplay. The movie’s attempts to make him sympathetic are bizarre at best: He wants to eat brains and feel personally validated by a bunch of kids dressed in wearable glow sticks. Who can’t relate?

The new villain, Carnage, is a sort of son-of-Venom character—another alien symbiote, this one bonded with a murderous serial killer by the name of Cletus Kasady (a smirking, inessential Woody Harrelson). Carnage has many of the same goopy, gloopy abilities as Venom, except that he’s bigger, red, and looks even shoddier when rendered on screen than his progenitor. He changes size from shot to shot, never looks like he’s actually interacting with his surroundings, and moves with the herky-jerky digitized weightlessness of a Playstation 2 cut scene.

Yes, Let There Be Carnage looks even worse than the original. With a budget of about $110 million, it doesn’t look cheap, exactly, just crappy. It’s not just that the effects work is of such low quality, either. It’s that every shot, every cut, every image in the movie has been constructed with a brutal and almost overwhelming thoughtlessness.

There is, however, something fitting about all of this. The character of Venom sprung up in the 1980s, during the runup to the comic book boom of the early 1990s. For a period of time, Spider-Man wore a black suit, which turned out to be an alien symbiote that wanted to bond; when Spidey rejected the bond, the suit turned to a new host, Eddie Brock, a newspaper-world rival of Spider-Man’s plainclothes alter-ego, Peter Parker. Thus, Venom was a dark mirror of Spider-Man turned back on him; he viewed himself as good, but was driven to madness and villainy by his hatred of the Parker/Spider-Man pair.

Carnage, in turn, came about at the peak of the early 1990s comic-book boom. He was an even darker version of Venom, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He was just a murderous psychopath—bigger, louder, and meaner than Venom, created only after Marvel’s bosses wouldn’t let a writer proceed with plans to kill off Venom, who had become a high-selling fan favorite. So for reasons of corporate strategy, fans got a grosser, cruder version of the original, a kind of violent parody of a character who was already a violent parody of his heroic source character.

Let There Be Carnage is a rotten film from start to finish; it exists only because Spider-Man remains popular, and the first Venom was something of a hit, thus necessitating a sequel. In a movie landscape still in the throes of a superhero boom, there is something strangely appropriate about the sheer crudeness of this hackneyed sequel to a comic book spinoff given that it is based on a comic book character who was, at the time of his inception, an uglier, crasser derivative of an already ugly, crass derivative.

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Now They’ve Crossed The Line

Now They’ve Crossed The Line

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

There are so many examples of depredations in American public life that it’s impossible to keep up. Things happen daily now that would have caused national outrage a few years ago.

But our sense of outrage has become dulled after nearly 20 months of the most irresponsible public policies in many generations. These days, news of terribleness just washes over us, and we hardly have time to think about it before the next shock comes along.

This one, however, should seriously give us pause because it impacts fundamental issues of security and privacy. It’s a demonstration of a reality we have to face today.

It is this: Your property is no longer safe from confiscation in the U.S. To be sure, you can say that this has been true since the income tax was passed in 1913. There is truth to that.

Still, we’ve generally been able to count on the rule of law. So long as you comply, you can generally assume that your stuff is safe. That is no longer true.

One way to think about lockdowns is as a test. What can the government get away with? How outrageous does the intervention have to be before people rise up and resist? How much of an advantage does the government have over the rest of us, and how can that power be deployed?

No More Safety

In Beverly Hills, California, there is a private service that provides lockboxes for people’s valuables. It is called U.S. Private Vaults. It seems more promising, to some degree, than a box at a bank, where the government has a long history of breaking in.

There was never any particular reason to think that the company could not keep its promises. Many people did trust this company with vast amounts of personal wealth. However, being a private company provides no real protection when the government has an agenda.

After all, we learned over the last 20 months that there is nothing that limits governments’ rights to have their way with private business. They can break in, shut them down, keep them closed, bankrupt them, and there is very little that can be done to stop it.

Six months ago, the FBI raided this company, broke into 800 different boxes by force and took all the contents. They claimed this was justified because they had probable cause that the box contents were gained from illicit activity. They have yet to prove that, however.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

The company’s website has posted a notice. It now has a notice:

“PLEASE BE ADVISED THAT LEGAL COUNSEL JUST RECEIVED THE FOLLOWING NOTICE OF FORFEITURE. THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IS SEEKING TO FORFEIT AND ASSUME OWNERSHIP OF THE CONTENTS OF ALL PRIVATELY HELD VAULTS ON THE PREMISES OF U.S. PRIVATE VAULTS, WHICH IS NOW CLOSED.”

You would think this would be national news, but instead the event got no attention. The total loot: $86 million. It included cash, coins, and jewelry. The Feds want to keep it all.

But here is another fascinating thing. That $86 million figure is what the Feds said, but look at the actual items listed in the boxes. It seems like the agents became lazy at some point and started marking everything as having the value of one dollar.

Here is just one example from one box. It had a Cartier bracelet with diamond, a Cartier bracelet “nail shape,” a diamond tennis bracelet, an 18” gold necklace, a two-tone Rolex men’s watch, another Rolex with gold and diamonds and a platinum Rolex.

