“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
Asset bubbles are brutal.
The most difficult time to remain centered and focused is during their last stages as everyone around you is going nuts. Logic has been tossed out the window, sentiment is manic, and every narrative – the stories we hear and use to make sense of our world – is thoroughly ungrounded.
After a decade of price deformation — such as UBER being valued by the ““markets”” at $45 to $50 billion despite having no viable path for ever making a profit — it seems that practically everyone has lost the ability to perform even basic math or reality checks.
For example, this week — for what must have been the 42nd time — the Trump administration has proclaimed a massive victory in the China Trade Deal.
The narrative being sold to us is that along with the immediate roll-back of tariffs (which is Trump caving, not ‘winning’), China will buy $50 billion of US agricultural products in 2020.
Huge excitement in the global equity markets has greeted this news. Stocks exploded higher and bonds have been sold off. Unleash the hounds of economic growth!!
All this, based on the premise that China has (verbally) agreed to buy $50 billion of US agriculture products in 2020.
Now, about that…
What does $50 billion a year in Ag trade look like? Is it even possible?
The all-time record of China buying Ag products happens to have been in 2012 when
What was that all-time record? It was just $26 billion.
But now, suddenly China is going to double that amount? In a single year?
After securing and formalizing huge trade deals with Russia and Brazil? After being so dissed during the trade negotiations that China’s press and ministers openly criticize the arrogance and hostility of the US?
Yeah, that’s not very likely at all, is my assessment. China is not going to stiff its new trade partners just to make Trump happy.
More than that, it’s also unlikely that China could even find a way to spend that much on US products:
The entire US Ag export market was $140 billion in 2018. For China to suddenly become $50 billion of that would be rather disruptive to say the least.
The black bar I’ve drawn on the above graph represent $50 billion of goods. If China were to become that large of a consumer, it would displace the equivalent of 100% of its current consumption, plus that of Mexico, the EU and most of Japan.
Yeah, that’s just not going to happen.
This is just so completely brain-dead obvious that I’m surprised it went completely unnoticed by the entire US financial press.
Though I shouldn’t be, because the tail end of a massive bubble comes with a near-complete loss of the masses’ ability to think or reason.
Of course, we humans have been here many times before:
Today, the herd has gone mad. So much so that it can’t recognize the simple math that “$50 billion” in annual Ag purchases is simply not realistic.
I have a lot of compassion for just how difficult it is to keep one’s sense during a massive bubble, especially during the one we’re in now. Because today’s bubble isn’t just a product of the magnificently dumb one the Federal Reserve/ECB,/BOJ/et al., have been blowing since 2008.
Rather, its origin starts back on August 15th, 1971 and it is rooted in a most ‘mad’ idea: that one can grow one’s debts faster than one’s income forever, Hey hosanna, Amen.
This is such a flawed concept that it annoys me to have to re-re-re-explain it to the shepherds overseeing the mad herd.
Expensively-educated ‘professionals’ will very earnestly try to explain to me that this is both a stable and good system, when it’s clear the math doesn’t work.
The only way you could possibly defend the above chart, mathematically, is in a world without any limits. As long as exponential growth can continue unchecked — forever — then the debt trajectory of the above chart can be maintained.
But in the world we live in, like it or not, limits exist. And our debt is fast-becoming a black hole whose inescapable event horizon approaches nearer all the time.
Yet at the political and institutional levels, “growth forever” is the only narrative. Even as it’s becoming increasingly clear that sustainable growth is proving more and more elusive. And the increasingly desperate efforts to pursue it are creating long-term damage to our future prospects (worsening unaffordability, wealth inequality, environmental destruction, geo-political pressures, etc)
The effect of that? More and more people are losing trust in the system.
And in a faith-based system of money, as all fiat currencies today operate in, trust is the single most important commodity. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
The trade deal is simply this week’s inane excuse for why the ““markets”” have been blasting higher.
The real reason has nothing to do with trade. Or with anything fundamental at all.
It’s all about central bank money printing.
The Fed is now in full emergency mode. Its December money printing is truly a work of pure desperation. Hundreds and hundreds of billions poured into the system to prevent a crisis:
Thought the Fed isn’t fessing up here. It’s not even yet admitting there’s a problem to be concerned about.
But its actions belie its desperation. And whatever’s going on behind the scenes is none of the truly ridiculous explanations they’ve offered so far.
It’s utterly, completely, totally ludicrous to suggest (as Powell did) that the banking system is suffering from a shortage of excess reserves. Puh-leeze!
At $1,388 billion, excess bank reserves are $1,358 billion more than they were before the Great Financial Crisis hit. $30 billion was enough a decade ago, but now 46x more than that is supposed to be insufficient??
So, that ain’t it.
Instead when banks won’t lend to each other overnight it’s because they don’t trust each other enough to do it.
That’s it. Full stop.
Which means the Fed know something we don’t. And it means Powell is a lying sack for suggesting otherwise.
And it means this whole thing could go 2008 nuclear at any time, and the system won’t be able to control the meltdown.
Which is why the Fed is fighting like crazy to prevent that sort of thing from ever getting started.
So here we find ourselves, at the twilight of the Everything Bubble, with asset prices at all-time highs and the mainstream narrative crooning that the future’s so bright we need darker sunglasses.
Yet paradoxically in parallel with that, a cursory peek behind the curtain and a little cocktail-napkin math show us that the entire financial, economic and monetary system is teetering on the brink. In the Fed’s latest half-$trillion liquidity dump, we can see how radically extreme the measures now need to be to keep things from falling apart.
Bottom line: This whole thing is going to blow up at some point. It will be a before-and-after story for the generations that follow, in the same way the Great Depression was.
You’ll either be emotionally, physically and financially ready for it or you’ll become collateral damage along with the rest of the herd.
