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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Minimum Wage
Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: minimum wage | 1 Comment »
Cashless Society? UK ATM-Use Plummets During Pandemic | ZeroHedge
Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2021
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/cashless-society-uk-atm-use-plummets-during-pandemic
by Tyler Durden
According to the UK’s largest ATM network, “LINK is committed to protecting free access to cash for as long as consumers want it”.
The question is, how long will the desire for good old fashioned bank notes last?
As this infographic shows, the use of LINK cash machines was down year-on-year in every month of 2019, as noted by the company in their 2020 report:
“The impact of many consumers reducing their cash usage continues to be seen across the LINK network.The number of transactions fell by 12.9% between December 2018 and December 2019.”
You will find more infographics at Statista
Estimates for the life expectancy of the country’s ATMs will have to be put on hold for now though, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes that with the Covid-19 pandemic drastically changing the way we interact with businesses – at least temporarily, and in some ways potentially forever. The lockdown-related closures of premises with an ATM will naturally be remedied once the measures are once and for all retracted, as will the lack of need for cash due to businesses such as bars and restaurants being closed.
The inevitable death of some brick and mortar businesses and the migration of commerce online will be an effect which be be felt for much longer, however. Likewise, the importance of making transactions contactless during the pandemic has led to the increased presence of card readers in establishments which previously only accepted cash – another trend which is unlikely to be reversed once the crisis is over.
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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: BLOOMBERG NEWS WARNS: Food Price Inflation is About to Get Worse
Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2021
https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2021/02/bloomberg-news-warns-food-price.html
Federal Reserve chairman Jay “I don’t see any inflation threat” Powell mad money printing will result in his going down in history as the most irresponsible head of the Federal Reserve ever. Yes, Federal Reserve historians will view him as an even worse monetary policy man than G. William Miller.
There are signs that the food inflation that’s gripped the world over the past year, raising prices of everything from shredded cheese to peanut butter, is about to get worse, reports Bloomberg.
Now farmers — especially ones raising cattle, hogs and poultry — are getting squeezed by the highest corn and soybean prices in seven years. It’s lifted the costs of feeding their herds by 30% or more, according to Bloomberg. To stay profitable, producers including Tyson Foods Inc. are increasing prices, which will ripple through supply chains and show up in the coming months as higher price tags for beef, pork and chicken around the world.
The last time grains were this expensive was after the U.S. drought of 2012, and meat prices saw a dramatic run-up. Now, meat is again poised to become a driver of global food inflation, and part of the intensifying debate over the path of overall inflation and exactly what central banks and policymakers should do to aid economies still working to recover from the pandemic.
I expect grain prices will exceed the 2012 levels.And this:
–RW
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How To Make Housing Less Affordable | The Libertarian Institute
Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2021
As Ludwig von Mises taught us, government intervention begets more intervention. When politicians interfere in the market in order to “improve” outcomes, the intervention not only fails to improve the situation, but makes matters worse, and often creates still more problems.
In order to address these negative consequences, government imposes still more interventions, which exacerbates the problems further. And the cycle repeats.
It’s the classic case of the “seen vs. the unseen.” The government mandates may produce some affordable housing units, but the incentives of the regulations cause a far more significant, but harder to detect, decline in overall housing starts.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/how-to-make-housing-less-affordable/
Few things in life are more certain than the costs of something exploding whenever government embarks on programs to make them “affordable.”
It took just five years after the passage of the “Affordable Care Act” for insurance premiums on the private market to more than double.
In the 1940s, the GI Bill kicked off decades of federal government’s increasing involvement in making college more affordable. The result? Since 1985, college costs have soared by 538%, nearly five times overall inflation during that time.
And so it goes with housing. The highly regulated—and Federal Reserve fiat currency fueled—housing market has seen prices skyrocket well ahead of overall inflation, contributing to the average age of first time home buyers to increase from between 25 and 34 in 1981 to 44 today. Real estate price hikes are of course especially acute in large cities where housing regulations become more numerous and complex.
For instance, San Francisco has become the second most expensive city in the U.S. to live courtesy of strict property zoning restrictions that help make it unaffordable for the non-rich to live there. As reported by the Stanford Daily in 2018, San Francisco imposes a “rigid collection of ultra-restrictive zoning laws,” which, according to the Daily, have played an “indisputable and well-documented” role in the city’s housing crisis.
But to politicians, admitting failure of government efforts to make things more affordable is never an option. Instead, they insist on doubling down on government interventions.
The most recent evidence of this is a Feb. 11 guest column in USA Today co-authored by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro.
In the article, Castro tells us there is “good reason” for the Biden administration to declare “equity in housing a top priority.”
In addition to the current crisis of millions of people being behind on rent thanks to government shutdowns over the past year, Castro informs the reader that “we need to tackle the underlying housing crisis that left more than 1 million Americans without a permanent home even before the pandemic.”
As is virtually always the case, when a politician or bureaucrat says “we” need to address something, they mean the government.
In this case, Castro insists that “lawmakers have failed to adequately invest in affordable housing.”