Each item was valued at $1. It was the same with a tremendous amount of the gold and platinum coins that were taken. Again, each was valued at $1.

I’ve not added it all up, but we are certainly talking about a lot more than $86 million. It seems safe to add a zero to this figure. We are looking at the property of many serious people who trusted this company could keep their stuff protected and safe. Now it is all in government hands.

The owners have to beg to get it back and must prove that it is all licit.

Among those pillaged was Joseph Ruiz, an unemployed chef. He had $57,000 in cash inside his box. He had to sue to get it back. The government claimed that he made that money by running an unlicensed pot business. They further claimed that dogs had sniffed out drugs on his cash.

Ruiz produced evidence that this was not true. The FBI returned his money, without apologizing or admitting error. He told the Los Angeles Times that this was “a bank heist in broad daylight.”

They have kept everyone else’s money. Six months have gone by. Some 300 of the victims are fighting for their rights in court. The rest of the 500 or so clients have probably just given up doing anything about it.

Where Is Your Stuff Safe?

The usual assumption in the past is that bank boxes are not as safe as private boxes. That might not be true anymore. That said, does it appear that there are no real safe places remaining?

In the early 1930s, when government confiscated gold, many people found workarounds in private estates around the country. They quietly stored their gold in basements and in holes in the ground, where it stayed for decades. World War II came and went.

It wasn’t until 1974 when gold was demonetized that it became legal to own again. Members of family estates then contacted the private estates and quietly got their money back. By this time, so many presidents had come and gone, and so much had changed in the country, that no one particularly cared. Good strategy, but it’s a long game and rather risky.

There is no safe way out for anyone or anything when civilization is headed to destruction. No person is safe. No property is safe. You are better off knowing that than not.

It pays to be alert and careful, knowing full well that we are living with a system of government that has become highly dangerous to everything and everyone we hold dear.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/30/2021 – 12:54

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

Until the Very End, the Generals Wanted Biden to Leave 2,500 Troops in Afghanistan


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Military officials appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday to discuss the conclusion of military operations in Afghanistan, as well as President Joe Biden’s handling of the extraction. Those present included Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Lloyd Austin, secretary of defense; and Kenneth McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command.

The session marked the first time that these top military officials had all appeared in front of Congress since the Kabul airport suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops and dozens of fleeing Afghans. It was also the top brass’s first opportunity to comment on the drone strike that military officials initially insisted had killed only Islamic State militants. (It had, in fact, accidentally hit civilian targets.) For Milley, in particular, this was also his first visit to Congress since reporting revealed that he had reached out to his counterpart in the Chinese government to assure him that he would provide a warning before acting on any potentially aggressive orders from outgoing President Donald Trump.

In his testimony, McKenzie indicated that earlier this year, he recommended that Biden leave a residual force of 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, afraid that a complete withdrawal “would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and, eventually, the Afghan government.” Milley confirmed that he agreed with the advice.

Immediately, Republicans seized on this admission: Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) tweeted that the administration “ignored the advice from the military and mislead the American people,” and that had their advice been followed, “Biden’s botched Afghan withdrawal could have been prevented and American lives could have been saved.” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R–Okla.), who had asked the initial question, later tweeted a video in which he criticized the Biden administration for “not listening to his advisors” on the issue.

In response to a question from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), Austin acknowledged that while there were “a range of possibilities” for what could have happened with a theoretical continued presence, “if you stayed there at force posture of 2,500, certainly, you’d be in a fight with the Taliban. And you’d have to reinforce yourself.”

This is the crux of the matter: There is no plausible scenario in which the U.S. could leave behind a permanent, or even indefinite, force of soldiers without incurring further casualties. The Doha Agreement negotiated under Trump set an end date by which all American forces would have left Afghanistan, barring any future Taliban violence; a new administration reneging on that deal would certainly have invited renewed bloodshed. And a force of 2,500 facing the entirety of a renewed Taliban would have necessitated further reinforcement. At that point, we would be right back to October 2001, facing an uncertain future and an even more uncertain end goal.

Nevertheless, some Republicans are asserting that McKenzie’s answer contradicted what the president had said during an August interview with ABC News host George Stephanopoulos, who asked whether Biden had been advised to leave 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. Biden’s answer was, at best, muddled and self-contradictory, saying both that he did not receive such advice, and that the advice was “split.”

In the most charitable interpretation of his response, a Washington Post fact check noted that Biden immediately pivoted to talking about how the Taliban, after agreeing to a U.S. withdrawal deadline and abiding by its stipulation against attacks on troops, continued to capture territory throughout Afghanistan, and any effort on the part of the U.S. to try to extend or even expand its presence within the country would not have been taken lightly by an emboldened Taliban now in near-complete control of the country.

The White House contends that this is what the president meant—that nobody advised him he could leave 2,500 troops without risking a return to direct conflict. Whether or not Biden was lying, equivocating, or simply forgetful, the fundamental point remains the same: For all the well-deserved scorn one can heap on Biden’s execution of the withdrawal, the only true alternative was not withdrawing at all, and that would have been far worse.

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