PP NewsBrief: 2021-06-11

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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A Couple Things About Inflation

"Inflation is in the news, but there are a couple of things about inflation that don't get much coverage. Let's start with the trope that inflation is always a monetary phenomenon. Actually, no.

When nutrient-rich soil and fresh water reserves are depleted, crop yields decline and as human population and appetites for animal protein soar, food becomes scarce. When food becomes scarce, prices rise accordingly. It doesn't matter what you do with money supply, prices will rise in relation to everything used as "money:" gold, shells, paper with colorful pictures printed on it, giant stone disks, quatloos, cryptocurrencies, etc.

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What few seem to grasp is that there is a hierarchy of needs that ruthlessly separates "needs" from "wants," and the value of "wants" quickly drops to zero in real scarcities....

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You want to trade your shares in XYZ Corporation for a 50-pound bag of rice? How do I know the "value" of shares in XYZ Corporation won't be zero tomorrow? No, thank you. Come back when you have something tangible and tangibly useful (i.e. it will hold its value tomorrow) to trade for the rice.

We inhabit a fantasy world in which scarcity has been banished by the gods of globalized markets and phantom assets built on sandcastles of leverage are the most valuable assets on the planet. Global stocks are now worth $115 trillion, woo-hoo.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the vast majority of humanity trades their labor for food and other essentials. The funny thing about human labor is that thanks to population growth, globalization and financialization, the relative value of labor has been in decline for decades....

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The pathetically thin slice of wealth held by the bottom 50% of American households has fallen to near-zero. It's fallen by 2/3 since the recent peak in the mid-1990s, the last "boom" that trickled down to the bottom 90%.

The bottom 50% have no reserves to draw upon as prices of tangible essentials rise. They have no wealth to sell, and the value of their labor as measured in purchasing power of essentials is in an accelerating decline.

This is a longstanding reality of civilization. As productivity rises, the human population expands up to the carrying capacity of the biosphere. Labor's earnings rise as producers expand production to meet rising demand. Human population and appetites for goodies keep expanding, overshooting sustainable supply while labor expands to the point that it is in oversupply. Wages decline and labor thus loses purchasing power just as prices of essentials soar. Discontent and disorder increase and states and civilizations fall.

...

...The Federal Reserve can create currency out of thin air but it can't conjure up productive land, fresh water, copper ore, oil, or food.

The Fed can conjure up phantom "wealth" based on leverage but this relies on a heavily hyped faith in a fantasy world in which all tangible scarcities are magically turned to abundance by central bank money creation and low interest rates, and a splash of technocrat pixie dust: carbon taxes, windmills and drones flitting about."

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AI 'Smart Potty' Monitors Bowel Health For Gastro Issues

"According to Duke Today, researchers at Duke announced an artificial intelligence tool that could easily be mounted on a standard toilet to analyze patients' stools and give gastroenterologists suggestions about bowel health.

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The device uses an algorithm to monitor a patient's stool (i.e., loose, normal, or constipated) and the presence of blood, allowing them to diagnose the patient and provide proper treatment.

To develop the artificial intelligence image analysis device, researchers had to train a deep learning algorithm with 3,328 unique stool images and accurately classify anomalies in the stool that would suggest a patient is experiencing gastrointestinal problems.

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"We are optimistic about patient willingness to use this technology because it's something that can be installed in their toilet's pipes and doesn't require the patient to do anything other than flush," said Sonia Grego, PhD, founding director of the Duke Smart Toilet Lab and a lead researcher on the study. "This could be especially useful for patients who may not be able to report their conditions, such as those who live in a long-term care facility.""

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Bezos the Great and Powerful

"In Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, Bloomberg editor and author Brad Stone reveals the 12-point list of rules that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos laid out for executives at his film and production company, Amazon Studios. They are entertainingly banal: a heroic protagonist, a compelling antagonist, secret abilities, moral choices, cliffhangers.

George Lucas cribbed this crap from the likes of Joseph Campbell 40 years ago when it was pointed out that Lucas had written a hero’s journey and had to pretend that had been his intention all along. But while a kook and (later) a bit of a tyrant, the Star Wars director nevertheless worked with a real creative spark in producing a genuine piece of popular art. By the time Lucasfilm sold its franchise to Disney, there was a collective sense of an éminence grise — that Lucas was justified in cashing out.

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Before its sale to Amazon, MGM was a victim of what we would now call ​“private equity” — a more anodyne term than corporate raider, if no less destructive or predatory. (Private equity has already destroyed such classic American businesses as Sears and Toys ​“R” Us. And despite what you may have heard, several of these were still profitable.)

Over more than three decades of ​“ownership,” Kerkorian in fact bought and sold MGM a total of three times, auctioning off much of its original library of titles while acquiring new ones, and loading up the business with ever more debt in the process. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and it emerged from Chapter 11 under the controlling ownership of its own largest creditors. MGM’s pending sale to Amazon will ultimately pay these creditors out for the billions of dollars in debt with which they themselves saddled the zombie studio.

For its part, Amazon is under no illusions that it is purchasing what you or I might consider a production company. As Bezos himself explained at an annual shareholders’ meeting, ​“MGM has a vast and deep catalog of much beloved intellectual property, and … we can reimagine and develop that IP for the 21st century.”

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Like so much of the current American economy, Amazon’s latest purchase does not actually have to make any kind of business sense. Amazon is the world’s fourth-largest company by market capitalization and eighth or ninth in terms of gross revenue, depending on how one counts China’s Sinopec oil and gas conglomerate. (Interestingly, Amazon is 30% smaller than stodgy old Walmart, which remains the world’s largest company by revenue by far.) Amazon is less stratospheric in terms of actual profitability — closer to such fuddy-duddy concerns as Toyota, Samsung, Shell and Volkswagen, and far below companies like Saudi Aramco, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, several Chinese banks and Microsoft (yes, Microsoft). But profitability is less of a concern in this age of infinite growth; Amazon is incentivized to buy a studio like MGM simply because it can.