“Adequate” is of course rarely defined by progressives urging to expand government programs. The federal government spent $51 billion on housing assistance programs in 2019, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. And that doesn’t include the myriad of state and local housing programs, which included more than 3,300 local public housing authorities that own about 1.2 million housing units across the nation, according to Urban Institute research.
To address the “crisis” in affordable housing, Castro continues, “we need to pair investments with policies such as a renter’s tax credit, universal housing vouchers, direct relief checks and full enforcement of the Fair Housing Act.”
While the renter’s tax credit would be new—and all tax credits should be welcome—the rest of Castro’s recommendations largely double down on government policies that make affordable housing more scarce rather than abundant.
Affordable housing programs typically involve either financial assistance to renters/buyers or zoning rules forcing developers to sell a certain percentage of their new units at below-market prices.
Such policies work to drive up housing prices and restrict supply.
Financial assistance to renters or buyers of housing artificially props up demand for housing. Such programs inject more money into the housing market, which drives up prices.
Meanwhile, affordable housing zoning requirements mandating that a percentage of units be sold at below-market prices discourage new development, restricting the supply of housing—which drives up prices.
Higher prices not only put housing out of reach for the poor, they also place undue financial strain on the middle class. In a study of low-income housing mandates in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2003 to 2007, economists Benjamin Powell and Edward Stringham found that new home construction fell by an average of 30 percent in the first year, resulting in an average 8 percent increase in housing prices.
More specifically, as reported in this 2016 Los Angeles Times article, “In a study looking at Southern California, Stringham and Powell found that housing starts in eight cities dropped off significantly after the inclusionary zoning went into effect. In the seven years before the law, over 28,000 new homes were built. In the seven years after? Only 11,000. Yes, 770 ‘affordable’ units were constructed, but what’s more important is the 17,000 homes that weren’t built at all, making the housing shortage more acute and pushing up prices.”
It’s the classic case of the “seen vs. the unseen.” The government mandates may produce some affordable housing units, but the incentives of the regulations cause a far more significant, but harder to detect, decline in overall housing starts.
Moreover, if such mandates don’t lower new housing starts, low income housing mandates prompt developers to raise prices on the remaining houses to make up for the lost revenue from the share of houses they are forced to sell or rent at below-market rates. Thus, the real impact of affordable housing policies is less, not more, affordable housing.
As Ludwig von Mises taught us, government intervention begets more intervention. When politicians interfere in the market in order to “improve” outcomes, the intervention not only fails to improve the situation, but makes matters worse, and often creates still more problems.
In order to address these negative consequences, government imposes still more interventions, which exacerbates the problems further. And the cycle repeats.
Such is the case time and again with government efforts to make goods or services more “affordable.”
The answer to the nation’s affordable housing problem doesn’t lie with still more government interference, but rather a removal of the government interventions causing the problems in the first place.
Bradley Thomas is creator of the website Erasethestate.com and author of the book “Tweeting Liberty: Libertarian Tweets to Smash Statists and Socialists.” He is a libertarian activist who enjoys researching and writing on the freedom philosophy and Austrian economics. Follow him on Twitter @erasestate.
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From “Event 201” to “Cyber Polygon”: The WEF’s Simulation of a Coming “Cyber Pandemic” – unlimitedhangout.com
Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2021
The WEF has been actively promoting and creating such systems and has most recently taken to calling its preferred model “stakeholder capitalism.” Though advertised as a more “inclusive” form of capitalism, stakeholder capitalism would essentially fuse the public and private sectors, creating a system much more like Mussolini’s corporatist style of fascism than anything else.
byJohnny VedmoreandbyWhitney Webb
Last year, the World Economic Forum teamed up with the Russian government and global banks to run a high-profile cyberattack simulation that targeted the financial industry, an actual event that would pave the way for a “reset” of the global economy. The simulation, named Cyber Polygon, may have been more than a typical planning exercise and bears similarities to the WEF-sponsored pandemic simulation Event 201 that briefly preceded the COVID-19 crisis.
On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum (WEF), along with Russia’s Sberbank and its cybersecurity subsidiary BI.ZONE announced that a new global cyberattack simulation would take place this coming July to instruct participants in “developing secure ecosystems” by simulating a supply-chain cyberattack similar to the recent SolarWinds hack that would “assess the cyber resilience” of the exercise’s participants. On the newly updated event website, the simulation, called Cyber Polygon 2021, ominously warns that, given the digitalization trends largely spurred by the COVID-19 crisis, “a single vulnerable link is enough to bring down the entire system, just like the domino effect,” adding that “a secure approach to digital development today will determine the future of humanity for decades to come.”
The exercise comes several months after the WEF, the “international organization for public-private cooperation” that counts the world’s richest elite among its members, formally announced its movement for a Great Reset, which would involve the coordinated transition to a Fourth Industrial Revolution global economy in which human workers become increasingly irrelevant. This revolution, including its biggest proponent, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, has previously presented a major problem for WEF members and member organizations in terms of what will happen to the masses of people left unemployed by the increasing automation and digitalization in the workplace.
New economic systems that are digitally based and either partnered with or run by central banks are a key part of the WEF’s Great Reset, and such systems would be part of the answer to controlling the masses of the recently unemployed. As others have noted, these digital monopolies, not just financial services, would allow those who control them to “turn off” a person’s money and access to services if that individual does not comply with certain laws, mandates and regulations.