In Part 2: Take Action Locally To These Global Threats, we make it clear that all is not lost; you likely have more agency to protect yourself than you realize — and to position wisely to prosper — from the unfolding collapse if you commit to taking smart action now.
I myself have ramped up my plans to an even greater extent that I had before the 2008 crisis. In Part 2 I share the big step I’ve just taken in my own life to prepare for what’s coming, and I encourage you to get busy following suit with your own preps.
Bubbles are brutal. As John Hussman wisely quips, they force us to decide to either “look like an idiot before the crash, or look like an idiot after it”.
Break from the herd, no matter how awkward it may feel, and secure your future. Don’t be one of the countless idiots who ignore the warnings.
Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).
The post Bubbles Are Brutal appeared first on Peak Prosperity.
President Barack Obama and James Comey in the Rose Garden of the White House, June 21, 2013, as Obama announced Comey's nomination to succeed Robert Mueller as FBI director (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
"What did the president know, and when did he know it?" was the key question in the impeachment investigation of President Richard Nixon.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in his report on FISA abuse that President Obama didn't know anything about the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
But buried in the 446-page report released Monday is the revelation that FBI Director James Comey briefed Obama and other senior officials at a White House Situation Room, points out former counterintelligence agent and now lead Judicial Watch investigator Chris Farrell in a Daily Caller column.
Horowitz reported the meeting took place at around the same time that "the FBI was trying to determine whether any U.S. person had worked with the Russians" and that they were looking into four individuals with "some association or connection to the Trump campaign."
Farrell argues this information should be seen in the context of the Sept. 2, 2016, text message from FBI lawyer Lisa Page to her paramour Peter Strzok -- the lead Crossfire Hurricane investigator -- saying, "POTUS wants to know everything we are doing."
The text was part of a discussion between Page and Strzok about preparing talking points for a Comey meeting, presumably at the White House.
Farrell points out that the text message "was critically important because it elevated the scandal to the White House level and dragged it into the Obama Oval Office."
But Horowitz's June 2018 IG report "basically ignored the importance of this message, and the new report takes pains to explain it away."
Others present at the White House meeting were Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers.
Farrell points out that none of them were interviewed for the Horowitz report.
Remarkably, according to the report, Comey claimed that no one at the meeting "responded or followed up with any questions."
"This revelation should have been a major headline from the IG report was buried in the media narrative that there was 'no political bias' in this obviously grossly biased and ill-predicated domestic spying operation," writes Farrell.
Farrell notes that former Whitewater Independent Counsel Robert Ray was "aghast to learn how little involved the attorney general and the deputy attorney general of the United States" were in Crossfire Hurricane.
Ray said he could not believe "that there is an investigation that would take you inside a presidential campaign and four people who were targeted within that campaign and that doesn't require some kind of supervisory review and initiation beyond simply the inner-reaches of the FBI."
Farrell concludes that people "can rationalize it or explain it away, but any plain reading of the record tells us what we need to know."
"Obama wanted to know everything they were doing, and it looks like he did."
The post IG report shows Obama knew about spying on Trump appeared first on WND.
A couple of years ago there was quite a kerfuffle about the holiday duet, “Baby, its Cold Outside." This song, from 1944, features a dialogue which some people might describe as a man trying to talk a woman into staying longer at his place on a snowy night.
The criticism said the song was really about a predatory man attempting a date rape and the critics managed to get the song removed from many radio playlists.
Older women who remember those days said that, far from being a male chauvinist song, it was actually a feminist anthem in which an unchaperoned woman tries to talk herself into doing what she wants to do in spite of the conservative social standards of the time. Maybe there is a little bit of both going on?
I’m not into this new penchant for censorship, yet I wonder what those same critics would make of Santa, Baby which seems to me much less ambiguous?
This song from 1953, common on radio play lists around Christmas, features a woman singing seductively to Santa of all the things she wants him to bring her when he “hurries down the chimney tonight”: a sable fur, “a ’54 convertible too, light blue,” a yacht, “a duplex, and checks,” Tiffany diamonds and finally a ring (“I don’t mean on the phone”) apparently in anticipation of his proposal of marriage.
It is certainly true that men and women in love enjoy giving and receiving presents from one another, but the woman’s claim of being an “an awful good girl” rings false next to her reasoning: “think of all the fellows I haven’t kissed." It seems to me this song illustrates a parasitical relationship where there is no real love, just use.
Are men who pressure women into having sex exhibiting strength or weakness? Are women who use sexuality to get money and favors exhibiting strength or weakness? It’s not clear. Could it be that men and women are capable of taking advantage of the weaknesses of the opposite sex while capitalizing on their personal strengths?
We want our sons to value the women they love for who those women are and not merely use women for sex. But men and women both wish to be loved for who they are. Men do not want to be used any more than women do. It is right to teach our sons not to objectify women; it is also a good idea to teach our daughters not to objectify themselves, nor use men for what they can get out of them.
The ways women hurt each other, as well as men and children, are usually impossible to prosecute. Recently there has been a movement to make men accountable for sexual sins and various hashtags were mobilized. I am guessing a similar call for women to be held socially accountable for their selfish and destructive behavior would not go over as enthusiastically. I can’t quite figure that out.
Is it because we don’t really believe women to be capable of evil or maybe just that we think they are not responsible enough to be held accountable for it? Or is it because it just seems mean? Are we all in denial about women’s capacity for evil? And if we are, isn’t that sexist?
We seem to hold, that men who are used and discarded by rapacious women suffer less than women used and discarded by lascivious men. But I find that sexist and rather unbelievable.
Of course, rape and murder and violence (the crimes that men do at three times the rate of women) are objectively worse than seduction or theft. It is also true that men’s rate of suicide is 3.54 times the rate of women, their rate of death by drug overdose is 68 percent that of women, and they have double the rate of alcoholism of women. And that is just a fraction of the negative outcomes I could cite.
