When the Jussie Smollett incident hit the headlines in early 2019, anyone with a modicum of critical thinking skills could see it was an obvious hoax.
Yet, leftist networks, politicians and celebrities breathlessly amplified Jussie's claim, fueling racial division throughout the country instead of taking the 'wait-and-see' approach that much of the black community took at the time:
Now let's look at who didn't remain silent - and still promoted Jussie's lie.
Then there's this guy...
And this guy...
Katie Perry tweeted at the time: "Standing with and sending love to @JussieSmollett today... this is a racist hate crime and is disgusting and shameful to our country."
Cher tweeted a cryptic boomer message that only level-6 cat ladies can decipher:
And yet, none of these race-baiting celebrities and politicians who used their massive platforms to promote Jussie's lie have deleted their tweets, or owned up to being an idiot.
apnews | How will the world decide when the pandemic is over?
There’s
no clear-cut definition for when a pandemic starts and ends, and how
much of a threat a global outbreak is posing can vary by country.
“It’s
somewhat a subjective judgment because it’s not just about the number
of cases. It’s about severity and it’s about impact,” says Dr. Michael
Ryan, the World Health Organization’s emergencies chief.
In
January 2020, WHO designated the virus a global health crisis “of
international concern.” A couple months later in March, the United
Nations health agency described the outbreak as a “pandemic,” reflecting
the fact that the virus had spread to nearly every continent and
numerous other health officials were saying it could be described as
such.
The
pandemic may be widely considered over when WHO decides the virus is no
longer an emergency of international concern, a designation its expert
committee has been reassessing every three months. But when the most
acute phases of the crisis ease within countries could vary.
off-guardian | Illinois Representative Jonathan Carroll wants to
push through a change to the state’s insurance law that would mean
health insurers no longer have to cover unvaccinated people who get
Covid, forcing people to pay their medical bills out of pocket.
I think it’s time that we say ‘You choose not to get
vaccinated, then you’re also going to assume the risk that if you do
catch COVID, and you get sick, the responsibility is on you,’”
The potential corruption and abuse of such a rule should be obvious
to anyone familiar with just how mendacious insurance companies can be.
In all likelihood insurance companies will simply demand a negative Covid test before paying anything,
and if you test positive, no matter what you were treated for, you will
be called a “covid case” and forced to pay out of pocket.
The bill could, essentially, wipe all health insurance off the books for unvaccinated people.
The vaccinated should take no comfort from this, because their
vaccinated status is entirely temporary, and subject to rules that could
change on a whim.
Any “double jabbed” who misses a booster, or got a brand of vaccine
that was subsequently unapproved or discontinued, or wasn’t updated for
the latest variant, could suddenly find themselves one of the
“unvaccinated” underclass.
Of course, once it applies to vaccination status it can apply to other things. You travelled to the wrong place, or you didn’t wear a mask, you “associated with known anti-vaxxers”.
And, even more concerning, is the potentially slippery slope this
starts us down. Unvaccinated don’t get health insurance. Neither do
smokers who get lung cancer. Or overweight people who get diabetes. And
so on and so on.
The potential good news is that putting this law on the books would
require a lot of legal workarounds, including violating or changing the
Affordable Care Act, which outlaws removing insurance coverage from
someone based on a new medical diagnosis or test result.
off-guardian | Doctors are warning that hundreds of thousands of people in the UK could be at increased risk of heart disease or cardiac events.
Speaking to the Evening Standard, psychological therapist Mark Rayner and vascular surgeon Tahir Hussein said that the UK could see “300,000 new patients with heart issues” in the near future.
What’s to blame? Well, that would be “Post Pandemic Stress Disorder”. A new condition “yet to be recognised”, even though “many experts believe it should be”.
It’s a totally real thing. They didn’t just completely make it up. Don’t be cynical.
You see, all the “pandemic” related anxiety and stress has taken such
a toll on the public that doctors are predicting a 5% increase in heart
disease, nationwide, and not just in the elderly or infirm.
According to Dr Hussein, he is already seeing…
a big increase in thrombotic-related vascular conditions
in my practice. Far younger patients are being admitted and requiring
surgical and medical intervention than prior to the pandemic.
Now, some of you demented anti-vaxxers out there might be asking crazy questions like “could this increase in blood clots and heart disease be linked to injecting millions of people with an untested vaccine?”
But that’s absurd. And I told you to stop being cynical.
It turns out all the people saying that back in March weren’t just
conspiracy theorists spreading misinformation after all. They were
totally right. But the clots are only rare, so don’t worry. And they
sort of know what causes it now, so future batches might be fine.
And yes, also in the interests of fairness, it’s true that both the Pfizer and Moderna shots can cause heart issues too. Both, according to the CDC, can cause pericarditis and myocarditis, the complications of which include heart attacks, heart failure and strokes.
The UK government has even produced special guidelines for dealing with myocardits, “following Covid19 vaccination”.
But, just like the blood clots, this is very rare. Obviously not so rare you don’t need a special guiding document on how to deal with it, but still very very rare.
…the point is, yes, all the major Covid vaccines are known to have cardiac-related side effects, and yes, some doctors are now predicting a major spike in heart-related health problems, but these are totally unrelated.
charleshughsmith |The possibility that the United States could fragment is no longer a marginalized topic.
Maps displaying various post-U.S. regional configurations accompany
essays exploring how and why a break-up of the U.S. would be a solution
to regional and ideological polarization, for example, Max Borders'
recent article,
Dear America: It's Time to Break Up.