The WEF has been actively promoting and creating such systems and has most recently taken to calling its preferred model “stakeholder capitalism.” Though advertised as a more “inclusive” form of capitalism, stakeholder capitalism would essentially fuse the public and private sectors, creating a system much more like Mussolini’s corporatist style of fascism than anything else.
Yet, to usher in this new and radically different system, the current corrupt system must somehow collapse in its entirety, and its replacement must be successfully marketed to the masses as somehow better than its predecessor. When the world’s most powerful people, such as members of the WEF, desire to make radical changes, crises conveniently emerge—whether a war, a plague, or economic collapse—that enable a “reset” of the system, which is frequently accompanied by a massive upward transfer of wealth.
In recent decades, such events have often been preceded by simulations that come thick and fast before the very event they were meant to “prevent” takes place. Recent examples include the 2020 US election and COVID-19. One of these, Event 201, was cohosted by the World Economic Forum in October 2019 and simulated a novel coronavirus pandemic that spreads around the world and causes major disruptions to the global economy—just a few weeks before the first case of COVID-19 appeared. Cyber Polygon 2021 is merely the latest such simulation, cosponsored by the World Economic Forum. The forum’s current agenda and its past track record of hosting prophetic simulations demands that the exercise be scrutinized.
Though Cyber Polygon 2021 is months off, it was preceded by Cyber Polygon 2020, a similar WEF-sponsored simulation that took place last July in which speakers warned of a coming deadly “pandemic” of cyberattacks that would largely target two economic sectors, healthcare and finance. Cyber Polygon 2020 was officially described as “international online training for raising global cyber resilience” and involved many of the world’s biggest tech companies and international authorities, from IBM to INTERPOL. There were also many surprising participants at the event, some of whom have been traditionally seen as opposed to Western imperial interests. For example, the person chosen to open the Cyber Polygon event was the prime minister of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Mishustin, and its main host, BI.ZONE, was a subsidiary of the Russian-government-controlled Sberbank. This suggests that the overused “Russian hacker” narrative may be coming to an end or will soon be switched out for another boogeyman more suitable in light of current political realities.
Aside from Mishustin, WEF executive director Klaus Schwab and former UK prime minister Tony Blair participated in the Cyber Polygon 2020 event, which is due to be repeated annually and bears many similarities to 2019’s Event 201. Rather than preparing for a potential medical pandemic, Cyber Polygon 2020 focused on preparing for a “cyberpandemic,” one that mainstream media outlets like the New Yorker claim is “already underway.” Given the WEF’s recent simulations, powerful billionaire business owners and bankers appear to be poised to use both physical and digital pandemics to reform our societies according to their own design and for their own benefit.
The Architects of Cyber Polygon
See the rest here.
Author Johnny Vedmore
Johnny Vedmore is a completely independent investigative journalist and musician from Cardiff, Wales. His work aims to expose the powerful people who are overlooked by other journalists and bring new information to his readers. If you require help, or have a tip for Johnny, then get in touch via johnnyvedmore.com or by reaching out to johnnyvedmore@gmail.com
Author Whitney Webb
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Cyber Pandemic, Cyber Polygon, Event 201, Great Reset, Sberbank, WEF | Leave a Comment »
Biden, commander of the “true believers”, by Thierry Meyssan
Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2021
As the United States moves resolutely towards civil war, President Joe Biden is relying on left-wing believers of different faiths. He sees Donald Trump’s voters as people who have been abused in their faith and whom he must bring back to the true path. By manipulating religions, the Democratic Party is dividing the country, not between different faiths, but between ways of thinking about faith. President Biden’s ambition is to unite all his fellow citizens under his own magisterium in order to continue along the path laid out by Barack Obama. In fact, far from appeasing, he is unwillingly radicalizing the political debate.
https://www.voltairenet.org/article212224.html
by Thierry Meyssan
I have previously presented the supporters of woke culture in the US as “Godless Puritans”. This is a shortcut to point out that many of them do not believe in God. I would like to correct this picture by dealing here with the imprint of believers within the American left. This is a subject that is very little discussed in the USA [1] and totally ignored in Europe, where the US overlord always erases the outrageous aspects of religions.
First of all, it is necessary to set the context:
The United States would have been founded by a Puritan sect, the Pilgrim Fathers, who came in the 17th century on board the Mayflower. They left England, crossed the Atlantic, found an almost empty continent where they brought their demand for purity and built a “City on the Hill” that illuminated the world. In fact today, the United States is the champion of religious freedom in the world, but not of freedom of conscience: the testimony of a renegade against his former church or sect is not admissible in a court of law.
During the Cold War, President Eisenhower positioned the United States as the champion of Faith in the face of the Soviets’ “Godless Communism” [2]. He distributed “Christian” propaganda to all his soldiers and set up an ecumenical prayer group in the Pentagon, now known as “The Family” [3]. He spread it throughout the Western world. All the presidents of the Chiefs of Staff Committee have belonged and still belong to it, as well as many foreign heads of state or government.