I wonder why men’s negative outcomes are so much worse than women’s? Could it be there are ways men are more vulnerable than women? The data seems to suggest that. And if so, is it true vulnerability or is it just inferiority? And if it is inferiority, should that be met with social judgment or social care?
Somehow men should always be called out and women should never be called out. Maybe the idea is men should be tough enough to take what women dish out? Sounds sexist to me, but even if that is true, what about infants and children? Should they be tough enough to take what their mother or other women dish out?
Our culture has a hard time even admitting the possibility of predatory or parasitic female behavior, or if we do, we don’t seem to think it’s ever as bad as anything a man can do. And I am not sure what that indicates about our true opinions on the issue of equality between men and women.
When women have negative outcomes, we look for causes. I suggest we do the same for men. For example, if the female voice from Santa, Baby was your mother (a woman who seduces men and values them merely for what they can provide for her) what kind of person are you likely to become?
I do not believe a woman’s behavior is less significant than a man’s behavior, and not just because I believe the sexes equally significant people but because the evidence is all around me of the pain women cause. I suggest that in some ways women do more damage (sometimes with objectively less evil behavior) because there are ways that men, and certainly children, are weaker than women. Women are formidable opponents of one another.
Of course, there is more than just predation or parasitism; there is a third way: mutualistic relation. We use this term in natural science as opposed to either predation or parasitism to describe how animals of different species sometimes manage to work together, each benefiting from the relationship. Not only is this possible for men and women it should be our aim. I believe we can rise above the constant cycles of predation and parasitism toward something better.
Consider the favorite holiday story, The Gift of The Magi, a famous tale by O. Henry. In it we encounter Jim and Della, a poor young couple each trying to come up with the perfect Christmas gift for each other in a very lean time. If you don’t know the story you should follow the link and read it now before I spoil it for you. It’s short.
Now, there were two possessions […] in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
The abridged version is that Della’s great love for Jim causes her to sell her hair (that was a thing one could do in 1905) to buy Jim a chain for his pocket watch, only to find that Jim, in his great love for Della, has sold his pocket watch to buy her the large jeweled combs she had been admiring, meant to be worn nestled in her voluminous elaborate upswept hair, which, in light of her new boyish pixie cut, are now useless.
O. Henry ends his simple story like this:
The magi, as you know, were wise men – wonderfully wise men – who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. … And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
Marriage is hard, and if you are fortunate it ends in death. If you don’t love someone enough to face poverty and suffering with them, don’t marry. If you’ve chosen to marry and want that to be a success, be to your spouse the sort of person you need them to be to you, come what may.
--
This article has been republished with permission from MercatorNet under a Creative Commons license.
[Image Credit: Pxfuel]
With the impeachment nonsense making TV news unwatchable, I've been catching up on "Law & Order SVU" recently.
The scripts involve the sort of real-life crimes that are a lot more common since our country has become "diverse," such as child rape and incest. But the child-rapists are never diverse, as they are in real life. No, the perps are always blond, blue-eyed American men.
In fact, the modern American white male is the least rapey, most gentle, protective, chivalrous creature God has ever created. Get ready for a gigantic I TOLD YOU SO when American women realize that, from 1620 to the day Ted Kennedy's 1965 immigration act kicked in, they never had it so good.
I wouldn't mention it, except for "Law & Order SVU." It would be as if the writers portrayed New York City as a sleepy little burg and Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, as a fast-paced metropolis, jam-packed with skyscrapers.
In one episode titled "Zero Tolerance," a white American male sells illegal-alien girls to other white American men in a sex trafficking scheme that was somehow enabled by Trump ... SEPARATING CHILDREN FROM THEIR PARENTS AT THE BORDER!!!
(The theory of causation is a little vague, but it was definitely Trump's fault.)
Also, according to "Law & Order SVU," the main demographic with a sexual fetish for pre-pubescent Hispanic girls is: handsome, married American white men.
Thus, the john having sex with a 9-year-old illegal alien in this episode was a white businessman, married with two sons, who was in New York specifically to have sex with underage girls.
You have to admire television writers who have taken a vow to never leave their homes, have any human contact or read.
Reviewing my years of research on child sex crimes, I see that this has happened NEVER. It's kind of the opposite. I ended up with so many immigrant child rape cases for "Adios, America!" that most of them had to be left on the cutting room floor – or the book would have been twice as long.
Since 2013, an average of 34 illegal aliens have been charged in North Carolina with 151 counts of raping or sexually assaulting a child per month – and that's based on police data from less than a third of the counties in a single state.
Shocking child sex crimes that you'd expect to happen about once a century now come at a clip of "every few years." Within a five-year timespan, for example, the same California judge presided over these two cases:
Since 1990, the media have reported on 53 specific girls aged 10 or younger who have given birth in Latin America. In the United States, with a population about 70 percent the size of the nine countries where those births occurred, there were four reported births to girls that young.
Three were to immigrants.
Two were fathered by Hispanic immigrants, one by a Haitian illegal immigrant and one by an American. But for William Edward Ronca, there would not be a single confirmed case of a white man in the Western Hemisphere impregnating a girl 10 years old or younger.
A report from the Inter-American Children's Institute explained that Latin America is second only to Asia in the sexual exploitation of women and children because sex abuse is "ingrained into the minds of the people." Women and children are "seen as objects instead of human beings with rights and freedoms."
If the "Law & Order SVU" writers are worried that Trump is preventing these child-rape-happy cultures from coming to our country, I've got good news!
Just two months ago, at an illegal-immigrant flophouse in Immokalee, Florida, a teenage girl got up to use to the bathroom in the middle of the night and caught an adult man in the act of raping a toddler, with blood running down both their legs.