Bezos likely sees himself as the protagonist in his own heroic journey. For all his grand vision, however, his company’s size feels almost accidental — a symptom of a broken American regulatory state and an economy’s mania for acquisition. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto, and we’re likely never going back. MGM sold off Dorothy’s ruby red slippers in 1970."

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How the CDC is manipulating data to prop-up “vaccine effectiveness”

"Essentially, Covid19 has long been shown – to those willing to pay attention – to be an entirely created pandemic narrative built on two key factors:

• --False-postive tests. The unreliable PCR test can be manipulated into reporting a high number of false-positives by altering the cycle threshold (CT value)
• --Inflated Case-count. The incredibly broad definition of “Covid case”, used all over the world, lists anyone who receives a positive test as a “Covid19 case”, even if they never experienced any symptoms.

Without these two policies, there would never have been an appreciable pandemic at all, and now the CDC has enacted two policy changes which means they no longer apply to vaccinated people.

Firstly, they are lowering their CT value when testing samples from suspected “breakthrough infections”.

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Throughout the pandemic, CT values in excess of 35 have been the norm, with labs around the world going into the 40s.

Essentially labs were running as many cycles as necessary to achieve a positive result, despite experts warning that this was pointless (even Fauci himself said anything over 35 cycles is meaningless).

But NOW, and only for fully vaccinated people, the CDC is suggesting labs lower their CT values to 28 cycles or fewer.

While it is technically true the CDC are only directly referring to samples for sequencing in these guidelines, focusing on that distinction disregards the way institutional dilution of responsibility works.

When the CDC tells State health authorities it “would like to characterize the SARS-CoV-2 lineages responsible for breakthrough infections”, and in turn warns that “only specimens with Ct value ≤28 to CDC are suitable for sequencing” they are not literally ordering people to run their tests at 28 cycles, but they are certainly implying that they should, and guaranteeing that some people will. This will then have the effect that fewer “breakthrough infections” are being officially recorded.

Secondly, asymptomatic or mild infections will no longer be recorded as “covid cases”.

That’s right. Even if a sample collected at the low CT value of 28 can be sequenced into the virus alleged to cause Covid19, the CDC will no longer be keeping records of breakthrough infections that don’t result in hospitalisation or death.

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Just like that, being asymptomatic – or having only minor symptoms – will no longer count as a “Covid case” but only if you’ve been vaccinated.

The CDC has put new policies in place which effectively created a tiered system of diagnosis. Meaning, from now on, unvaccinated people will find it much easier to be diagnosed with Covid19 than vaccinated people.

The CDC is demonstrating the beauty of having a “disease” that can appear or disappear depending on how you measure it.

To be clear: If these new policies had been the global approach to “Covid” since December 2019, there would never have been a pandemic at all."

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Chat app sting tells US intel agencies are interested in more than just ‘backdoors’, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou tells RT

"A deceptively-marketed 'encrypted' messenger that was used to bust hundreds of criminals worldwide shows that intelligence services are creating, and not just exploiting, chat apps, according to CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou.

The FBI has been secretly operating an encrypted chat app called ANOM, which became popular among organized crime, with the gangsters oblivious to the fact that they were being monitored while using the app. Codenamed Operation Trojan Shield/Greenlight, the surveillance scheme eventually led to a coordinated crackdown on criminal gangs involving law enforcement from 16 nations. More than 800 suspects have been arrested so far, putting a dent in over 300 criminal syndicates across the globe, Europol said.

Speaking to RT about the wide-ranging law enforcement operation, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou noted that the public will need to come to terms with the fact that authorities are likely involved in much more than just trying to circumvent apps such as WhatsApp or Signal in order to gain access to private data.

“We worry about intelligence services having backdoors… Most people don’t think about intelligence services actually creating the app in order to entrap people,” Kiriakou said.

Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst who was prosecuted and imprisoned under the Espionage Act for exposing US torture of terror suspects under former President George W. Bush, went so far as to suggest that it would be naive to believe that your digital messages are safe from snooping.

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“I don’t think they crossed the line. I actually think this was a very well-thought-out operation. You simply trick the people you are targeting into using your technology. It’s so simple.”"

I disagree. This sort of thing highlights how easily the lines get blurred in the digital realm. A traditional sting morphs into this and before you know it we've all got apps & services secretly run by three-letter agencies & security services.

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Bowser’s About Face: The District Admits Using Tear Gas Against Protesters and Seeks To Dismiss BLM’s Lafayette Park Lawsuit

"A federal judge in Washington is set to decide whether to dismiss a case on behalf of protesters who claim they were injured during the June 1, 2020, protests around Lafayette Park next to the White House. In the course of the arguments, one lawyer stood out in insisting that the use of tear gas against the protesters was entirely reasonable.

What was so striking is that the lawyer, Richard Sobiecki, represents the D.C. government of Mayor Muriel Bowser, who condemned the federal government for its clearing of the area and alleged use of tear gas. Much of the media lionized Bowser for her stance at the time. She received national acclaim for painting “Black Lives Matter” on the street next to the park and renaming it “Black Lives Matter Plaza.”

Now, one year later, Bowser is keeping the BLM plaza but opposing the BLM protesters. Her administration insisted in court that the protesters were legitimately teargassed by the metropolitan police to enforce her curfew that night.

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There has long been a dispute as to whether the federal operation employed tear gas. The federal government has maintained that it used pepper balls. As I stated in my congressional testimony, the distinction is really not significant, practically or legally; pepper balls and tear gas can have the same effect on protesters, and both are often referenced together in court orders as “non-lethal riot control devices.”

However, as this debate over the denial of tear gas by the federal operation raged, neither Bowser nor her government stepped forward to say that D.C.’s Metropolitan Police used tear gas in their operations a block or so from Lafayette Park. Instead, Bowser denounced the force used by the Trump administration, including the use of tear gas.

Now, with Trump out of the White House, Bowser’s administration insists there was nothing unreasonable in the use of tear gas to enforce a curfew and is asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit by protesters, including Black Lives Matter DC. The media that spent the past year denouncing the Trump administration over its alleged use of tear gas seems largely silent as Bowser’s administration claims its own use of force was reasonable.