Finally, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Americans have been detaching themselves from their Churches, and 17% of them claim to be agnostic, and sometimes even atheist. As for the number of believers who do not claim to be affiliated to a particular church, it is constantly increasing. Political discourse is no longer directed only at believers of all Christian denominations, or even at believers of all religions, but also at non-believers.
This development was first expressed at the Democratic Party Convention in 2012. While many workshops were organised by religious groups, the texts presented and adopted no longer mentioned God. Not because the party no longer had an overwhelming majority of believers, but because they wanted to continue to speak to everyone and the US people had changed.
In the 2004 presidential election, the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, is a Catholic who had hesitated to become a priest. He believes he can count on the electorate of his religious community, but is unable to do so. Left-wing Catholics are not yet organised. His speech on abortion shocked the future Cardinal Burke, who asked the Episcopal Conference to refuse him the Eucharist. Finally, Pope Benedict XVI would evoke, after his defeat at the hands of George W. Bush, his de facto excommunication.
In 2008, the election of Democrat Barack Obama, which was presented as a victory for black organisations, was in reality an even greater victory for left-wing, predominantly white Christians. His chief of staff, John Podesta, being a Catholic activist, had gathered all the chapels of left-wing Christians, Protestant and Catholic, to support his accession to the White House.
Similarly, the passage of the law on the obligation for workers to take out health insurance with a private company is above all a victory of left-wing Christians against those on the right. The former intended to follow the precepts of their religion, while the latter wanted to save their values. Note that Jesus the Nazarene always refused to position himself on these grounds, but taught by his example. Note also that Barack Obama’s legislative choice was not political. He never cared about what his fellow citizens wanted.
Barack Obama has a great religious culture, not only Christian but also Muslim. Not much is known about his faith, but he has always appeared to be very respectful of all forms of religion. This has long allowed him to appear wise and to unite believers from all walks of life behind his name.
He reformed the White House Office for Faith-based Initiatives created by his predecessor. He made sure that federal subsidies would not be used for any particular faith. He placed the young Joshua DuBois there to coordinate the left-wing believers and added a council composed of their leading figures: Reverend Traci Blackmon, who was committed to health care for all; Reverend Jennifer Butler, founder of Faith in Public Life; Reverend Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and spiritual advisor to the President; Reverend Michael McBride, committed to fighting guns and police violence against blacks; best-selling author Rachel Held Evans, author of A Year of Biblical Femininity: How a liberated woman found herself sitting on her roof, covering her head and calling her husband master; Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. He was also appointed U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom; Harry Knox, leader of the Human Rights Campaign’s Religion and Faith Program and then director of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, leader of gay rights and the fight for abortion rights; Rami Nashashibi, Director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network. He campaigned to distinguish Muslims from terrorists after the 9/11 attacks.
All of these personalities actively participated last year in the debates on the statues to be toppled or in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
During her presidential campaign Hillary Clinton spoke as little as possible about her personal faith. She spoke a lot to believers, especially evangelicals. With a discourse on the precepts of Christianity which would impose to confess the original sin of slavery and to receive all migrants, she did not succeed in convincing them. It was only after her electoral defeat that she announced that she was thinking of becoming a Methodist pastor.
On the contrary, her rival, Donald Trump, who does not seem to have any religious preoccupation, managed to rally to him the majority of right-wing Christians and particularly white Evangelicals. He presented himself to them not as a believer, but as a “guy who was going to get the job done” and save the values that left-wing Christians were neglecting. Right-wing Christians appreciated his sincerity and saw him as a miscreant sent by God to save America.
During Obama’s term, American left-wing believers felt – rightly or wrongly – that Pope Francis was speaking to them in particular. Indeed, they interpreted his first apostolic letter, Evangelii gaudium (2013), which invites the faithful to evangelise the world, as a justification for their political commitment, since it deals with “the preferential option for the poor”. However, contrary to what left-wing believers in the United States think, the Catholic Church has never taught to prefer some men to others. Especially left-wing believers have received the encyclical Laudato si’ (2015), devoted to environmental issues, as a support for their environmental activism. On the whole, all confessions combined, they now consider Pope Francis as the most legitimate religious leader.
Joe Biden is the second President of the United States to be Catholic after John Kennedy. But while Kennedy had to prove that he was independent and would not accept an injunction from a foreign pope, Biden tried by all means to be worshipped by a pope adulated by his constituents. During his election campaign, he aired an advertising clip in which he explains what he owes to his faith. When he lost his wife and daughter in an accident, and then one of his sons to cancer, it allowed him to overcome his grief and keep hope.
At the beginning of this article, I mentioned the Pentagon prayer group. Since its creation by General Eisenhower, it has organized a prayer lunch with the current President of the United States every year at the beginning of February. Everyone was waiting for President Biden’s speech. It lasted 4 minutes by video conference. The speaker condemned “political extremism” (an allusion to his predecessor) and celebrated fraternity among “Americans”.