Although the victim's age was redacted from the police report, the child was wearing a blood-soaked diaper when she arrived at the hospital. The infant was injured so badly that she's been in the hospital since the attack, undergoing multiple reconstructive surgeries – with more to come.
We know the child's rapist was an illegal alien – there was no one else in the trailer. At the moment, it appears that the primary suspect is her "father," Hector Gabriel-Jimenez, 23, who has been arrested for child neglect.
He entered the country illegally back in February, was apprehended by border police and sent on his merry way – by a president who launched his campaign talking about Mexican rapists.
But Mariska Hargitay ("Detective Olivia Benson") blames Trump for his imaginary act of enforcing the border, not for what he's actually done, which is allow the ACLU to fling our border open to child kidnappers and child molesters.
Promoting the idiotic episode, Hargitay tweeted: "The situation at the border has been unconscionable and cruel. As we speak there are still countless children who are separated from their families because of our government's actions. We can do better. We must do better."
In fact, Trump has been doing exactly what the geniuses of "Law & Order" want! And unlike the show's incomprehensible chain of causation, our actual border policy – which the "Law & Order" writers and Trump agree on! – led directly to a diapered baby being taken away from her mother and brutally raped.
As the father explained to the police: The reason he took the toddler away from her mother in Guatemala was so that "he would be allowed to stay in the U.S.A. and not have any problems with immigration for entering the U.S.A. Illegally."
Incest and child rape are not native American habits. Nor is child rape common in Spain. This isn't genetic. Bestial behavior toward women and children is a hallmark of primitive, peasant cultures – the cultures we are importing by the million.
The hallmark of civilized cultures is to arrest and imprison child rapists. But the brain-dead writers of "Law & Order SVU" invent little stories to demoralize the defenders of civilization, so we can let the incest and child rape flow!
The post Who's doing the raping? Don't ask 'Law & Order SVU' appeared first on WND.
Two questions:
1. Did the testimony of DOJ Inspector General Micheal Horowitz before the Senate Judiciary Committee Dec. 11 about his investigation of the FBI exonerate the FBI?
2. How does the Horowitz testimony affect the House impeachment of Trump?
Did you watch the testimony? Did you watch and listen to the media and former FBI Director James Comey prior to the Horowitz testimony? Comey and the mainstream media continually claimed that the IG report exonerated the actions of Comey and the FBI. As per the testimony of Horowitz, the report does not do that at all.
Horowitz discussed many items. These five are the heart of his observations:
1. The original start to the investigation of Trump personnel in 2016 was justified by a low threshold of evidence as established by FBI policy.
2. The FISA request and renewals included 17 errors that could be considered criminal actions as authorized by the director of the FBI and his staff. The dossier produced by Michael Steele was never explained to the FISA court as being produced as political intelligence by Nellie Ohr of Fusion GPS, paid by the Democratic Party and fed to the FBI through her husband, Bruce Ohr, an official at the agency. In addition, bad actors at the FBI fabricated and altered evidence.
3. The FBI never explained to Donald Trump that personnel on his campaign were under investigation, nor that his campaign could have been infiltrated by Russians operatives. Not once. Never. If the FBI thought that members of the Trump campaign could be Russian operatives, then why did they not inform him about it as per FBI protocol? Horowitz had no answer.
4. FBI sent personnel to different Trump campaign meetings with the objective of finding data about Trump and his campaign without notifying the candidate of that objective. Instead, FBI personnel (spies) posed as being there to provide defense information. Their objective was to find incriminating information about Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort.
5. No evidence of political bias influencing FBI actions was found. At the same time, no evidence that political bias did not influence FBI actions is available.
Does that sound like the IG exonerated Comey or the FBI? No, not in any way. But how did the mainstream media and Comey spin it for the last couple of days? As usual, the media were running interference for the deep state and Democrats.
So, how does this affect the impeachment process in the House?
The original claim of Democrats was that Trump colluded with Russians to affect the 2016 election. Rep. Adam Schiff claimed for three years that he had the evidence of that collusion and that the Mueller investigation would find the same. When that accusation was found to be false, the Democrats then looked for other reasons to try to remove Trump from office – including a whistleblower who allegedly worked for U.S. intelligence agencies.
Just as with the Steele dossier and the involvement of Bruce and Nellie Ohr with Fusion GPS, the pretense of wrongdoing by Trump on a call with the Ukrainian president was created by an intelligence operative. It was false. Just as with the Steele dossier, that whistleblower accusation about Trump was a fraudulent reason to investigate the phone call. Without that, there would be no investigation; therefore, no claims of obstruction of Congress or abuse of power.
What the IG report shows us is that the deep state creates data it calls facts/evidence. And that such false information is now being used by Democrats to try to remove a duly elected president. Just as with Mueller's indictments of several Americans, the crimes Trump supposedly committed have nothing to do with the original accusations by Democrats. No collusion with Russians. No quid pro quo. No abuse of office.
If Horowitz is correct about the FBI having adequate justification to "start" an investigation into the Trump personnel, then Trump certainly had adequate justification to investigate the admitted extortion of Ukraine by Joe Biden as per the video.
That leaves only one item: Did Trump obstruct Congress? Well, POTUS is an equal branch to Congress. POTUS is no more subservient to Congress than Congress is subservient to POTUS. And since the House did not ask the Supreme Court for a ruling on its requests, Trump was only acting as an equal branch. No obstruction.
James Comey, like Joe Biden, better not get too comfortable. What will more investigations find out about his actions? What will more investigations find out about the Bidens with Burisma and Ukraine?
The post 5 key takeaways of the Horowitz testimony appeared first on WND.
While many people want to know the motive behind a shootout at a Jersey City kosher grocery store, The New York Times conflated the fatal incident with a larger antisemitism narrative. We might not know the names or be allowed to view the social media accounts of the alleged shooters, but we know they hated Jews, according to a narrative-peddling corporate media.