The federal government still apparently denies using tear gas. D.C. police admit to using tear gas nearby to enforce Bowser’s curfew, but she has long insisted that the district did not assist in clearing Lafayette Park, which began before the curfew.

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After the Lafayette Park operation, Bowser declared that “if you are like me, you saw something that you hoped you would never see in the United States of America.” Now, her government is arguing not only that the protesters’ claims should be dismissed but that the district did and can continue to use tear gas in such situations, even to enforce a curfew.

In the meantime, the Biden administration agrees that the case should be dismissed entirely. The Department of Justice (DOJ) maintains that “Presidential security is a paramount government interest that weighs heavily in the Fourth Amendment balance.” The DOJ’s counsel, John Martin, added that “federal officers do not violate First Amendment rights by moving protesters a few blocks, even if the protesters are predominantly peaceful.”

The response to that from the media has been … crickets.

What a difference a year — and a new president — can make."

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USA Today fights to quash FBI subpoena demanding readers’ data amid probe into shooting that killed 2 agents

"Gannett, which owns USA Today and a number of local newspapers around the US, asked a Washington, DC district court to toss the FBI order in a May 28 court filing, first reported by Politico on Thursday.

“The subpoena violates the First Amendment to the US Constitution by demanding records that would identify particular persons who read a particular USA Today news report,” the publisher said, adding that the request runs afoul of other legal protections for news outlets.

The DC district court made Gannett’s motion public on Thursday, after the case was assigned to Judge James Boasberg.

The bureau filed the subpoena in April as part of a probe into a February shooting which left two FBI agents dead and another three wounded in Florida. The order demands data on any “computers or other electronic devices” that accessed a particular USA Today report on the incident during a specific time period, including phone numbers, IP addresses and associated dates, times and time zones, among other records.

“Your company is required to furnish this information. You are requested not to disclose the existence of this subpoena indefinitely as any such disclosure could interfere with an ongoing investigation and enforcement of the law,” the order reads, adding that failure to comply may be “punished as contempt.”

While the subpoena appears to stop short of demanding names, the records could nonetheless be used to identify readers. The request, however, is limited to a 35-minute window on the night of the shooting starting just after 8pm.

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The shooting that ultimately prompted the subpoena came amid a federal child exploitation probe, which saw suspect David Huber initiate a firefight with agents as they attempted to serve  a warrant at an apartment complex in Sunrise, Florida. Huber killed agents Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger and injured three others before taking his own life. It is unclear whether the FBI believes another person was involved with Huber’s alleged child sex abuse, the shooting or another crime.

It also remains unknown why USA Today was singled out for the subpoena, given that many other media outlets reported on the February shooting. A number of journalists have weighed in on the move, some saying they have never seen such a request from the government to a media outlet."

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"Fact-Checking" Takes Another Beating

"...the public is regularly misinformed about what fact-checkers do. In most settings — especially at daily newspapers — fact-checking, if used at all, is the equivalent of the bare-minimum collision insurance your average penny-pinching car renter buys. There’s usually just enough time to flag a few potential dangers for litigation and/or major, obvious mistakes about things like dates, spellings of names, wording of quotes, whether a certain event a reporter describes even happened, etc.

For anything more involved than that, which is most things, fact-checkers have to scramble to make tough judgment calls. The best ones tend to vote for killing anything that might blow up in the face of the organization later on. Good checkers are there to help perpetuate the illusion of competence. They’re professional ass-coverers, whose job is to keep it from being obvious that Wolf Blitzer or Matt Taibbi or whoever else you’re following on the critical story of the day only just learned the term hanging chad or spike protein or herd immunity. In my experience they’re usually pretty great at it, but their jobs are less about determining fact than about preventing the vast seas of ignorance underlying most professional news operations from seeping into public view.

Unfortunately, over the course of the last five years in particular, as the commercial media has experienced a precipitous drop in the public trust levels, many organizations have chosen to trumpet fact-checking programs as a way of advertising a dedication to “truth.” Fact-checking has furthermore become part of the “moral clarity” argument, which claims a phony objectivity standard once forced news companies to always include gestures to a perpetually wrong other side, making “truth” a casualty to false “fairness.”

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But objectivity was never about giving equal time and weight to “both sides.” It’s just an admission that the news business is a high-speed operation whose top decision-makers are working from a knowledge level of near-zero about most things, at best just making an honest effort at hitting the moving target of truth.

Like fact-checking itself, the “on the one hand and on the other hand” format is just a defense mechanism. These people say X, these people say Y, and because the jabbering mannequins we have reading off our teleprompters actually know jack, we’ll let the passage of time sort out the difficult bits.

The public used to appreciate the humility of that approach, but what they get from us more often now are sanctimonious speeches about how reporters are intrepid seekers of truth who sit next to God and gobble amphetamines so they can stay awake all night defending democracy from “misinformation.” But once you get past names, dates, and whether the sky that day was blue or cloudy, the worst kind of misinformation in journalism is to be too sure about anything. That’s especially when dealing with complex technical issues, and even more especially when official sources seem invested in eliminating discussion of alternative scenarios of those issues.

From the start, the press mostly mishandled Covid-19 reporting. Part of this was because nearly all of the critical issues — mask use, lockdowns, viability of vaccine programs, and so on — were marketed by news companies as culture-war narratives. A related problem had to do with news companies using the misguided notion that the news is an exact science to promote the worse misconception that science is an exact science. This led to absurd spectacles like news agencies trying to cover up or denounce as falsehood the natural reality that officials had evolving views on things like the efficacy of ventilators or mask use.

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Fact-checking was a huge boon when it was an out-of-sight process quietly polishing the turd of industrial reportage. When companies dragged it out in public and made it a beast of burden for use in impressing audiences, they defamed the tradition.

We know only a few things absolutely for sure, like the spelling of “femur” or Blaine Gabbert’s career interception total. The public knows pretty much everything else is up for argument, so we only look like jerks pretending we can fact-check the universe. We’d do better admitting what we don’t know."