For the new president, the Americans are “good”, as he proclaimed at the inauguration ceremony. The Democratic Party seeks Social Justice in the tradition of the “Social Gospel” of the 1920s. All Americans should have spontaneously followed him. Unfortunately, right-wing believers were blinded by Donald Trump; a man without religion. They voted for this billionaire without realizing that they were betraying their faith. That is why it is his duty to open their eyes and make them happy in spite of themselves.
President Biden has never tried to understand why right-wing believers voted for Trump. He has always considered this fact to be an intellectual anomaly. So today he is trying to equate the group QAnon with a delusional sect that imagines Satan everywhere in Washington. In each of his statements, he tries to present the Trump presidency as a mistake, a sinister parenthesis with no future.
For left-wing believers, the only thing that matters are the decisions taken since 20 January in favour of immigrants, women, sexual minorities, and against the violation of the sacred spaces of Indian minorities.
We are witnessing a vast misunderstanding. Left-wing believers think that they should impose their political beliefs in the name of God, while the Democratic Party thinks that it should not think politically, but seduce its voters. The separation of church and state still exists institutionally, but not in daily practice. The problem has shifted: it is no longer between religions, but between different conceptions of Faith.
Saint Bernard, who preached the Second Crusade, recognised that “Hell is paved with good intentions”. This is exactly what is happening here: left-wing believers are behaving like fanatics. They talk about national unity, but have launched a witch hunt, compared to which McCarthy’s witch hunt was no big deal. They dismissed hundreds of advisers in the Pentagon; they have tried to remove an elected representative from the House of Representatives because she questions the official version of the 9/11 attacks; or they want to arrest all the members of the QAnon movement. They don’t pacify the United States after the capture of the Capitol, but push it into civil war.Thierry Meyssan Translation
Roger Lagassé
[1] American Prophets: The Religious Roots of Progressive Politics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of the Country, Jack Jenkins, HaperOne (2020.
[2] Modern Viking: the story of Abraham Vereide, pioneer in christian leadership, Norman Grubb, Zondervan (1961). Military chaplains: From religious military to a military religion, Harvey G. Cox, JR, Abingdon Press (1969). Washington: christians in the corridors of power, James C. Hefley & Edward E. Plowman, Tyndale & Coverdale (1975).
[3] The Family: the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American Power, Jeff Sharlet, HarperCollins (2008).
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Catholic, faith, Hillary Clinton Email Probe, The Family, woke culture | Leave a Comment »
America’s Out Of Control Teens Are On A Historic Crime Spree
Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2021
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/americas-out-of-control-teens-are-on-a-historic-crime-spree/
Young people are running wild all over the country, and nobody seems to be able to come up with a solution to slow down the violence. Following the tragic death of George Floyd, teens were disproportionally involved in the rioting, looting and arson that erupted in major cities throughout the nation for the remainder of 2020. And sometimes they would just take out their frustrations on random people on the street. But in addition to violence that was spurred by social movements, most of our urban areas also experienced dramatic spikes in their murder rates. In fact, one recently released report found that murder rates rose by an average of 30 percent in 34 of our largest cities…
THE HOMICIDE RATE across 34 American cities increased by 30% on average during 2020, according to experts, as the U.S. reeled from the coronavirus pandemic and widespread protests against police brutality.
The newly released report from the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice found that homicides rose in 29 of the 34 cities studied and that the three largest cities in the sample – New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – accounted for 40% of the additional homicide victims in 2020.
That 30 percent average increase was the biggest one year spike ever recorded, and way too much of the time these murders are being committed by Americans under the age of 20.
For example, two Milwaukee teens were just charged with the rape and murder of a young woman named Ee Lee…
Kamare Lewis, 17, and Kevin Spencer, 15 each face one count of first-degree intentional homicide, as party to a crime and one count of first-degree sexual assault (great bodily harm), as party to a crime.
Lee was found Sept. 16, 2020 in Washington Park by “bystanders,” still breathing but unconscious, severely beaten and left for dead. She was undressed below the waist, indicating sexual assault. She suffered severe contusions to the face/head. A hospital examination confirmed the sex assault.
Lee later died from her injuries on September 19th.
But it wasn’t just Lewis and Spencer that were involved in this brutal attack. In fact, we are being told that a total of 11 youths were seen leaving the area…
Video from the Washington Park Library showed 11 people leaving the park — six in a group on bicycles; five in a separate group, some on bikes and others on foot.
Sadly, young girls are also murdering one another.
Here is an example of one young girl stabbing another young girl to death…
Lyric D. Stewart, 14, of Rock Island, was stabbed to death Dec. 30 during a fight in the 1200 block of 11th Street.
Jimena Jinez, 18, also of Rock Island, was arrested in the early morning of Dec. 31, 2020, and charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing death. She has been in custody in Rock Island County Jail since then, and is being held on $1.5 million bond.
Our nation is degenerating right in front of our eyes, and it is only going to get worse.
In Jacksonville, Florida a group of teens recently ganged up to kill three people, including a very young mother…
In the first time since a Washington Heights triple-murder, the family of one of the victims, Sara Urriola, is speaking out. The Jacksonville mother was murdered by four suspected teens at the Calloway Cove apartments.