An assailant involved in a prolonged firefight in Jersey City, N.J., that left six people dead, including one police officer, had published anti-Semitic and anti-police posts online and investigators believe the attack was motivated by those sentiments, a law enforcement official familiar with the case said on Wednesday.
This is how it now works. If you’re an antisemite involved in murder, you leave behind a “rambling manifesto,” either posted on social media or left on the backseat of your car.
It looks like the Times is on the inside track, same as they were when Judith Miller peddled neocon lies about Saddam Hussein.
Within hours, both the media and government were telling us the attack targeted Jews. Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, who is Jewish, said the suspects specifically targeted the grocery store. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted:
This tragically confirms that a growing pattern of violent anti-Semitism has now turned into a crisis for our nation. And now this threat has reached the doorstep of New York City.
— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) December 11, 2019
Statements issued by the state need a theatrical element in order to send the message to a largely indifferent public, so de Blasio announced the nation’s largest city is now locked in a “state of high alert.”
Although there is no credible or specific threat directed against New York City, I have directed the NYPD to assume a state of high alert.
Tonight, NYPD assets are being redeployed to protect key locations in the Jewish community. Tomorrow, we will announce additional measures.
— Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) December 11, 2019
On Wednesday, the shooters were supposedly identified.
BREAKING: Gunmen who stormed kosher store in Jersey City identified as David Anderson and Francine Graham. Anderson was a follower of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement. There were postings connected to Anderson's social page with anti-police and anti-Jewish writings – WNBC
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 11, 2019
David Anderson is supposedly a member of the “Black Hebrew Israelite” movement.
The Black Jew aspect of this story is an interesting side note. Anthropologist James E. Landing, in his book Black Judaism: Story of an American Movement, writes that Jews and Christians reject the assertion Blacks were the original Hebrew Jews.
Black Judaism is … a form of institutionalized (congregational) religious expression in which black persons identify themselves as Jews, Israelites, or Hebrews … in a manner that seems unacceptable to the “whites” of the world’s Jewish community, primarily because Jews take issue with the various justifications set forth by Black Jews in establishing this identity. Thus “Black Judaism,” as defined here, stands distinctly apart from “black Judaism,” or that Judaic expression found among black persons that would be acceptable to the world’s Jewish community, such as conversion or birth from a recognized Jewish mother. “Black Judaism” has been a social movement; “black Judaism” has been an isolated social phenomenon.
This “extremist fringe of the Hebrew Israelite movement” was highlighted by the Southern Poverty Law Center as racist and supremacist. “Around the country, thousands of men and women have joined black supremacist groups on the extremist fringe of the Hebrew Israelite movement, a black nationalist theology that dates back to the 19th century,” the SPLC wrote more than a decade ago.
Its doctrine asserts that African Americans are God’s true chosen people because they, not the people known to the world today as Jews, are the real descendants of the Hebrews of the Bible. Although most Hebrew Israelites are neither explicitly racist nor anti-Semitic and do not advocate violence, there is a rising extremist sector within the Hebrew Israelite movement whose adherents believe that Jews are devilish impostors and who openly condemn whites as evil personified, deserving only death or slavery.
The SPLC characterizes the movement as “the reversed-color mirror image of the Christian Identity theology embraced by many white supremacists, which holds that mainstream Jews are the descendants of Satan and that white people are the chosen ones, divinely endowed by God with superior status over ‘mud people,’ believers’ term for non-white individuals.”
African Hebrew Israelites emigrated to Israel in the 1960s where they endure racism to this day, not only by Jewish citizens but also the “apartheid” government (if Israel were truly an apartheid nation, it would establish Bantustans for Palestinians instead of engaging in slow-motion ethnic cleansing and the wholesale theft of Palestinian land).
Black Hebrews, according to Haaretz, are “in appalling fashion… still viewed by some Israelis as outsiders to be scorned. They are regularly referred to as kushim—a racial slur for black people—on the street, in the Hebrew press, and even by government representatives who clearly should know better.”
Last November, the FBI, with the avid assistance of the Anti-Defamation League, reported an increase in “hate crimes” against Jews following the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. CBS News reported:
Anti-Semitic crime spiked in New York City, home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel, in the weeks leading up to the Pittsburgh massacre, CBS News reported last week. There were 31 anti-Semitic hate crimes reported in the first 28 days of October in the city, compared to 9 for the same period in 2017, a New York Police Department spokesman said. The Anti-Defamation League also released a report that found social media harassment targeting Jewish Americans increased around the 2018 midterm elections and two-thirds of those online attacks were from people, not bots.
Notice how the corporate media conflates physical violence against Jews with politically incorrect thought crime posted on social media.
The FBI says it will launch training for law enforcement officers on how to identify hate crimes and report the data to the federal government. The Department of Justice also launched a new hate crimes web site which has information for law enforcement about reporting hate incidents.
In August, the FBI said it will go after “white supremacists” and others involved in the dissemination of “conspiracy theories” on social media and the internet. The FBI states “individuals’ belief in hoaxes and conspiracy theories led to or could have led to violence. They included the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the Pizzagate conspiracy, and the QAnon conspiracy,” Business Insider summarizes.
In the bizarro world of staged and exploitable political events and a 24/7 stream of propaganda, timing is everything. Thus, President Trump will today sign an executive order “to interpret Judaism as a nationality and not just a religion, a move that the Trump administration believes will fight what they perceive as anti-Semitism on college campuses, a White House official said,” according to CNN.
It’s an order that would allow Trump to take further steps to combat anti-Israel sentiments and divestment movements on college campuses by requiring colleges and universities to treat those movements as discriminatory in order to keep their funding.
Trump will use the “federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 that requires educational institutions receiving federal funding to not discriminate based on national origin, according to senior administration officials.”