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Fed to Treasury Dealers and Congress: We Can't Count On You, We're Taking Charge

"There are two standard-issue narratives about the Federal Reserve's agenda: the Fed's official narrative is that the Fed's mandate is to keep inflation under control while promoting full employment. The unofficial mandate that's obvious to all is to prop up assets, especially the stock market, which has become the Fed's preferred signifier of prosperity and the rightness/goodness of Fed policies.

The other narrative results from "following the money": the Fed is owned by private-sector banks, and so behind the curtain of happy-talk (full employment, blah-blah-blah), the Fed's only real agenda is to further enrich banks and too big to fail/jail financiers--something it has managed to do with remarkable success.

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While pursuing these non-mutually-exclusive agendas--we came to do good and stayed to do well-- the Fed has generated destabilizing extremes of wealth and income inequality, a reality that the Fed risibly denies. (There must be much mirth about this BS behind closed doors.)

Allow me to posit a third agenda which doesn't negate either conventional agenda but does explain some of the Fed's actions since 2008. As the system unravels, the Fed's primary imperative is to save the financial system and economy from the greed-soaked incompetence of the other players, public and private, by taking charge of critical swaths of the financial system and economy.

After the subprime debacle almost took down the entire global financial system, the Fed (with a bit of help from Congress) essentially took over the entire $10 trillion US mortgage market. Private-sector lenders had figured out how to issue guaranteed-to-default mortgages and pass off the fraudulent mortgage-backed securities (MBS) to pension funds in Norway and a global cast of suckers who believed America's financial system was properly regulated. (Haha, the joke's on you.)

In response, the Fed basically nationalized the mortgage market, buying more than $1 trillion in mortgage-backed securities...

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More recently, the Fed realized the private broker-dealer banks that handle the all-important issuance of Treasury bonds could no longer be trusted. As this article explains, Fed Prepares To Go Direct With Liquidity, "The Fed's primary concern is not employment or inflation, but rather keeping the market for Treasury securities functioning."

In response, the Fed is cutting the broker-dealers out as unreliable players. The Treasury market and the US dollar are the foundations of federal spending and power, and so the Fed has realized that, just as it did with the greedy, fraudulent embezzlers of the private-sector mortgage market, it has to bypass or neuter the private-sector players as threats to stability.

Next up on the Fed's agenda: take charge of the issuance of new money to households and cut Congress out of the loop...

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The Fed has concluded that supporting demand / consumption is too important to be left to the partisan antics and pay-to-play corruption of Congress. So the Fed's plan is to create new money out of thin air and deposit it directly in household accounts via the FedNow system.

We can't count on you, broker-dealers or Congress, so we're taking charge, as the system is now so over-extended that any misadventure by other players could well be catastrophic. So the only alternative from the Fed's point of view is to take charge and cut the untrustworthy, self-serving incompetents out of the loop.

The danger of this power grab is that the Fed will misjudge the situation, and that will prove catastrophic because the system has been stripped of resilience, feedback and redundancy. I suspect the Fed sees itself as trapped by the incompetence and greed of the other players and by its own policy extremes that were little more than expedient "saves" of a system that is unraveling due to its fragility and brittleness."

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Every New Financial Bubble Is a Cry of Desperation

"The weird investments are flying again. Earlier this year it was Gamestop stock, rising to the moon for no reason except that many people on internet message boards decided to push it there. Now it’s the stock of AMC, which has risen 3,000% this year for the same reason. This same collective mania causes millions of normal people to pour money into cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which have no underlying value other than the collective mania itself. The driver of this mass national frenzy is not any sort of business strategy, or even simple pandemic-induced boredom. It’s just the latest manifestation of the sickening desperation of people to break free from wage slavery. It is the modern lottery ticket. And, like all such dreams that are rooted in luck rather than in politics, it will ultimately amount to nothing.

Financial manias are nothing new. They have been around since the Dutch were going wild over tulip bulbs in the 1600s, and probably much longer than that. It is a basic truth that if you can get a large number of people to buy a non-infinite good at the same time, the price of that good will go up, until people stop buying it. That means that profits can be made for as long as the collective will to keep buying can be sustained. But at some point, inevitably, the pool of buyers dries up, and the people with lucky timing take their profits, and a much larger number of people with less lucky timing get left holding assets whose price plummets back down towards zero. It does not matter whether the asset in question is tulip bulbs or tech stocks or Bitcoins. This is how it happens. Being seduced over and over again by such a clearly established pattern for failure is just part of human nature.

An unfortunate aspect of all these bubbles is that savvy, well-informed insiders tend to be the ones who end up with profits at the end, while regular people who were attracted only by the promise of quick riches get left with the losses....

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...There are always some lucky winners in bubbles (today, they are the people advertising their eye-popping investment gains on Reddit, or the instantly rich Bitcoin investors flaunting their new wealth on Twitter), but the main function of this relatively small number of winners is to attract a much larger number of investors into the mania who will eventually be losers. There is a law of gravity in the economic world. Just like rockets fired in the air will later fall to earth, so too will investments priced much higher than their actual value crash down again, sooner or later. And all of the regular folks, who noticed the bubble just in time to bet their scraped-together savings on it as a path out of working drudgery, will be the ones crashing with it.

This is not really an economic problem. It is a political one. The problem is that people don’t see it as political....

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All of these schemes are propelled by not only ignorance and greed, which are natural elements of human nature, but by the equally natural sense of desperation that builds up in people who are trapped in an economic system that offers them no legitimate way to reach the good life. America is particularly cruel: It valorizes the rich, taunts everyone with their luxurious lifestyles, and pretends that anyone can have what they have, while instead offering a system designed to filter economic gains upwards to the rich while leaving everyone else treading water. It is only normal for people to grasp at any path offered to easy riches, no matter how much of an illusion it is....