But two forces larger than political polarization may fragment
nation-states across the globe, including the U.S.: inequality and
scarcity. Inequality and corruption go hand in hand, of course, as
the wealthiest few influence the state to protect their monopolies and
backstop their speculative gains.
The parasitic elite can accumulate the majority of income,
wealth, political power and resources in eras of expanding abundance, as
what's left is enough to support an expanding populace that consumes
more per capita every year, i.e. broad-based prosperity.
But once abundance transitions to scarcity, the economy and society
can no longer sustain the dead weight of its outsized parasitic elite.
The parasitic elite believes its bloated share of resources, wealth and
power is not only sustainable but can be expanded without consequence,
and so it deploys all its formidable power to keep the status quo
unchanged even as scarcity lowers the living standards of the bottom 90%
and hollows out the economy.
In effect, the modern central state, regardless of ideological label, optimizes inequality and growth. Once growth falters while inequality continues increasing, the only possible outcome is fragmentation and/or collapse.
Put another way: the status quo is no longer the solution to inequality and scarcity, it is the problem.
Private-sector and political elites are incapable of recognizing they
are now the problem, and so the rapid unraveling of the status quo will
come as a great shock to their magical-thinking confidence in their
power.
The elite's delusional "solution" is a seamless, painless transition
to a new era of abundance via "green energy." Unfortunately, this vision
is 100% magical thinking, as all these projections ignore the
physical realities of building out a global energy system that generates
energy on the same scale as existing hydrocarbon energy sources. Read
these three reports for reality-based assessments:
The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth: Even "sustainable"
technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines face
unbreachable physical limits and exact grave environmental costs.
(scientificamerican.com)
As explained in the first paper, inequality generates collapse and so does a decline in resources, i.e. scarcity.
Put the two together and the only possible outcome is collapse of all
centralized nation-states that optimize inequality and endless expansion
of consumption.
The issue isn't ideological labels or principles, it's whether the state
solves problems or covers them up with fake fixes that accelerate
collapse.
Nations which want to not just survive but emerge stronger have one path: a revolutionary transformation
from "waste is growth" to degrowth, from an economy and state dominated
by a parasitic elite to a strictly limited parasitic elite and from
abject dependence on fragile supply chains originating in other nations
to decentralized, localized independence for essentials.
strategic-culture | Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are
everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to
force, or legally compel, full population vaccination. The mandates are
coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the
places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse. And (no coincidence), this ‘marker’ has come just as U.S. Covid deaths in 2021 have surpassed those of 2020.
This has happened, despite the fact that last year, no Americans were
vaccinated (and this year 59% are vaccinated). Clearly no panacea, this
mRNA ‘surge’.
Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no
panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather
by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in
the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his
‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through
Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time. And the inflation
spike may well sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB) altogether.
Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after
which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too
(by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids
at risk and elevating heating costs unduly), and the Pharma
establishment will be aware that a new B.1.1.529 variant has made a big
jump in evolution with 32 mutations to its spike protein. This makes it
“clearly very different” from previous variants, which may drive further
waves of infection evading ‘vaccine defences’.
Translation: a new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and –
eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in
prospect. And what of inflation then, we might ask.
It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in
full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before
variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and
non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at
Christmas markets (that’s if they open at all). A big reversal was
foreshadowed by this week’s news: vaccine mandates and lockdowns, even
in highly vaccinated areas, are returning. And people don’t like it.
The window for the Re-Set may be fast closing. One observer, noting all the frenetic Élite activity, has asked
‘have we finally reached peak Davos?’. Is the turn to authoritarianism
in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various
‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate,
vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?
Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating
inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst
poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly
discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory
hits a wall, because – well, inflation again.
Are you paying attention yet? The great ‘transition’ is conceived as a
hugely expensive shift towards renewables, and to a new digitalised,
roboticised corporatism. It requires Big (inflationary) funding to be
voted through, and a huge parallel (inflationary) expenditure on social
support to be approved by Congress as well. The social provision is
required to mollify all those who subsequently will find themselves
without jobs, because of the climate ‘transition’ and the shift to a
digitalised corporate sphere. But – unexpectedly for some ‘experts’ –
inflation has struck – the highest statistics in 30 years.
There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do
not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its
‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full
throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no
dissidence.
When
and how can we know that a change of direction is fundamental and
lasting, rather than a temporary departure from established trends?
That, in essence, is the call we need to make now.
Far from being “transitory”, current conditions – including rising
inflation, surging energy prices and the over-stressing of supply-chains
– are indicators of a structural change.
Ultimately, what we’re witnessing is a forced restoration of equilibrium between a faltering real economy of goods and services and a drastically over-extended financial economy of money and credit.
This is where confidence in continuity crumbles, where the delusions of ‘growth in perpetuity’ succumb to the hard reality of resource constraint, and where ‘shocks that are no surprises’ shake the financial system.
If you want just two indicators to watch, one of these is the volumetric (rather than the financial) direction of the economy, and the other is the behaviour of the prices of essentials within the broader inflationary situation.
The economics of stress
In
the science of materials, it’s observable that fractures happen
quickly, even if the stresses that cause them have accumulated over a
protracted period. We can spend hours, days, weeks or even years
gradually increasing the tension applied to an iron bar, but the ensuing
snap in that bar will happen almost instantaneously.
Economics isn’t a science, but there’s a direct analogy here. Anyone who understands the economy as an energy system will be well aware of a relentless, long-standing build-up of stresses.
They’ll be equally aware that this cannot continue indefinitely.