Trump and his coterie of Israel-first neocons will further erode a seriously eroded First Amendment. They will force universities to single out and punish student Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists, thus violating a key principle of the Bill of Rights (now pretty much reduced to a doormat).
In Koontz v. Watson, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects the right to participate in a boycott. “Broadly speaking, the court’s decision in this case is likelier to be cheered by those on the left, where most of the energy behind boycotts of Israel emanate, and to be jeered by the Republicans and conservative Democrats who’ve lately pressed ahead with multiple efforts to legislate against economic boycotts of Israel,” explains Conor Friedersdorf, writing for The Atlantic.
The Jersey City shooting will claim its place in the expanding antisemitic threat narrative. BDS poses direct economic harm to Israel, so it must be equated with hatred, antisemitism, the Holocaust, and marching Nazis (and now Black Hebrews).
Likewise any principled criticism of Israel, of its ethnic cleansing, political malfeasance, assassinations, illegal bombing raids against neighbors, the murder of medics and journalists, and its ongoing and largely successful effort to outlaw critics and undermine their natural right to speak their minds.
I’m loving The Hated One – that’s the name of this YouTuber who makes these highly-intelligent videos with his unmistakably Slavic voiceover.
In this video, he shows how Chinese authoritarianism poses an existential threat to Western values via the large corporations that sacrifice those values in order to chase profits. He says, “If China’s power remains unchallenged, it will unrecognizably transform the future of human rights…
“China’s biggest export is censorship and it’s changing your everyday life. The way you enjoy video games, wear clothing or watch sports events is being shaped by the influence of the Chinese government.
“The Communist Party is able to use economic blackmail to coerce US companies to act as their political proxies. The stories of the NBA and [the video game company] Activision Blizzard are not anomalies, they are a window into the future, where China dictates corporate policies.”
The enormity of the Chinese population is helping to drive this shift. The entire Asia-Pacific region, which also includes the big gaming economies of Japan and South Korea makes up only 12% of Activision Blizzard’s total revenue, with the majority of its revenue still coming from Western gamers, primarily in North America, which currently makes up 55% of the market. However, the population of Chinese gamers is growing rapidly and is forecasted to reach 354 million by 2023, which is larger than the entire population of the United States.
China has by far the single biggest e-commerce market, with almost $2 trillion in sales; nearly 4 times greater than the United States’ and China has the world’s largest Internet population of over 700 million users.
“Companies that can’t resist Chinese revenue streams can choose to censor themselves or be denied access to China, altogether. This is a matter of pure corporate choice. Nobody’s forcing companies into China…
“Many don’t realize that it’s not just their integrity they are trading for profits. Placating Chinese censors legitimizes the country’s authoritarian regime that holds one million Muslims in indoctrination camps and subjects its population to atrocious surveillance and human rights abuses.
“Chinese censorship doesn’t just stay confined within the Chinese borders. As more and more corporations chase profits in Chinese markets, they find themselves blackmailed into complying with Chinese rules even outside of China’s jurisdiction. The latest NBA controversy is the loudest example of this reality.”
He recounts how a single tweet last October by Houston Rockets General Manager, Daryl Morey on his personal account in support of the Hong Kong anti-government protests was enough to cause the Chinese state-run broadcaster, CCTV to cancel all broadcasts of NBA pre-season games. CCTV issued a statement that freedom of speech doesn’t include “challenging a country’s national sovereignty.”
That tweet could result in the loss of 500 million viewers and it could cost the NBA $4 billion. “But it doesn’t end there,” he says.
“Even though the Houston Rockets and the NBA denounced the tweet, citing aims to bridge cultural divides, the Chinese Basketball Association suspended cooperation with Houston Rockets. The team’s merchandise was ordered to be pulled from several Nike stores in China and searches for all NBA sneakers on Alibaba and JV.com were removed from the results.
“This again put NBA into a lose-lose situation, as backlash hit back from the United States for pressing ahead with an exhibition game between Lakers and Brooklyn Nets in Shanghai.
The Chinese government is trying to suppress any speech that challenges the official narrative. Australian public-ethics professor Clive Hamilton whose publisher scrapped his upcoming book about China’s soft power out of concern about possible reprisals from Beijing says that what Western corporations are facing amounts to “economic blackmail.”
China is forcing foreign companies to accept their claims on territories in international disputes. Zara, Marriott and Delta Airlines had to update their websites with the “correct” version of the Chinese map that didn’t list Hong Kong and Taiwan as separate countries.
Apple, the iPhone maker removed the Taiwanese flag emoji from devices sold in Hong Kong and Macau and removed the HKmap.live app, used by Hong Kong citizens to stay safe during violent protests because Chinese state media claimed that protesters were using the app to attack the police.
He says, “In the United States, Apple portrays itself is the only company in Silicon Valley that values the privacy of their customers but in China, Apple banned all VPN apps from its App Store that could help Chinese users bypass the Great Firewall and avoid the potential abuse of their human rights by Chinese authorities.”
Last week, the latest results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) were released. These were based on tests taken in 2018 in reading, mathematics and science by a sample of students from each of the relatively wealthy OECD member countries as well as a range of other partner countries. Importantly, PISA researchers also surveyed participants on everything from their social media use to classroom climate.
The results have rightly produced a great deal of comment in Australia because they are further evidence of the country’s long-term decline in education. Mathematics and science have both continued their relentless downward drift and although reading held steady since the last round of testing in 2015, it has slid a long way since the first round in 2000.
In the context of Australia’s PISA results, it is tempting to look to the results from other countries for ideas on how the country can get out of this rut. Over the last decade or so, the region most cited by educationalists as an example to follow is the small Northern European nation of Finland. This time, the focus is shifting to its even smaller neighbour, Estonia.