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Political action is the only real path out of this, and it’s a path that is rocky and long and offers uncertain rewards. Nobody wants that. America is built to make us not want that. America is built to make us want the reward in our bank account, here and now. I don’t have any illusions about convincing millions of people not to throw their savings into inflating (or deflating) bubbles in hopes of striking it rich. But I would like for people to understand exactly what is happening here. The things are not worth what the price says. What goes up will not keep going up forever. You are, statistically, probably not the lucky one who will come out on top."

It's always easier to agree on the problems than the solutions.

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Federal Court Strikes Down California’s Assault Weapons Ban

"...After every mass shooting, politicians pledge that they will get guns out of society when they know that such promises mislead voters on the range of permissible action in the area. In reality, the range of permissible legislative action is quite limited. Moreover,  limits on things like clip capacity are unlikely to make a significant difference in gun violence. Now, a federal judge has struck down California’s three-decade-old ban on assault weapons as a violation of the Second Amendment....

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In Miller v. Bonta, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego found that the ban on weapons like the AR-15 are based on both a misunderstanding of the weapons and a misinterpretation of the Constitution.  I previously discussed many of the same issues surrounding the AR-15 which remains one of the most popular weapons in the United States:

“While a ban on AR-15s sounds compelling, it breaks down under closer review. The AR-15 and other weapons in its class use an intermediate cartridge that actually is less powerful than that used in a rifle. These weapons are often twice as powerful as a handgun but not nearly as powerful as a rifle. Moreover, guns like the AR-15 are popular because they are modular and allow for different grips and barrels.”

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The problem is that many politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed the decision of the Supreme Court in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller affirming the right to bear arms is an individual right under the Second Amendment. The court has repeatedly reaffirmed that landmark decision. In 2010, the court ruled that this constitutional right applies to the states as it does to the federal government since it is one of those “fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty.”

These cases are controlling, as politicians and commentators are fully aware. Benitez addresses the test for such laws and holds that the state does not come close to satisfying its burden. Before laying out this test and its application, the court notes:

"The Heller test is a test that any citizen can understand. Heller asks whether a law bans a firearm that is commonly owned by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. It is a hardware test. Heller draws a distinction between firearms commonly owned for lawful purposes and unusual arms adapted to unlawful uses as well as arms solely useful for military purposes. As applied to AWCA, the Heller test asks: is a modern rifle commonly owned by law-abiding citizens for a lawful purpose? For the AR-15 type rifle the answer is “yes.” The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and keep the popular AR-15 rifle and its many variants do so for lawful purposes, including self defense at home. Under Heller, that is all that is needed. Using the easy to understand Heller test, it is obvious that the California assault weapon ban is unconstitutional. Under the Heller test, judicial review can end right here."

This is only the latest major ruling by Benitez in the area. In 2017, he struck down the state’s nearly two-decade-old ban on the sales and purchases of magazines holding more than 10 bullets. As recently discussed, the Ninth Circuit upheld his decision, which is now scheduled to be reheard by an 11-member panel. These cases have a very strong chance for review before the Supreme Court given the division across the country and the 6-3 conservative majority on the Court.

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These are difficult policies and difficult cases.  Reasonable people can disagree, including on the meaning of the Second Amendment. What is troubling is the level of misleading and frankly disingenuous discussion of the issue. The public is constantly being told that electing certain politicians will result in sweeping gun control when the current case law directly contradict such assertions."

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The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun -- Even Without the New Laws Biden Wants

"The Department of Homeland Security on Friday issued a new warning bulletin, alerting Americans that domestic extremists may well use violence on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. This was at least the fourth such bulletin issued this year by Homeland Security (DHS) warning of the same danger and, thus far, none of the fears it is trying to instill into the American population has materialized.

The first was a January 14 warning, from numerous federal agencies including DHS, about violence in Washington, DC and all fifty state capitols that was likely to explode in protest of Inauguration Day (a threat which did not materialize). Then came a January 27 bulletin warning of “a heightened threat environment across the United States that is likely to persist over the coming weeks” from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” (that warning also was not realized). Then there was a May 14 bulletin warning of right-wing violence “to attack higher-capacity targets,” exacerbated by the lifting of COVID lockdowns (which also never happened). And now we are treated to this new DHS warning about domestic extremists preparing violent attacks over Tulsa (it remains to be seen if a DHS fear is finally realized).

Just like the first War on Terror, these threats are issued with virtually no specificity. They are just generalized warnings designed to put people in fear about their fellow citizens and to justify aggressive deployment of military and law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country. A CNN article which wildly hyped the latest danger bulletin about domestic extremists at Tulsa had to be edited with what the cable network, in an “update,” called “the additional information from the Department of Homeland Security that there is no specific or credible threats at this time.” And the supposed dangers from domestic extremists on Inauguration Day was such a flop that even The Washington Post — one of the outlets most vocal about lurking national security dangers in general and this one in particular — had to explicitly acknowledge the failure:

"Thousands [of National Guard troops] had been deployed to capitals across the country late last week, ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized.

Once again on Wednesday, security officials’ worst fears weren’t borne out: In some states, it was close to business as usual. In others, demonstrations were small and peaceful, with only occasional tense moments."

...

...Even prior to the Department's creation, its first Secretary, Tom Ridge, when he was still the White House's Homeland Security Chief in early 2002, created an elaborate color-coded warning system to supply a constant alert to Americans about the evolving threat levels they faced from Islamic extremists.

In 2004, Ridge admitted that he had been repeatedly pressured by Bush officials to elevate the warnings and threat levels for political gain and to keep the population in fear. He claims that he, in particular, was coerced against his will to raise the threat level just prior to the 2004 presidential election and resigned for that reason shortly thereafter. DHS's color scheme became "the brunt of endless jokes and derision,” concluded a 2007 scholarly study in the journal International Security, noting that it "became perceived as being politically motivated” largely due to the complete lack of specific information about what Americans were supposed to fear or avoid. Moreover, “its designers assumed that the population would trust in the national leadership and believe in the utility of the system's information.” It failed because of how often the alleged threats failed to materialize, and because the warnings were rarely accompanied by any specificity that could permit action to be taken or avoided.