Two things matter now.
First, when will these cumulative pressures bring about the moment of fracture?
Second, what should we expect to see when this snapping-point is reached?
The answers to the second question are pretty clear.
alt-market | For many years now there has been a contingent of alternative
economists working diligently within the liberty movement to combat
disinformation being spread by the mainstream media regarding America’s
true economic condition. Our efforts have focused primarily on the
continued devaluation of the dollar and the forced dependence on
globalism that has outsourced and eliminated most U.S. manufacturing and
production of raw materials.
The problems of devaluation and stagflation have been present since
1916 when the Federal Reserve was officially formed and given power, but
the true impetus for a currency collapse and the destruction of
American buying power began in 2007-2008 when the Financial Crisis was
used as an excuse to allow the Fed to create trillions upon trillions in
stimulus dollars for well over a decade.
The mainstream media’s claim has always been that the Fed “saved” the
U.S. from imminent collapse and that the central bankers are “heroes.”
After all, stock markets have mostly skyrocketed since quantitative
easing (QE) was introduced during the credit crash, and stock markets
are a measure of economic health, right?
The devil’s bargain
Reality isn’t a mainstream media story. The U.S. economy isn’t the stock market.
All the Federal Reserve really accomplished was to forge a devil’s bargain: Trading one
manageable deflationary crisis for at least one (possibly more) highly
unmanageable inflationary crises down the road. Central banks kicked the
can on the collapse, making it far worse in the process.
The U.S. economy in particular is extremely vulnerable now. Money
created from thin air by the Fed was used to support failing banks and
corporations, not just here in America but also banks and companies
around the world.
Because the dollar has been the world reserve currency for the better
part of the past century, the Fed has been able to print cash with wild
abandon and mostly avoid inflationary consequences. This was especially
true in the decade after the derivatives crunch of 2008.
Why? The dollar’s global reserve status means dollars are likely to
be held overseas in foreign banks and corporate coffers to be used in
global trade. However, there is no such thing as a party that goes on
forever. Eventually the punch runs out and the lights shut off. If the
dollar is devalued too much, whether by endless printing of new money or
by relentless inflationary pressures at home, all those overseas
dollars will come flooding back into the U.S. The result is an
inflationary avalanche, a massive injection of liquidity exactly when it will cause the most trouble.
bloomberg | To show how exclusive you are, there’s nothing like turning away a billionaire.
Two
members of the three comma club were among those nominated to join
R360, a new, invitation-only investment and networking group for
people with net worth of $100 million or more. Neither billionaire made
it past the membership committee, according to Charles Garcia, one of
the group’s managing partners.
“I took some grief for that,” said the 60-year-old
entrepreneur, a consummate networker who founded Sterling Financial
Investment Group in the late 1990s and chaired South Florida chapters of
wealth network Tiger 21 for many years. “One person seemed to want to
leverage the group to benefit their own business activities, and the
other didn’t want to integrate his family.”
Neither of those are in line with the values
considered core to the group. Members with those values — which include
honor, entrepreneurial grit and generosity of spirit — are invited to go
on a three-year “journey” to gain mastery across six kinds of capital:
financial, intellectual, spiritual, human, emotional and social. A
three-year family membership costs $180,000.
There are countless formal and informal networks
for wealthy individuals and families, and R360 aims to find a place
among them. Tiger 21, perhaps the most widely known group, has nearly
1,000 members paying dues of $30,000 a year.
For the ultra-wealthy, these groups provide a
sort of confidential, supercharged coaching network on everything from
figuring out one’s purpose in life to learning more about philanthropy
to understanding the blockchain.
“When people get
wealth of $100 million or more, their issues are far greater than for
people who are wealthy but not at that level,” said Michael Cole, 61,
one of R360’s managing partners and the former chief executive officer
of Cresset Asset Management. “They’ve achieved success, and are looking
more at how can I make an impact on things that matter to me — for
myself, for my family, for society.”
Then there are philanthropic networks, such as
the invite-only Synergos Global Philanthropy Circle, founded by Peggy
Dulany and her late father, David Rockefeller, with more than 100 member
families around the world. Like R360, GPC describes membership as
a journey — a year-long cycle of “inspiring, engaging and connecting
philanthropists and social investors to create a better world.” Dues are
$25,000 a year.
These independent groups are in addition to those those formed by private banks
and high-end wealth-management firms, which pour resources into
building networks designed to connect, educate, entertain — and retain
— their ultra-wealthy clients and their children.
They can also be flourishing businesses
themselves. Tiger 21 was founded in 1999 by entrepreneur Michael
Sonnenfeldt, who sold roughly a 50% stake to private equity firm
Education Growth Partners in 2019 for an undisclosed sum.
R360
is set up as a limited partnership, with 48 founding partners
contributing $350,000 each, which equates to about a 60% ownership. The
group wants to add about 50 members a year until reaching 500 in the
U.S. and 500 abroad. Garcia stresses that R360 will never be sold, and
that “the idea is to have this around 100, 200 years from now.”
popular | In the United States, only certain types of theft are newsworthy.
For example, on June 14, 2021, a reporter for KGO-TV in San Francisco tweeted a cellphone video
of a man in Walgreens filling a garbage bag with stolen items and
riding his bicycle out of the store. According to San Francisco's crime
database, the value of the merchandise stolen in the incident was
between $200 and $950.