“We have lost a loving, caring, wife, mother, daughter, niece, cousin, sister, aunt, best-friend and friend today. Sara loved her friends and family very much and the friends that knew her know she was all about the well-being of her family. She loved to dance, dress up, and enjoyed all family events,” the family said in a statement to Action News Jax.
How twisted do you have to be in order to do something like that?
Horrific murders like this happen day after day, but they barely make a blip on the news anymore because they have become so common.
Meanwhile, carjackings are on the rise all over the nation as well.
According to NPR, the number of carjackings in Minneapolis more than tripled last year…
In Minneapolis, for example, there were 405 carjackings last year — more than triple the number in 2019. The suspects arrested were often juveniles between the ages of 11 and 17.
Other cities saw huge increases too, including New Orleans; Kansas City, Mo.; Louisville, Ky.; and Washington, D.C. Last year in Chicago, there were 1,400 carjackings.
Speaking of Chicago, there are certain parts of the city that now resemble a war zone. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, there is a good chance that a kid could stick a gun in your face and demand the keys to your vehicle.
What would you do if this happened to you?…
On a sunny January afternoon, Amy Blumenthal drove to her Chicago home after picking up groceries. She turned off a street and into an alley, backed her car into her garage and started unloading the bags.
“All of a sudden, I heard something and looked up and there was a boy with a COVID mask on holding a gun just inches from my face,” Blumenthal says. He demanded she hand over her keys. Another young male, also wearing a mask, told her to hurry up.
Amy Blumenthal was not prepared to face this sort of a scenario.
She eventually pulled herself together enough to give her two attackers the car keys, and she was later totally shocked to find out that they were both under 16 years of age…
In shock, she fumbled as she complied — they let her keep her house keys. Then they jumped in the car and sped off. Chicago police officers noticed their erratic driving, gave chase and the two were quickly arrested after crashing the vehicle into a building.
The robbery had left her shaken, but learning more about who they were left her stunned: They were just 15 and 13 years old.
Thanks to decades of running in the wrong direction, this is what our country has become.
We have become a completely and utterly lawless nation from the very top to the very bottom, and yet we continue to refuse to see the error of our ways.
So the fabric of our society will continue to unravel, and the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted on a daily basis will continue to disappear.
***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael Snyder and my brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book, I have written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned) By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe. I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook, Twitter and Parler, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Homicide rates, Out Of Control Teens, society | Leave a Comment »
A Note on the Second Amendment – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2021
And neither does the federal government have any authority whatsoever under the Constitution to establish or mandate gun-free zones, background checks, psychological evaluations, training courses, waiting periods, trigger locks, gun purchase limits and age restrictions, gun-barrel lengths, concealed weapons laws, licensing of gun dealers, gun-owner databases, gun licensing, gun registration, or gun insurance.
Too bad that Republicans in Congress support most of these things, otherwise most federal gun laws would have been repealed when Republicans had absolute control of the government for over four years under George W. Bush and for two years under Donald Trump.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/02/laurence-m-vance/a-note-on-the-second-amendment/
On January 4, 2020, on just the second day of the 117th Congress, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), introduced the Sabika Sheikh Firearm Licensing and Registration Act (H.R.127) “to provide for the licensing of firearm and ammunition possession and the registration of firearms, and to prohibit the possession of certain ammunition.” The bill is named after a Pakistani Muslim exchange student who was shot to death in a Santa Fe, Texas, high school in 2018, although seven other students and two teachers were murdered as well.
So far the bill has no cosponsors. That’s a good thing because this is one of the most evil bills ever introduced in Congress (and members of Congress have introduced some utterly evil bills over the years).
Under this bill, “the Attorney General, through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, shall establish a system for licensing the possession of firearms or ammunition in the United States, and for the registration with the Bureau of each firearm present in the United States.”
Here is the registration provision:
Under the firearm registration system, the owner of a firearm shall transmit to the Bureau—(A) the make, model, and serial number of the firearm, the identity of the owner of the firearm, the date the firearm was acquired by the owner, and where the firearm is or will be stored; and (B) a notice specifying the identity of any person to whom, and any period of time during which, the firearm will be loaned to the person.
The Attorney General shall establish and maintain a database of all firearms registered pursuant to this subsection. The Attorney General shall make the contents of the database accessible to all members of the public, all Federal, State, and local law enforcement authorities, all branches of the United States Armed Forces, and all State and local governments, as defined by the Bureau.
Here is the licensing provision:
Except as otherwise provided in this subsection, the Attorney General shall issue to an individual a license to possess a firearm and ammunition if the individual—(i) has attained 21 years of age; (ii) after applying for the license—
(I) undergoes a criminal background check conducted by the national instant criminal background check system established under section 103 of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, and the check does not indicate that possession of a firearm by the individual would violate subsection (g) or (n) of section 922 or State law;
(II) undergoes a psychological evaluation conducted in accordance with paragraph (2), and the evaluation does not indicate that the individual is psychologically unsuited to possess a firearm; and
(III) successfully completes a training course, certified by the Attorney General, in the use, safety, and storage of firearms, that includes at least 24 hours of training; and
(iii) demonstrates that, on issuance of the license, the individual will have in effect an insurance policy issued under subsection (d).