Though Obama scrapped the unpopular color-coded system in 2011, he — in a classic Obama gesture — merely replaced it with an equally vague and fear-generating bureaucratic alternative that was also subject to political manipulation....

...

Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.

...

Before Joe Biden was even inaugurated, he and his allies knew they needed a new villain. Putin never generated much fear in anyone beyond MSNBC panels, the CNN Green Room, and the newsrooms and op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. While negative views of Russia increased in the U.S. during Russiagate mania, few outside of hard-core Democratic partisans viewed that country as a genuine threat or primary enemy. Few Americans woke up shaking in fear about what the Kremlin might do to them.

The search for a new enemy around which the Biden administration could coalesce and in whose name they could keep fear levels high was quickly settled. Cast in that role would be right-wing domestic extremists. In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”

Pending Domestic War on Terror legislation favored by the White House — sponsored by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — would simply amend the old War on Terror laws, which permitted a wide range of powers to fight foreign terrorist organizations, so as to now allow the U.S. government to also use those powers against groups designated as domestic terror organizations. Just as was true of the first War on Terror, this second one would thus vest the government with new, wide-ranging powers of surveillance, detention, prosecution and imprisonment, though this time for use against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

...

Meanwhile, one of the most repressive features of the first War on Terror — due-process-free no-fly lists against American citizens — is now back in full force. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) have both been demanding that the FBI ban January 6 protesters and other “domestic extremists” from air travel without being convicted of any crime or even given a hearing to determine whether this prohibition is justified. Rep. Thompson even demanded that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) be put on the no-fly list, then took to Twitter to boast of how proud he was of this demand...

...

Beyond the DHS bulletins, that agency and other intelligence operatives continue to issue reports, for both public and classified consumption, warning that the greatest national security threat the U.S now faces is domestic extremism. As we reported here last month, that "domestic extremist” designation includes not just anti-Biden and anti-government protesters on the right but also leftist groups including animal rights activists — essentially anyone who objects to prevailing ruling class dogma and wants to use their constitutional rights to advance those views. To compile these reports, the CIA appears clearly to be breaking the law in using its vast intelligence weapons for domestic monitoring and control.

Online censorship, of course, is also rapidly increasing in the name of stopping the threat of domestic extremism....

...

No nuance or questioning is permitted when it comes to discussions of how much danger America really faces from domestic extremists. The parallels with the first War on Terror are manifest.

I know of nobody who dismissed the significance of the 9/11 attacks. A one-day attack that wipes out 3,000 human beings and crashes four passenger jets into three large buildings is a gravely serious event. But there were plenty of people — including myself — who spent years arguing that the threat reflected by that attack was being aggressively and deliberately exaggerated by U.S. officials and both political parties in order to justify extraordinary power grabs for themselves.

In response, a standard tactic was deployed against those who, after 9/11, urged that the threat be placed in rational context rather than melodramatically and cynically inflated. Anyone urging sober restraint was instantly accused of being sympathetic toward if not outright supportive of anti-American terrorism. The Bush administration demanded a binary framework most vividly expressed by the then-president's decree in his late September, 2001, address to the Congress: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” And thus was any middle ground — I condemn the 9/11 attack but oppose dangerous overreaction or authoritarian power grabs in the name of combatting it — abolished.

That Bush "with-us-or-with-the-terrorists” directive provoked a fair amount of outrage at the time but is now the prevailing mentality within U.S. liberalism and the broader Democratic Party.

...

...Just as was true of the first War on Terror, any attempt to place the actual lingering threat in context (by rejecting the claim that the danger is so grave that it requires vast new powers), or to suggest it is being manipulatively exaggerated (by calling it The Insurrection), or to document actual lies being told in service of the prevailing narrative (such as the ongoing lie that a pro-Trump crowd murdered Officer Brian Sicknick) provokes furious accusations that one must be sympathetic to if not supportive of the January 6 rioters and any groups associated with them. Attempts to suggest that those charged in connection with the January 6 riot are being excessively prosecuted and punished provoke even greater rage — despite the fact that not a single one of them has been charged with treason, sedition, insurrection or domestic terrorism, and despite the fact that concerns about overzelaous prosecutors and the carceral state are supposed to be staples of liberals politics (though ones which, like anti-police sentiment and opposition to killing unarmed protesters, instantly disappear when convenient, such as when it comes time to exploit Officer Sicknick or cheer the fatal point-blank shooting of the unarmed Ashli Babbitt).

...

It is a shoddy, anti-intellectual and deceitful tactic, to be sure, but it is now commonplace. And that is particularly concerning as the Democrats’ devotion to a new War on Terror continues to grow. On Monday, President Biden, citing "the intelligence community,” asserted that white supremacist terrorism is "the most lethal threat to the Homeland today.”"

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The Sources of Rip-Your-Face-Off Inflation Few Dare Discuss

"Inflation will be transitory, blah-blah-blah--I beg to differ, for these reasons. There are numerous structural sources of inflation, which I define as prices rise while the quality and quantity of goods and services remain the same or diminish. Since the word inflation is so loaded, let's use the more neutral (and more accurate) term decline in purchasing power: an hour of your labor buys fewer goods and services of lesser quality than it did a decade ago or a generation ago.

While the conventional discussion focuses on monetary inflation, i.e. expansion of money supply, the real rip-your-face-off sources have nothing to do with money supply. The rip-your-face-off sources are scarcities that cannot be filled by substitution or globalization.

...

The only substitute for a skilled welder is another skilled welder, and while theory holds that there will be cheaper welders who can be brought in from elsewhere, this is also not true: due to deficiencies in education and a cultural bias against manual labor, there is a shortage of skilled welders virtually everywhere.

But wait, can't we just offshore the project? Globalization always lowers costs, right? So by all means, load your busted boat trailer on a container ship to China, find a welder in Shanghai to do the work, and then ship the boat trailer back. Weeks later, you discover the plan and the specs weren't followed, so all the time and money was wasted. It would have been so much cheaper and faster if you'd just paid the welder in town a few extra bucks and had it done right in a few hours.