According to an analysis
by FAIR, a media watchdog, this single incident generated 309 stories
between June 14 and July 12. A search by Popular Information reveals
that, since July 12, there have been dozens of additional stories
mentioning the incident. The theft has been covered in a slew of major
publications including the New York Times, USA Today and CNN.
In most coverage, the video is presented as proof that there are no
consequences for shoplifting in San Francisco. But the man in the video,
Jean Lugo-Romero, was arrested about a week later
and faces 15 charges, including "grand theft, second-degree burglary
and shoplifting." He was recently transferred to county jail where he is
being held without bond.
Just a few months earlier, in November 2020, Walgreens paid a $4.5 million settlement
to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging that it stole wages from
thousands of its employees in California between 2010 and 2017. The
lawsuit alleged that Walgreens "rounded down employees' hours on their
timecards, required employees to pass through security checks before and
after their shift without compensating them for time worked, and failed
to pay premium wages to employees who were denied legally required meal
breaks."
Walgreens' settlement includes attorney's fees and
other penalties, but $2,830,000 went to Walgreens employees to
compensate them for the wages that the company had stolen. And, because
it is a settlement, that amount represents a small fraction of the total
liability. According to the order approving the settlement, it represents "approximately 22% of the potential damages."
So
this is a story of a corporation that stole millions of dollars from
its own employees. How much news coverage did it generate? There was a
single 221-word story
in Bloomberg Law, an industry publication. And that's it. There has
been no coverage in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, or the dozens of
other publications that covered the story of a man stealing a few
hundred dollars of merchandise.
darrellowens | I don’t really know if there’s a crime wave regardless of the
perception that there is one. I don’t trust police statistics besides
homicide, home invasion and auto burglaries. I don’t know many people
who would make a police report about assault or theft. I worked at a
Walgreens with an extensive theft problem and know first hand only
extreme cases were reported to the police. In San Francisco, there’s
seven fewer homicides, two hundred more burglaries and fifty more motor
thefts than last year. Is that a crime wave? I suppose. The entire
country has seen increased crime since the pandemic. The only thing that
sticks out about San Francisco is the appalling high drug overdoses last year in which no other Bay Area county came close.
Couldn’t
help but notice that the vast majority of mob burglaries happened
outside of San Francisco, though. I notice that only crimes in San
Francisco require public responses from district attorney Chesa Boudin.
Alameda County district attorney Nancy O’Malley is never made to answer
for the very clear crime wave in Oakland right now. O’Malley virtually
never appears in any publication about the endless homicides, the
endless dispensary attacks, or even the freeway shootings that have
killed two in the last couple months including a mother and a baby, on
top of 80 freeway shootings last year in Alameda County. Nothing about
district attorney Diana Becton who bears apparently no responsibility
for the numerous homicides in Pittsburg and Antioch, or the burglaries
in Walnut Creek. Jeff Rosen, Santa Clara County DA, home of the
Lululemon and this recent shoe store mob burglary? Never heard of him.
It’s
only Boudin, apparently, who’s expected to give public comment to media
about crime. Why? It’s not as if he runs SFPD. He doesn’t make staffing
decisions, he doesn’t decide who gets arrested and where beat patrols
go. He’s a prosecutor. Because he pointed out that punitive behavior
isn’t always warranted in every situation, now he’s become target #1 for
all social ills in San Francisco with a recall initiative, despite no
real evidence that he’s more lenient on prosecutions than his Bay Area
counterparts, or that the crime wave is unique to San Francisco.
What really gets to me though is that there is
a clear crime wave happening. Oakland’s at its 127th homicide as of
typing this. When I started this substack 2 days ago it was at its
126th. Where’s the faces of the victims? Where’s the twitter videos? Who
even are these homicide victims? With exception to the murdered KRON
guard Kevin Nishita or baby Jasper Wu, we hardly even know them.
Prior
to the pandemic, homicides in Oakland were at all time lows, but now
the homicide levels for a second year in a row is reaching 1990s levels
of death. But since these are mainly confined to East Oakland and West
Oakland, and the victims are mostly Black and Brown, nobody really
cares. After all, it’s where murder is expected to happen and to the
people it's expected to happen to. When crime happens where it’s not
supposed to happen like in suburban Walnut Creek or downtown San
Francisco, suddenly it gets hyper media focus.
Louis Vuitton and
Nordstrom have become incessantly repeated names as if they’re people,
not 15 year old Shamara Young, 34 year old Danny McNary Jr, 41 year old
Kanawa Long, 22 year old Devani Aleman Sanchez, 24 year old Suiti Mesui,
33 year old Lindsey Logue, 52 year old Dirk Tillotson, 30 year old
Willie Lennon III and the list goes on. What about the numerous
unidentified people who were gunned down and had their lives taken from
them? The media doesn’t care because they died in the zipcodes where
society has deemed it acceptable and not news worthy.
There were
three instances of shootings in Oakland the weekend of the Louis Vuitton
burglary. Two people—two human beings—died. Shot to death by a gun,
bled out on the street with their minds in panic. One a 17 year old boy
who spent over 6,000 days being born, raised, having life struggles and
successes, having family, going to school — all erased in just a few
seconds. No follow up stories by newspapers, no check-ins on the family
from journalists. No social media outrage. Nothing.
Just another
sex and age description in the homicide weekly wrap up. Public dollars
goes not to the therapy for the families who lost their relatives or
have been terrorized by crackling bullets, not just in Oakland or
Antioch but in Bayview-Hunter’s Point or the troubled areas in downtown
San Francisco, but instead to free parking and street closures for
suburban Black Friday shoppers.