Finland was the darling of the early rounds of PISA. Plane loads of bureaucrats and educationalists arrived to have a good look at its magic mix of herbs and spices. Unfortunately, the spectacles they were wearing had leaden ideological lenses and they only saw what they wanted to see: Finland does not test students. Finland has no academic selection. Schools are free to teach how and what they like. All of these propositions do not bear close scrutiny.
Using a weird form of policy time travel, commentators have even pointed to newly introduced initiatives such as phenomenon-based learning—similar to the project-based learning that’s fashionable in Australia—and implied that these initiatives are somehow associated with Finland’s past success. It is important to note that PISA is an assessment of 15-year-olds, i.e. the products of around 10 years of schooling. If we want to know the causes of Finland’s phenomenal success in 2006, we therefore need to look at what they were doing before 2000.
Taking a long view is particularly important in the case of Finland because its results have significantly declined since 2006. That means that those noughties junkets inevitably gathered information about some practices that are associated with this decline.
Yet despite Finland’s drop in performance, educationalists have stayed loyal, perhaps because it offers a more ideologically palatable vision than high performers from East Asia with their explicit teaching, memorisation and textbooks. And yet, the latest Finnish slide in all three PISA subjects has prompted a certain amount of repositioning. Estonia is now being hailed as the example to follow and the myth-making has begun. Estonia has scored highly since it first entered PISA, but nobody really knows why, least of all the Estonians. And so a blank canvas awaits an astute educationalist on the make. Is it because Estonians have a ‘growth mindset,’ i.e. a belief that success is more the result of hard work than talent? Probably not, given that other nations have similar growth mindset scores in the latest PISA tests, despite performing far worse. However, such caveats have never dampened PISA speculation fever in the past.
And isn’t this all a little absurd? There are almost as many people living in Sydney as there are in the whole of Finland. And education systems vary on many other factors relevant to educational performance that aren’t under the control of education policy-makers. A non-exhaustive list would include relative wealth, the cultural value placed on education, the economic returns to being well educated, the prevalence of home tutoring, the homogeneity of the population, and the urban versus rural population mix. Get all these factors pointing in the right direction and you can ace PISA with relatively mediocre schools. This is why it is worth looking at trends within systems rather than relative position in an international league table.
Poland is on a roughly upward trajectory and so it might be worth looking at their recent policy changes. England is also improving in mathematics and there are tentative signs of progress in reading, even if science scores seems to have declined. This is particularly interesting because the U.K. is involved in a natural experiment with its four education systems (one for each of the constituent nations) embarking on very different reforms.
Scotland and Wales have both listened to progressive educationalists and developed high-level and aspirational policies focused on interdisciplinary learning and so-called 21st-century skills. Scotland is a little further down this rabbit hole than Wales and the signs from PISA are not encouraging, particularly for a country that has traditionally prided itself on the superiority of its education system over other parts of the U.K. Its science scores have slid further than in England and its maths scores have slipped while England’s have risen. The good news is an improvement in reading on its test scores in 2012 and 2015, although they are only back to where they were in 2009.
England’s approach has been quite different to Scotland’s and has mixed school autonomy and accountability policies with a focus on curriculum content, while importing some ideas about maths teaching from East Asia. England has also reformed the teaching of early reading by establishing a phonics screening check—knowledge of the relationships between letters and sounds is a critical component of learning to read. However, it’s probably too early for the effects of these approaches to show up yet in the PISA tests.
So What Should Australia Do?
One area where Australia stands out from the rest of the OECD is, unfortunately, the climate of its schools. In the PISA survey, Australian students reported very high levels of bullying and classroom disruption. Why this is a particular problem in Australia should be a cause of national introspection, but it is unlikely to move the educational establishment which suffers from an ideological blockage in this area. Australian experts tend to reject any focus on behaviour as a kind of wrongthink. What sort of monster wants students to be managed and controlled? The answer, of course, is the other kids in the class who are being bullied or having their education disrupted.
If a teacher cannot teach due to a lack of classroom order then it doesn’t really matter what or how they are trying to teach. So this is the first issue Australia must address.
Despite being only a few years old, England’s reforms at least have the advantage of being consistent with what we know from other education research and from cognitive science. Curriculum content is extremely important. We understand new concepts by relating them to concepts we already know. Knowledge is what we think with. Having sufficient knowledge in our long-term memories is a workaround for the fact that we have a highly constrained working memory—the thoughts we are conscious of at any given time. By focusing on exactly what we want students to learn and in what sequence, we give them a superpower to understand new knowledge when they read it, to solve problems, and to think critically.
Unfortunately, education experts tend to talk in abstract terms, as if qualities such as critical thinking are generic, transferable skills that can be developed in the same way we might exercise a muscle. This is not the case. This head-in-the-clouds approach is as much a systemic as ideological issue. Unlike other professions, education experts are often completely removed from practice. Abstract and vague proposals will continue to be a problem as long as educationalists continue to have no idea how to actually teach reading to a five-year-old or the particle theory of matter to a 12-year-old.
Reforming Australia’s national curriculum to make it more knowledge-rich, as has happened in England, would be a step in the right direction. However, rewriting a document on a government server is not enough. What matters is the enacted curriculum. At present, teachers are expected to design all of their own lessons and source all of their own materials. It is as if we insisted that surgeons, as a sign of their professionalism, should design all of their own surgical procedures. Instead, we need to put highly quality, curriculum-aligned teaching resources into teachers’ hands.
Only once we have solved the problem of what to teach does the problem of how to teach become relevant. This is an easy question to resolve. We have known since at least the 1960s that the most effective teachers take an explicit approach to teaching academic subjects. Concepts are fully explained in a fairly didactic way and lessons are highly interactive to retain children’s attention and to allow the teacher to address any misconceptions quickly. Unfortunately, despite being favoured by the high-performing East Asian education systems, such teaching is deeply unfashionable in Australia. Anti-authoritarian social constructivist ideology favours approaches where students have to figure things out for themselves, perhaps as part of a group. This is why inquiry and project-based learning are the current buzzwords.