But wait--we'll just automate welding and have a robot do it all for next to nothing. OK, fine, pal--you manufacture the robot and program it to trundle out to the busted boat trailer, examine the breaks and do the welding so it actually works again. Go ahead and do that (at gargantuan expense), and then let's see the robot do it right in dozens of different jobs in all sorts of situations, and then add up the cost of all that compared to the relatively low cost of an experienced welder.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, people with high levels of craft skills and experience are scarce, and the fantasy of robots replacing them are untethered from reality.

...

Fans of automation are rarely if ever the people tasked with designing, manufacturing and programming robots. Fans of automation don't recognize any limits on the cost and efficacy of automation because their faith in technology is quasi-religious, but in the real world, there are many tasks that don't lend themselves to automation.

...

Although it's heresy to true believers in automation, humans are cheaper and create more value than robots in many settings. Simply put, there are limits on the cost effectiveness and value creation of robotics and automation.

...

Few seem to have noticed that we're already on the downside of Peak Globalization: labor costs are rising in China, too, for the same reason labor costs are rising here and elsewhere: the number of people willing to do dirty, boring, difficult work for low pay and no benefits is diminishing....

...

Apologists for the wunnerfulness of globalization also fail to take into account the nationalization of critical resources or resources being cut off for geopolitical reasons. Nice copper mine you got there, but now it's ours, and we're raising prices. Go find a substitute for copper, cobalt, rare earths-- gosh, there are no substitutes? Wait a minute, economists promised us scarcity was impossible because there's always a substitute.

In the real world, essentials for which there are no substitutes are scarce, and the world is awakening to the power of those who control these essentials. Globalization was always based on the notion that there was always another place to stripmine, but now the entire planet has been stripmined, put under the plow or clearcut.

The primary source of cost-cutting and profit-boosting--lowering quality and reducing quantities-- have reached limits...

...

Few are willing to acknowledge these sources because they run counter the the fantasy world narrative that's spinning the frenzied hamster wheel. Purchasing power is prosperity, and since purchasing power is in free-fall, so is prosperity--at least for the bottom 90%. Trillions in free money have masked the decline temporarily, but what's transitory isn't inflation-- it's the illusion of prosperity that's transitory. And that's why nobody in a position of power wants to discuss prices being driven by scarcities caused by actual physical limits.

Those who think prices can't double or triple haven't experienced scarcities caused by actual physical limits. There are no substitutes for essentials or skilled labor, globalization has already stripmined the planet and central banks can't print experienced workers willing to work for rapidly devaluing wages in dead-end jobs while billionaires pay pennies in taxes."

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Switzerland prepares to remove pandemic restrictions from vaccinated citizens with Covid certificates

"The certificates, which will either be provided via hard copy or electronic format, are expected to be distributed from next week. They will be given to people who are deemed to be at a low risk of transmitting Covid after being vaccinated, testing negative or having received temporary immunity after recently recovering from the virus.

While the government is still ironing out the full details of the Covid certificate scheme, it is expected that all members of the general public who are eligible to receive the document will do so by the end of June.

The legal basis for the certificate scheme will come into effect on Monday, with the government working to ensure it meets European and digital privacy requirements so that any related app could be available through the online stores of Google and Apple.

...

The Swedish health minister, Alain Berset, told local media recently that the government hopes the country will have fully reopened domestically by August, assuming the vaccination programme continues unimpeded.

Switzerland is not the first European nation to implement a Covid passport scheme, with Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Greece and Poland having launched similar documents for their own citizens on June 1, as part of an EU-wide move to reopen countries and their borders."

========

Texas becomes latest state to ban Covid vaccine passports after Gov. Abbott signs bill

"Texas Governor Greg Abbott has signed a bill barring the use of vaccine passports, insisting Texas must remain completely “open” while blasting the passes as an infringement on individual liberty.

“Texas is open 100%. Texans should have the freedom to go where they want without any limits, restrictions, or requirements,” Abbott said in a tweet before signing the bill on Monday, adding that the legislation prohibits any business or government entity from “requiring vaccine passports or any vaccine information.”

Companies that run afoul of the new law can have state contracts revoked and may lose government-issued licenses or operating permits, according to the Texas Tribune. The bill stipulated that businesses will still be permitted to screen for the coronavirus itself and implement “infection control protocols,” however.

Though Abbott previously signed an executive order to a similar effect in April, Monday’s bill signing made Texas the latest state to ban the passes with lawmakers’ consent, most led by Republican governors. While both Utah and Arkansas prohibited government agencies from requiring proof of vaccination, others, such as Alabama, Indiana, Iowa and North Dakota, have barred vaccine passports outright, including for both business and the government."

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“Unloading A Revolver Into The Head Of Any White Person”: Yale Features Violent, Racist Diatribe By Psychiatrist

"...psychiatrist Dr. Aruna Khilanani. The New York-based doctor was invited to Yale School of Medicine in April to deliver an address which turned out to be a violent, racist diatribe...

...

The audio of the talk was placed on substack by former New York Times opinion writer and editor Bari Weiss. Khilanani previously complained that Yale had restricted access to her speech and demanded that it be made public. Yale Child Study Center Director of Medical Studies Dr. Andres Martin was listed as “course director” for the talk.

Khilanani launched into an attack of all white people as a monolithically ignorant, delusional, and hateful group. Early on, she offers a telling self-diagnosis: “We are calm, we are giving, too giving, and then when we get angry, they use our responses as confirmation that we’re crazy or have emotional problems.” She insisted “Nothing makes me angrier than a white person who tells me not to be angry, because they have not seen real anger yet.”

Khilanani then gives a chilling observation. After noting that she stopped watching news because it upset her too much, she noted “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f–king favor.”

Khilanani encouraged the audience to stop speaking with white people because they have are incapable of dealing with their racism and refuse to admit that they are all racists.

...