MSN |A
Chicago bus driver landed in the hospital after he was beaten on the
streets Saturday night, resulting in a 15-year-old boy being arrested.
The bus driver, 49, was inspecting his bus at about 9 p.m.
after he heard a loud sound. He was reportedly pushed and punched by
both a male and female, police said. An unidentified 15-year-old boy was
charged with a felony count of aggravated battery of a transit employee and disorderly conduct in connection.
Footage allegedly
showing the incident has spread on social media. A large group of youths
is seen surrounding the bus driver and hitting and kicking him as
onlookers cheer and record the incident.
Chicago
police, however, did not confirm to Fox News that the video circulating
shows the attack on the 49-year-old bus driver. Police directed Fox
News to the "initial narrative" that only two suspects were involved and added that police "do not have any additional information."
Violence
plagued the Loop in Chicago on Saturday night. A 15-year-old was shot
in the arm, dozens of young people flooded the area, fights broke out,
police made 21 arrests of youths, a police officer suffered a broken
arm, another officer was injured, and a convenience store owner was
punched in the face.
Second Ward Alderman Brian Hopkins said police have evidence that the large groups formed due to social media influencers who organized a flash mob.
Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot said "swift action" will be taken and that parents need to take responsibility for their kids.
"We
are going to take significant, swift action to quell any issues,"
Lightfoot said of the incident. "[Saturday night] there were a large
number of children that were down at Millennium Park. We followed the
protocols that we put in place from the summer of 2020. When it was time
for them to leave the park, we made sure they left the park without
incident."
"These
kids have to take responsibility, but I’m going to say the parents have
to take responsibility," she said. "Do you know where your kid is? Are
you making sure that you’re talking to your children about how they
should act in a large crowd?" Fist tap Dale
twitter | I'm starting to think that organized looting may represent a deeper
ambition to make a political statement against capitalism and "the
system."
Sharing some reactions to my thread on boarded up SF below.
(A 🧵, 1/x)
First - the thread. It has reached about 15 million impressions - driven primarily by critics and trolls.
I went through a few hundred of the replies and quote tweets yesterday morning.
It was a painful read.
The tweets are filled with anger and hatred. If you are easily triggered
do not read this thread. I was very disturbed reading these.
If you want to see my notes they are linked in this Notion Doc.
However - to summarize there were a few categories of critical responses: 1. You are evil 2. Rich/businesses/property is evil 3. Gov/System is broken 4. This is justified 5. Misc/other
First up - "you are evil". The primary arguments were:
+ You just want to shop for luxury goods
+ You just care about money/things looking good
+ You are white (and have benefited from racism)
+ You are racist
A few more from "you are evil" theme (note - there were hundreds of these):
The second theme was that the rich/businesses/ property are evil (1/2)
foreignpolicy | To imagine that economics leads to political de-escalation would be,
to say the least, historically naive. As U.S. history teaches,
socioeconomic clashes can play out violently. The South fought a civil
war in defense of slavery, a mode of production based on forced labor.
Nor do producers, outrun by technology, necessarily surrender quietly to
the force of technological logic. Think about the protracted rearguard
actions mounted in defense of agrarian interests that distorts global
food markets all the way to the present day. The most gothic visions see
the United States plunged into something akin to a civil war between
fossil fuels and anti-fossil fuel factions. That may be fanciful, but
what is harder to deny is the United States, whether governed by
Democrats or Republicans, has a lamentable track record of managing and
mitigating the job losses and social dislocation that follows deep
economic change.
In 2012, economist David Autor and his co-authors published a famous paper on what they called the “China syndrome.”
They showed how China’s integration into the world economy and a surge
of imports to the United States raised incomes overall but, at the same
time, irreparably damaged many manufacturing communities across the
United States. Ahead of COP26, Autor and his co-authors released an updated paper,
which compared the China shock with the impact of coal’s rundown.
Damage to local economies from the coal industry’s decline was even
worse. If the China shock is widely blamed for unhinging the blue-collar
coalition that once supported Democrats, the effect of the coal
industry’s collapse was even more unambiguous: 2016 saw a heavy
pro-Trump swing across America’s coal regions.
The
answer from the Democratic Party’s left wing, after they won control of
the House of Representatives in 2018, was the Green New Deal. It sought
to address this challenge by combining gigantic investment in renewables
with an alliance with organized labor and marginalized groups to create
a “just transition.” It was a head-on effort to win the argument for an
energy transition, not just as an opportunity for green growth but as a
moment of social reconstruction as well. It was a grand vision adequate
to the scale of the climate crisis. When Sen. Bernie Sanders folded his
presidential bid in 2020, many of his key advisors were incorporated
into Biden’s policy team—and with good reason. Given the dislocation an
energy transition is likely to cause, the industrial revolution Kerry
advocates would be political poison were it not backed by a Green New
Deal vision.
But Biden was not carried to victory in 2020 on the back of
enthusiasm for green policies. In Texas, there is reason to believe an
anti-climate, pro-oil vote helped yield a better-than-expected result
for Trump. On Capitol Hill, Biden’s infrastructure plans have been cut
to ribbons by a Congress with a nominal Democratic majority. The outlook
for the 2022 midterms is grim. Decarbonization may be a promising
business proposition in some sectors, but it is not an issue that will
help Democrats win the majority they would need to give comprehensive
climate policy a robust political platform.