Although it is clear what needs to be done to fix things, the Australian government is running in a different direction. Instead of curriculum reform, the ‘Gonski 2.0’ proposals that education minister Dan Tehan is apparently doubling-down on are an odd mix of vague and abstract claims about critical thinking and an approach based on individual ‘learning progressions’ that sounds similar to one abandoned in England nearly a decade ago. The idea seems plausible—map out what progression looks like in different skills and then teach each child according to what stage they’ve reached in that journey. Unfortunately, such an approach does not take account of the fact that skills like writing are highly dependent on context and cannot be summarised neatly on some kind of scale. It is easier, for instance, for most students to write “two or more elaborated arguments” if they are writing about abolishing school uniform rather than, say, the impact of import tariffs on the Australian domestic market. Rubrics and learning progressions therefore incentivize teachers to reward children for demonstrating their skills in one of these simple contexts, rather than to encourage the children to grapple with more complex, challenging ideas. In addition, it does not address the practical challenge of teaching students individually in classrooms of 25+ and one teacher. Perhaps most fundamentally of all, it entrenches inequity. Instead of laying down a standard, teaching to that standard and then intervening when students struggle to reach it, teachers are expected to reconcile themselves to students simply being at different points on the progression.
To be fair, can we really expect politicians to solve these problems? England has been unusual in that it has had a series of politicians with an uncharacteristic interest in the detail of education reform. Waiting for an Australian equivalent to appear is not a strategy.
That’s why I will keep talking to other teachers. The most likely way out of this mess is from the ground up. If the government wants to help, it should focus on ways to release our potential.
Greg Ashman is a teacher and a Ph.D. student at the University of New South Wales. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not represent any institution. You can follow him on Twitter @greg_ashman
The post Australia’s PISA Shock appeared first on Quillette.
The long-awaited report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was released yesterday, in which the Obama appointee protected the swamp. The OIG’s release was quickly followed by contrary statements from the two top law enforcement officers in charge of investigating the ongoing coup d’état against the President.
US Attorney John Durham issued a release strongly disagreeing with Horowitz’ conclusion that the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation was not politically-motivated. Unlike Horowitz, Durham has the power to bring the coup plotters to justice, including the power to indict and impanel a grand jury and it’s expected he will do so within the next few months.
US Attorney General Bill Barr also criticized the FBI, stating:
“The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a US presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken…It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.”
In short, 1) the FBI abused the FISA process by relying on anti-Trump information from sources they knew were dubious, i.e., the Hillary Clinton campaign-financed “Pee-Pee Dossier”; 2) the FBI presented false information and withheld exculpatory evidence from the court.
For his part, FBI Director Christopher Wray issued a statement, saying “We will review the performance and conduct of certain FBI employees who were referenced in the Report’s recommendations…[and] will take appropriate disciplinary action where warranted.” Additionally, Wray has “ordered more than 40 corrective steps to address the Report’s recommendations.”
Here’s where it gets crazy. Horowitz’ report contained some very bizarre font artifacts whose significance is not yet fully understood. The term “Comey” does not exist in the OIG Report so technically, James Comey is not named in the report. However, the term “Corney”, clearly referring to the disgraced former FBI Director appears 140+ times!
The same phenomenon appears in the official May 17, 2017 DOJ document memorializing Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate alleged Trump-Russia collusion.
In this 2017 document, as well, the font has been altered and what appears to be “Comey” is actually “Corney”. Readers can confirm this for themselves by copying and pasting his name from these two DOJ documents into a blank document in their own computers. Very, very strange!
Another example of altered fonts appears in the footer of the final page 476 of yesterday’s OIG Report. It says, “To report allegations of waste, fraud, abuse, or misconduct regarding DOJ programs, employees, contractors, grants, or contracts please visit or call the DOJ OIG Hotline at oig.justice.gov/hotline or (800) 869-4499.”
When you copy and paste “oig.justice.gov/hotline” into a new document, it reads: “oiq.justice.qov/hotline”. The Gs are converted to Qs! Very strange, indeed! Try it yourself!
In the meantime, Adam Schiff was a no-show yesterday at the impeachment inquiry that he’d convened.
In this video, Douglas and Tyla Gabriel and Michael McKibben weigh in on the OIG Report, which Douglas equates to a reiteration of the useless, swampy Mueller Report.
The IG report was finally released on Monday, and boy was it a doozy. It detailed literally dozens of very serious errors committed by the FBI during their investigation of the Trump campaign, and Republican leaders are absolutely outraged about what this report has revealed. Apologists for the deep state are attempting to characterize these […]
The post Trump And Key Republicans Are Boiling With Anger Over The Revelations About The Deep State In The IG Report appeared first on The Most Important News.
Following the highly anticipated release of the DOJ Inspector General's so-called FISA report, Attorney General Bill Barr and his hand-picked US Attorney, John Durham, have issued statements disagreeing with the IG's conclusions.
The report found that while the FBI made serious errors investigating the Trump campaign, and relied heavily on the discredited Steele dossier, that the agency was ultimately justified in launching a counterintelligence operation, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane.
"The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken," Barr said in a statement released shortly after the FISA report.
"It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory," he continued. "Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration."
Barr added that the FISA report reveals a "clear abuse" of the surveillance court.
"In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source."
"The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory. While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process."
Statement from U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr:
— Trump War Room (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TrumpWarRoom) December 9, 2019
"The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken... pic.twitter.com/xVNfOJxzCP
Durham, meanwhile, said "Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened."
"I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff," Durham also said. "However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department. Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S."
Full Durham statement:
"I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff. However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department. Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened."