The insurance policy is issued by the Attorney General and costs $800.
It is surprising that Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) didn’t mention this bill during his appearance on the Laura Ingraham show late last month. According to his congressional website:
A strong supporter of the Second Amendment, Congressman Scalise has sponsored and cosponsored legislation protecting citizens’ right to keep and bear arms. The ability of law abiding citizens to bear arms and the right to self-defense is a fundamental constitutional right of every law-abiding American. Congressman Scalise supports law-abiding citizens’ ability to purchase firearms and national reciprocity for concealed carry permit holders. Congressman Scalise’s pro-gun stance has earned him an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association. A member of the Congressional Second Amendment Task Force, Congressman Scalise will continue fighting to protect every citizen’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Likewise, there is no mention of this bill Scalise’s website, not under press releases, and not even under the Second Amendment section.
In his appearance on Ingraham’s show just hours after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a news conference where she engaged in “deliberately scaring people to distract from Biden’s leftist, job-killing agenda—and to set the stage for a Democrat gun grab,” Scalise said:
Look, in the last eight days, president Biden’s probably killed over a million American jobs with these executive orders he did on everything from banning leases—we see that in South Louisiana, the damage it will do to hardworking jobs, to Keystone, to the Paris accord that’s going to kill manufacturing in America.
That’s what they’ve done in the policy, and so look, if there was a real, credible threat that she knew of, no matter who it is, a member of Congress or somebody else, go to the authorities with that. And she didn’t do that. She goes to the press, which tells you what she is really trying to do is scare people, create distractions.
Another thing they’re trying to do, Laura, is take away our Second Amendment rights. Make no doubt—they’re going to be coming sometime this year with a bill to take away our second amendment rights. So they’re building this predicate that, “Oh, my God, everybody better be afraid of somebody with a gun,” and that’s going to be their attempt to then go take away the guns.
As pointed out above, that bill has already been introduced.
I note also that Scalise twice used the expression “Second Amendment rights.” Scalise, like the vast majority of Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and conservatives in Congress, the media, and the general public, misconstrue the nature of the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment was added to the Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution), which the requisite number of states approved on December 15, 1791. The twenty-seven words of the Second Amendment read: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” It does not read: “The people shall have the right to keep and bear arms.”
The Second Amendment confers no positive right. It recognizes a pre-existing right. It is an additional limitation on federal power to infringe upon the right of the people to bear arms aside from the fact that no authority is granted to the federal government in its limited, enumerated powers to infringe upon this right in the first place.
Even if the Second Amendment only applied to the states’ ability to maintain militias—as many liberals and progressives say—or as subject to some other interpretation that limits its language to militias, that would still not affect Americans’ natural right to keep and bear arms. And even if the Second Amendment didn’t exist, Americans would still have the natural right to keep and bear arms.
This is because there is no authority granted to the federal government by the Constitution to ban, regulate, or otherwise infringe upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Therefore, the federal government has no authority whatsoever under the Constitution to ban or regulate any type of handgun, shotgun, or rifle; large-capacity magazine; bump stock; ammunition; assault weapon; automatic weapon; machine gun, grenade, or bazooka.
And neither does the federal government have any authority whatsoever under the Constitution to establish or mandate gun-free zones, background checks, psychological evaluations, training courses, waiting periods, trigger locks, gun purchase limits and age restrictions, gun-barrel lengths, concealed weapons laws, licensing of gun dealers, gun-owner databases, gun licensing, gun registration, or gun insurance.
Too bad that Republicans in Congress support most of these things, otherwise most federal gun laws would have been repealed when Republicans had absolute control of the government for over four years under George W. Bush and for two years under Donald Trump.
The Best of Laurence M. Vance Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom; War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism; War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy; King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, and many other books. His newest books are Free Trade or Protectionism? and The Free Society.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Constitution, Sabika Sheikh Firearm Licensing and Registration Act, Second Amendment | Leave a Comment »
Now even classical music is racist – spiked
Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2021
A scandal involving an obscure music journal confirms that the crusade against whiteness is out of control.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/16/now-even-classical-music-is-racist/
In a world where, sooner or later, everything is racialised, it was only a matter of time before classical music became a target of the crusade against whiteness. So I wasn’t particularly shocked when I read this headline in the New York Times: ‘Obscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles over Race and Free Speech.’
The obscure musicology journal in question is the tiny Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The journal’s editor, Timothy Jackson, a music-theory professor at the University of North Texas, is under fire for his hard-hitting response to the claim that the interwar Austrian-Jewish composer and theorist Heinrich Schenker personified the white racist attitudes that dominate classical music. Jackson’s university has launched an investigation into his behaviour, barred him from editing the journal, and suspended funding for the Schenker Center, which he runs.
Jackson has been vilified by the Twittermob and ostracised by his colleagues. Graduates who have previously worked with him are now worried that their association with this fallen professor could harm their career prospects. How did this all happen?
The story of the demise of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies began in the autumn of 2019, when Philip Ewell, a black music-theory professor, gave a talk at the Society for Music Theory in Columbus, Ohio. Ewell takes the view that classical music is compromised by its whiteness.