We are thus back at the impasse. The idea that economic logic by
itself will deliver an unambiguous case for ambitious climate policy in
the United States is naive. But so too is the idea that a Green New
Deal-style program will carry a progressive Democratic Party to
triumphant victory. The possibility of a deepening sociopolitical divide
around the climate issue and inconsistent and incoherent policy cannot
be denied. While individual eco-entrepreneurs like Musk may get rich,
the fear must be that the United States never develops a coherent social
response to the energy transition.
visualcapitalist | Anthropogenic mass is defined as the mass embedded in inanimate solid
objects made by humans that have not been demolished or taken out of
service—which is separately defined as anthropogenic mass waste.
Over the past century or so, human-made mass has increased rapidly,
doubling approximately every 20 years. The collective mass of these
materials has gone from 3% of the world’s biomass in 1900 to being on par with it today.
While we often overlook the presence of raw materials, they are what
make the modern economy possible. To build roads, houses, buildings,
printer paper, coffee mugs, computers, and all other human-made things,
it requires billions of tons of fossil fuels, metals and minerals, wood, and agricultural products.
Human-Made Mass
Every year, we extract almost 90 billion tons of raw materials from the Earth. A single smartphone, for example, can carry roughly 80% of the stable elements on the periodic table.
The rate of accumulation for anthropogenic mass has now reached 30
gigatons (Gt)—equivalent to 30 billion metric tons—per year, based on
the average for the past five years. This corresponds to each person on
the globe producing more than his or her body weight in anthropogenic
mass every week.
At the top of the list is concrete. Used for building and infrastructure, concrete is the second most used substance in the world, after water.
Human-Made Mass
Description
1900 (mass/Gt)
1940 (mass/Gt)
1980 (mass/Gt)
2020 (mass/Gt)
Concrete
Used for building and infrastructure, including cement, gravel and sand
2
10
86
549
Aggregates
Gravel and sand, mainly used as bedding for roads and buildings
17
30
135
386
Bricks
Mostly composed of clay and used for constructions
11
16
28
92
Asphalt
Bitumen, gravel and sand, used mainly for road construction/pavement
0
1
22
65
Metals
Mostly iron/steel, aluminum and copper
1
3
13
39
Other
Solid wood products, paper/paperboard, container and flat glass and plastic
4
6
11
23
Bricks and aggregates like gravel and sand also represent a big part of human-made mass.
Although small compared to other materials in our list, the mass of
plastic we’ve made is greater than the overall mass of all terrestrial
and marine animals combined.
As the rate of growth of human-made mass continues to accelerate, it
could become triple the total amount of global living biomass by 2040.
But humans can have a hard time comprehending numbers this big, so it
can be difficult to really appreciate the breadth of this incredible
diversity of life on Earth.
In order to fully grasp this scale, we draw from research by Bar-On et al. to break down the total composition of the living world, in terms of its biomass, and where we fit into this picture.
Why Carbon?
A “carbon-based life form” might sound like something out of science
fiction, but that’s what we and all other living things are.
Carbon is used in complex molecules and compounds—making it an essential part of our biology. That’s why biomass, or the mass of organisms, is typically measured in terms of carbon makeup.
In our visualization, one cube represents 1 million metric tons of carbon, and every thousand of these cubes is equal to 1 Gigaton (Gt C).
Here’s how the numbers stack up in terms of biomass of life on Earth:
Taxon
Mass (Gt C)
% of total
Plants
450
82.4%
Bacteria
70
12.8%
Fungi
12
2.2%
Archaea
7
1.3%
Protists
4
0.70%
Animals
2.589
0.47%
Viruses
0.2
0.04%
Total
545.8
100.0%
Plants make up the overwhelming majority of biomass on Earth. There are 320,000 species of plants, and their vital photosynthetic processes keep entire ecosystems from falling apart.
Fungi is the third most abundant type of life—and although 148,000 species of fungi have been identified by scientists, it’s estimated there may be millions more.
LATimes | “They’re trying to move us backward,” said Melina Abdullah, co-founder
of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. “We don’t want to move backward; we
want to move forward.”
Abdullah called Avant’s killing “horrific and appalling” and said
Black Lives Matter mourns with her family. But she said officials must
not be allowed to use Avant’s death or recent property crime to push for
more policing, cash bail or other tough-on-crime measures that she said
have been proved not to work.
“We need to think about what kind
of economic desperation actually creates property crime and how do we
get people out of that state,” Abdullah said. “How do we create livable
wage jobs? How do we create affordable housing?”
Abdullah also warned against accepting claims about crime that may
not have a basis in reality — which, as it happens, is something police
have warned against in recent days, as concern over crime trends has
escalated.
For example, while the “follow-home” and
“smash-and-grab” trends in L.A., including upticks in robberies in
corridors like Melrose Avenue, have caused concern, they are not
indicative of a citywide surge in property crime.
According to
LAPD data through Nov. 27, property crime this year is up 2.6% over the
same period last year but is down 6.6% from 2019. Robbery is up 3.9%
over last year but down 13.6% from 2019. Burglaries are down 8.4% from
last year and down 7.7% from 2019. Car thefts are a notable outlier, up
nearly 53% from 2019.
More concerning is violent crime. Homicides
are up 46.7% compared with 2019, while shooting victims are up 51.4%,
according to police data. As of the end of November, there had been 359
homicides in L.A. in 2021, compared with 355 in all of 2020. There have
not been more homicides in one year since 2008, which ended with 384.
In Beverly Hills, police stress that crime is rare — and killings
like Avant’s even more so. Police Chief Mark Stainbrook said that
despite recent incidents, Beverly Hills remains one of the safest cities
in the nation.