Khilanani is an example of a growing number of writers and academics spewing anti-white sentiments while dismissing any criticism as white insecurity or privilege.  Elie Mystal, writer for Above the Law and The Nation’s justice correspondent, for example, lashed out at “white society” and how he strived to maintain a “whiteness free” life in the pandemic.  A seminary professor recently publicly prayed “Dear God, Please help me to hate White people” and to overcome any lingering concern for them. Even students are voicing such views.  We recently discussed a Miami law student writing about her “hate for white people.” It is not hard to imagine what would be the response if such statements were made about a different race.

I have long defended such statements as protected by free speech principles and I feel the same way about Khilanani’s speech. This is a viewpoint that should be discussed and debated....

...

I believe in largely unfettered free speech, particularly for statements made off campus or outside of a classroom. There is a value to having an open intellectual forum including extremist views like those of Loomis and Khilanani. The problem is that universities have shown little tolerance for opposing viewpoints and have often subjected faculty to investigations and sanctions for expressing their viewpoints.  Students have also been sanctioned for criticism BLM and anti-police views at various colleges. Even a high school principal was fired for stating that “all lives matter.”  Each of these controversies raise concerns over the countervailing statements against police or Republicans or other groups.

The problem is not the tolerance shown speakers like Khilanani but the intolerance shown opposing viewpoints. Indeed, it is rare for such conservative or libertarian speakers to be invited to these conferences or campus events.  Yale clearly wanted to feature Khilanani and her “decoding whiteness” viewpoints. The question is whether it will now offer a speaker who will decode Khilanani and whether she is herself an example of violent and racist ideations."

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Five States + San Francisco Do Not Require Parental Consent For Administering COVID Vaccines to Minors

"Five states — Alabama, Iowa, North Carolina, Oregon and Tennessee — allow minors to decide for themselves whether or not to get the experimental Covid-19 vaccine without parental consent, the East Bay Times reported. Additionally, San Francisco’s Department of Public Health last month issued an order allowing 12 years-old and up to receive the vaccine without parental consent. Pennsylvania, meanwhile, is considering a bill that would allow teens 14 and older to make the decision themselves.

...

"In North Carolina, teens can consent for themselves for Covid-19 vaccines, “if they have the ability to understand and make decisions about their health,” Bailey Pennington, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, told CNN in an email.

“It is expected that in the majority of instances, communication is shared with parent and guardians and parent/guardian consent is obtained for COVID-19 vaccination for people under 18,” the email said in part, adding, “As part of normal development, most children are able to understand and make decisions about their health some point before the age of 18. There is no one age at which this always occurs; it varies from child to child. Some vaccine providers may ask for written consent for people under age 18 who are consenting on their own.”

In a couple of states CNN contacted, Alabama and Tennessee, teens 14 and older can be vaccinated without needing parental consent.

“The Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) requires consent for vaccines for persons up to 14 years of age. Of course, ADPH wants parents and guardians engaged in the healthcare of their children,” Dr. Karen Landers, a health officer within the department, wrote in an email to CNN.

In Oregon, children 15 and older may give consent without a parent or guardian. In Iowa, CNN was told that individual health care providers or health systems consult with their legal counsel regarding requirements and documentation needed to administer Covid-19 vaccines."

A number of medical experts have spoken out against administering experimental vaccines to young people because the virus poses little risk to them, and the vaccines have not been proven to be safe."

What's maybe most interesting is to contrast the age of consent for sex with the age of consent for this experimental gene therapy.

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Nearly 80% of surveyed Americans won’t change their mind & get Covid-19 vaccine, as inoculation rates threaten Biden’s July 4 goal

"More than three in four adults (78%) who have thus far refused to get a Covid-19 vaccination say they are unlikely to change their minds in the future, according to a new Gallup poll. Of that group, 51% say they are “highly unlikely” to change their minds.

Approximately 20% of people who are hesitant to receive a vaccine say they are open to changing their stance, with only 2% saying they are “highly likely” to eventually be convinced to get inoculated.

...

While approximately 3.4 million shots were being given out a day in mid-April, that number has now fallen to below one million a day, according to a report from the Washington Post.

To hit the president’s goal, it says, approximately 4.2 million adults would need to be getting vaccinated a week, but only 2.4 million were given a jab last week.

...

Some states have tried incentivizing vaccine hesitant residents by offering lottery winnings worth millions of dollars. The rates of vaccination vary significantly from state to state, with a handful set to hit Biden’s goal, including New York, a state in which over 60% of adults have received at least one dose of a vaccine.

Some right-leaning states, however, have lower vaccination rates and are unlikely to hit the 70% threshold in the next month, the Washington Post report goes on. Twelve states, including Oklahoma, Montana, and West Virginia, have seen their daily vaccinations fall to just 15 jabs per 10,000 residents.

...

Over 60% of adults have received at least one Covid-19 dose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with 14 jurisdictions hitting the 70% or higher threshold set forth by Biden."

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World Economic Forum pushes MIT program that automatically detects “disinformation narratives” online

"Misinformation and propaganda are as old and as present as human communication and societies organized into states. The curiously intense focus on these the last couple of years prompts many to believe such issues are now used as justification and smokescreen for suppressing legitimate but unwanted speech, and free expression-related civil rights.

Depending on where you stand on that, you may be reassured or dismayed that the World Economic Forum (WEF) is one of the entities pushing hard the agenda of online misinformation presenting a huge danger today – and endorsing some “solutions.”

One comes from MIT and its “Reconnaissance of Influence Operations (RIO)” – now there’s a name George Orwell would probably not kick out of his novels.

Out the gate, RIO “establishes” that power of misinformation on social networks and elsewhere online is such as to sway elections, but also allow different points of view to be expressed, or as the program announcement put it, “sow discord.”

Another dangerous point the MIT program aims to address is disinformation feeding “conspiracy theories” – but in light of the recent embarrassing U-turn on the “Wuhan lab leak” there’s no evidence of a firm and consensus-based definition of what a “conspiracy” even is. Rather, the category seems prone to political whim.

But RIO looks to be designed to work under the false premise that these definitions are objective, and agreed on by all stakeholders.

...

“The team envisions RIO being used by both government and industry as well as beyond social media and in the realm of traditional media such as newspapers and television,” the WEF said on its website."