For Ewell, white supremacy is evident in the teaching, playing and interpretation of classical music. From this perspective, where everything is seen to involve white racism, all the values celebrated in classical music are expressions of whiteness; they are all coded in a ‘white racial frame’, says Ewell. So, the reason Beethoven enjoys such high esteem among lovers of classical music is not because of his genius but because, as Ewell explains, he ‘has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for 200 years’.
Ewell’s obsession with the invisible power of whiteness is matched only by his philistinism – he describes Beethoven as an ‘above average composer’. Evidently, the academic members of the Society for Music Theory enjoy being guilt-tripped about their privilege because they responded to Ewell’s address with a standing ovation. The society – whose members are overwhelmingly white – loved what they heard. Later, its executive board declared that ‘we humbly acknowledge that we have much work to do to dismantle the whiteness and systemic racism that deeply shape our discipline’.
In his address, Ewell drew attention to virulent racist comments made by Schenker. Like many Germanophile artists and intellectuals of his time – the late 19th and early 20th centuries – Schenker regarded other people with contempt. He dismissed the ‘filthy’ French, English and Italians as ‘inferior races’, regarded Slavs as ‘half animals’, and claimed that Africans had a ‘cannibal spirit’.
If all that Ewell had said was that Schenker personified the cultural and racial hatreds of his society at the time he was alive, few would have disagreed. However, he went a step further and implied that Schenker’s musical theory was also infused with a racist tone. He claimed that Schenker carried his racist views into his work, as allegedly expressed in his belief in the ‘inequality of tones’. In other words, Ewell offered a racialised version of the argument that you cannot separate politics from art. Ewell’s attack on white art is the functional equivalent of previous denunciations of ‘bourgeois art’ or ‘decadent art’.
Jackson, who has devoted years of his academic life to the study of Schenker, reacted angrily to Ewell’s attack. He devoted an issue of his journal to addressing Ewell’s claim that Schenker’s racial views were connected to his musical theories. Five of the essays published in the issue defended Ewell, while 10 opposed him. Jackson’s response was hard-hitting and arguably intemperate. He accused Ewell of using Schenker as a proxy for Jews and suggested that his critique of Schenker may well have been an example of black anti-Semitism.
Jackson’s response was a passionate academic defence of Schenker’s reputation. He points out how ambiguous Schenker was in relation to his own Jewish identity, that he desired to be accepted into the fold of Germanic culture, and that he subsequently had a change of attitude, concluding later in life that ‘music is accessible to all races and creeds alike’.
Whether or not one agrees with Jackson’s reply to Ewell, or with his assessment of Schenker, there can be little doubt that the tone and content of his reply were consistent with the normal standards of academic debate. Nor can there be any doubt that the reaction of the University of North Texas, its sidelining of Jackson and his journal, plays into the hands of those who want to silence Jackson and defame his reputation.
In the eyes of his detractors, and no doubt in the eyes of the Society for Music Theory, Jackson’s real crime is that, unlike them, he refused to roll over, apologise and embrace the myth of whiteness that is being peddled by guilt-tripping moral entrepreneurs.
Moral entrepreneurs like Ewell have acquired a commanding influence over how racism is perceived and understood. Yet Ewell’s use of the concept of the ‘white racial frame’ to understand classical music has little to do with racism. He himself stated that he is not interested in ‘negative stereotypes of blacks’ and their application to classical music. ‘What I stress’, he said, ‘is not so much black stereotypes as positive white stereotypes’, which supposedly create a ‘pro-white subframe’. For Ewell, detaching positive connotations from whiteness, or spoiling whiteness by delegitimising the cultural authority of someone like Beethoven, is the precondition for turning classical music into an inclusive project. The aim is not to deracialise classical music, but to reframe it in a different colour.
No doubt Ewell would find it difficult to grasp the attitude towards classical music displayed by the radical black activist and writer, WEB Du Bois. Du Bois admired the music of Richard Wagner, the notorious racist and anti-Semitic composer. For Du Bois what mattered was Wagner’s music. He said: ‘The musical dramas of Wagner tell of human life as he lived it, and no human being, white or black, can afford not to know them, if he would know life.’
Advocates of the idea that white supremacy infects classical music would no doubt like to deprive millions of people of the joy of being exposed to the kind of music that helped Du Bois to better understand the human condition. Ewell and the Society for Music Theory should be ashamed of their newfound roles as the academic police of music and culture.
Frank Furedi’s latest book Democracy Under Siege: Don’t let Them Lock It Down is published by Zer0 Books.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: classical music, Journal of Schenkerian Studies, Philip Ewell, racist, Timothy Jackson | Leave a Comment »
Human Respect Tests – The Advocates for Self-Government
Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2021
https://www.theadvocates.org/human-respect-tests/
Human Respect Tests
How respectful are you?
Duration: 3 Minutes
3 to 10 questions depending on how you score.
Test Your Beliefs
See to what extent your beliefs are respectful or coercive.
Share Your Results
See how your beliefs compare to your friends. Pick Your Political Type Or take the political quiz
Se the rest here
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Advocates for Self-Government, Human Respect Tests | Leave a Comment »