Crime across Beverly Hills this year was down 2%
as of the end of October. Violent crime in the past two years is up 23%
compared with the two years prior, but the total number of such crimes
remains tiny: There were just five robberies in the city in October, and
homicides are rare.
It’s not clear what reforms the concerns about crime in the Los Angeles area will lead to — if any.
A
crime spike in the 1990s led California to adopt policies that
toughened sentences and increased incarceration. The reform movement was
an acknowledgment that those policies went too far and caused their own
injustices. A poll of L.A. voters
released this week showed that public safety is perceived as less of a
pressing problem than homelessness, housing affordability, traffic,
climate change and air quality.
Jonathan Simon, a criminal justice
professor at UC Berkeley’s law school and author of “Governing through
Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a
Culture of Fear,” said it is unlikely that crime concerns will
completely derail the progressive criminal justice reform movement that
began with Floyd’s killing.
However, such concern could slow those
reforms, he said — showing once more “how potent the political value of
crime is” and how quickly politicians and others can revert to a
“crackdown” mentality.
“It’s a powerful trope now for 40 years,” Simon said.
Townhall | Third Worldization reflects the asymmetry of law enforcement. Ideology
and money, not the law, adjudicate who gets arrested and tried, and who
does not.
There were 120 days of continuous looting, arson, and
lethal violence during the summer of 2020. Rioters burned courthouses,
police precincts, and an iconic church.
And there was also a
frightening riot on January 6, when a mob entered Washington D.C.'s
Capitol and damaged federal property. Of those arrested during the
violence, many have been held in solitary confinement or under harsh
jail conditions. That one-day riot is currently the subject of a
congressional investigation.
Some of those arrested are still - 10 months later - awaiting trial. The convicted are facing long prison sentences.
In
contrast, some 14,000 were arrested in the longer and more violent
rioting of 2020. Most were released without bail. The majority had their
charges dropped. Very few are still being held awaiting capital
charges.
A common denominator to recent controversies at the
Justice Department, CIA, FBI, and Pentagon is that all these agencies
under dubious pretexts have investigated American citizens with little
or no justification - after demonizing their targets as "treasonous,"
"domestic terrorists," "white supremacists," or "racists."
In the
Third World, basic services like power, fuel, transportation, and water
are characteristically unreliable: in other words, much like a frequent
California brownout.
I've been on five flights in my life where
it was announced there was not enough fuel to continue to the scheduled
destination. The plane was required either to turn around or land
somewhere on the way. One such aborted flight took off from Cairo,
another from southern Mexico. The other three were this spring and
summer inside the United States.
One of the most memorable scenes
that I remember of Ankara, Old Cairo, or Algiers of the early 1970s
were legions of beggars and the impoverished sleeping on sidewalks.
But
such impoverishment pales in comparison to the encampments of
present-day Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, or San Francisco. Tens of
thousands live on sidewalks and in open view use them to defecate,
urinate, inject drugs, and dispose of refuse.
In the old Third
World, extreme wealth and poverty existed in close proximity. It was
common to see peasants on horse-drawn wagons a few miles from coastal
villas. But there is now far more contiguous wealth and poverty in
Silicon Valley. In Redwood City and East Palo Alto, multiple families
cram into tiny bungalows and garages, often a few blocks from tony
Atherton.
On the main streets outside of Stanford University and
the Google campus, the helot classes sleep in decrepit trailers and
buses parked on the streets.
Neistat was right in identifying a pandemic of crime in Los Angeles as Third Worldization.
But
so was Rogen, though unknowingly so. The actor played the predictable
role of the smug, indifferent Third World rich who master ignoring - and
navigating around - the misery of others in their midst.
NYTimes | The
police on Thursday announced that they had arrested a suspect in the
fatal shooting of Jacqueline Avant, a philanthropist and the wife of the
music producer Clarence Avant, one day after she was killed at her home
in Beverly Hills, Calif.
About an
hour after Ms. Avant, 81, was killed, the suspect, Aariel Maynor, 29, of
Los Angeles, was arrested when he accidentally shot himself in the foot
while burglarizing a home in Hollywood, about 7 miles from Ms. Avant’s
home, Chief Mark Stainbrook of the Beverly Hills Police Department said
at a news conference on Thursday.
The
police found Mr. Maynor in the backyard of the home in Hollywood after
they received a report of a shooting there at 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday,
Chief Stainbrook said, adding that they also recovered the rifle Mr.
Maynor is believed to have used to shoot Ms. Avant. Mr. Maynor was taken
to a hospital, where he remains in custody.
Ms.
Avant was found with a gunshot wound after the police received a report
of a shooting at her home in Beverly Hills at 2:23 a.m. on Wednesday.
Mr. Avant and a private security guard were at the home at the time of
the shooting, but were unharmed, the police said.
Surveillance
videos, including city cameras, showed Mr. Maynor’s vehicle heading
eastbound out of Beverly Hills shortly after Ms. Avant was shot, Chief
Stainbrook said.
The evidence
indicates that Mr. Maynor acted alone in the shooting, and his motive
remains under investigation, Chief Stainbrook said. Mr. Maynor has “an
extensive criminal record” and was on parole, Chief Stainbrook said.
“Our
deepest gratitude to The City of Beverly Hills, the B.H.P.D. and all
law enforcement for their diligence on this matter,” Ms. Avant’s family
said in a statement on Thursday after the police announced the arrest.
“Now, let justice be served.”
The fatal shooting of Ms. Avant
prompted an outpouring of grief and condolences from prominent figures
in the arts, sports and politics, including former President Bill
Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore and the former Los Angeles Lakers
star Magic Johnson.
A onetime model
who was married to Mr. Avant for more than 50 years, Ms. Avant was a
past president of the Neighbors of Watts, a charitable organization that
threw star-studded benefits to support child care and other needs. She
was also an elementary school tutor and an avid collector of Japanese
lacquered boxes.
Mr.
Avant started Sussex Records in 1969 and signed Bill Withers, releasing
some of his best-known songs, including “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Use Me”
and “Lean on Me.” Over the years, he also worked with Jimmy Jam, Terry
Lewis and Babyface. He helped promote Michael Jackson’s “Bad” world tour
in 1987, and was chairman of the board of Motown Records.
Mr. Avant was the subject of a 2019 Netflix documentary, “The Black Godfather,”
which featured testimonials from Mr. Clinton, former President Barack
Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris, who was then a presidential
candidate.
The couple’s daughter, Nicole A. Avant, a former U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, was a producer of “The Black Godfather,” and is married to Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix.
LATimes | The spate of smash-and-grab robberies
plaguing Los Angeles made its way to Rancho Dominguez this week, where
authorities say cash, jewelry and other items were taken from the Del
Amo Swap Meet.
The incident occurred around 11:30 a.m. Thursday,
according to Deputy Grace Medrano of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s
Department.
Video provided to The Times showed several people making off with goods amid broken glass and blaring alarms.
The
witness who took the video said there were several people shopping at
the time of the robbery and that the thieves “faked a fight” to distract
security guards before breaking the glass and grabbing the items.
“People were scared [and] running away because the glass-smashing
sounded like gunshots,” said the witness, who asked to remain anonymous.
Two employees were shoved to the ground, but it was not clear whether
they were injured, the witness said, adding that the robbers had
multiple cars waiting outside with their engines running.
A representative for the Swap Meet did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
ecosophia | There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for
that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in
advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people. Popular
though this notion is, it’s quite mistaken. What history shows, rather,
is that the future is always born on the irrational fringes of society,
bursting forth among outcasts, dreamers, saints, and fools. It then
sweeps inward from there, brushing aside the daydreams of those who
thought they could make the world do as they pleased.
Consider the Roman Empire in the days of its power. While its
politicians and bureaucrats laid their plans and built their careers on
the presupposition that their empire would endure for all imaginable
time, a prisoner on a Mediterranean island—exiled for his membership in a
despised religious cult—saw the empire racked with wars, famines, and
plagues, ravaged by horsemen galloping out of the east, and finally
conquered and fallen into ruin, to be followed by a thousand years of
triumph for his faith. We call him John of Patmos today, and his vision
forms the last book of the New Testament. He was a figure of the
uttermost fringe in his own era: isolated, powerless, and quite possibly
crazy. He was also right.
Thus it’s important to keep a close eye on the fringes of
contemporary culture, the places where the future is being born out of
the surging tides of unreason. One of the things I watch most closely
with this in mind is the burgeoning realm of contemporary conspiracy
theories. Those reveal far more than the conventionally minded imagine,
irrespective of their factual accuracy or lack of same. As Alain de
Botton commented of religions, whether conspiracy theories are true or
not is far and away the least interesting question about them.
To begin with, the popularity of conspiracy theories is a sensitive
measure of the degree to which people no longer trust the conventional
wisdom of their time. That’s an explosive issue just now, and for good
reason: the conventional wisdom of our time is fatally out of step with
the facts on the ground. Look across the whole range of acceptable
views presented by qualified pundits, and by and large you’ll find that a
randomly chosen fortune cookie will give you better guidance. The
debacle in Afghanistan is only one reminder of the extent that a popular
joke about economics—“What do you call an economist who makes a
prediction? Wrong.”—can be applied with equal force to most of the
experts whose notions guide industrial societies.
What makes the astounding incompetence of today’s expert opinions so
toxic is that nobody in the corporate media, and next to nobody in the
political sphere, is willing to talk about it. No matter how disastrous
the consequences turn out to be—no matter how often the economic
policies that were supposed to yield prosperity result in poverty and
misery, no matter how often programs meant to improve the schools make
them worse, no matter how many drugs released on the market as safe and
effective turn out to be neither, and so on at great length—one rule
remains sacrosanct: no one outside the managerial class is supposed to
question the validity of the next round of expert-approved policies, no
matter how obviously doomed to fail they are.
Gregory Bateson, in a fascinating series of articles collected in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
discussed the way that schizophrenia is created by this kind of
suppression of the obvious in a family setting. Insist to a child from
infancy onward that something is true that the child can see is
obviously not true, punish the child savagely every time it tries to
bring up the contradiction, and there’s a fair chance the child will
grow up to be schizophrenic. Conspiracy theories in society are the
collective equivalent of schizophrenia in the individual, and they have
the same cause: the systematic gaslighting of individuals who know that
they are being lied to.
Bateson’s analysis goes further than this. He noticed that, bizarre as
schizophrenic delusions can be, they always contain a solid core of
truth expressed in exaggerated and metaphoric language. Look into the
family situation, Bateson suggests, and you can decode the metaphors.
Here’s a patient who claims that he’s Jesus Christ. Observation of the
family reveals one of those wretched family dramas, as dysfunctional as
it is endlessly repeated, in which the patient was assigned an
ill-fitting role from birth. What the patient is saying, in his
exaggerated and metaphoric way, is quite accurate: “I’m not who they say
I am.”
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