Biden's Anti-Eurasian Green Delusion And America's Race To Irrelevance

Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Many people couldn’t help but laugh when Biden told the Boris Johnson on March 26 that the USA and it’s NATO allies should create “an infrastructure plan to rival the Belt and Road Initiative” post haste. What would such a program look like? How would it be funded when the USA is so embarrassingly bankrupt? Who among the nations of the world would ever consider buying a ticket onto such a sinking ship?

It took a few weeks for details to finally emerge, but by the end of the April 22-23 Climate Summit hosted by Biden, John Kerry and Anthony Blinken, it has become abysmally clear what delusions possessed the poor president.

After having announced a 52% carbon reduction policy below 2005 levels by 2050, Biden swiftly committed the USA to what he called the most comprehensive infrastructure plan in history with a $2 trillion Green New Deal-like infrastructure program designed to revive the policy of America’s 32nd president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mirroring FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, Biden has even planned a Civilian Climate Corps, along with a Green Climate Bank to parallel FDR’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

The catch? Biden’s version was written by the same financial technocrats that FDR went to war with 80 years ago and unlike FDR’s version, the modern green version of the New Deal will have the effect of destroying the productive industrial powers and living standards of the nation once green grids are built.

A Comparison of Two New Deals

Where FDR’s New Deal was premised on the removal of Wall Street’s hegemony over national sovereignty via the Pecora Commission, Glass-Steagall, and SEC; Biden’s Green New Deal is shaped by Central Bankers’ Climate Compacts and green finance strategies authored by the richest oligarchs on the planet like the Bloomberg-Carney Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. In fact, it shouldn’t come as a coincidence that the first legislative effort to establish a Green New Deal, was not American at all, but was submitted by Britain’s Lord Adair Turner in 2009 while he was acting head regulator of the City of London which remains the nerve center of world finance today as it was a century ago. Up until 2019, Lord Turner was the chair of George Soros’ Institute for New Economic Thinking- an organization devoted to making Huxley’s Brave New World a practical reality and upon which he still serves as Senior Fellow.

Where FDR created large scale infrastructure megaprojects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, Rural Electrification Project, Hoover Dam, Colorado River Basin programs, and St Lawrence Seaway which all had the effect of leap frogging to higher rates of industrial power than at any other time in history, Biden’s Green New Deal professes to do the opposite. Yes, jobs will be created in insulating a few million homes and building windmills and solar panels, however those jobs will be short lived. For once they are built there will be nothing left to do but maintain the solar panels with unionized squeegees in an imaginary world of no change and zero-technological growth that might look good in computer models, but has very little correspondence with humanity’s actual requirements for long term survival.

It appears to be genuinely believed by ivory tower technocrats managing the Biden Administration that financing a green infrastructure program won’t be difficult. The 2020-21 pandemic showed the enlightened elite that money can always just be printed from thin air. The U.S. debt has already risen to 27 trillion, so what’s a few trillion more?

Where that fails, just compensate by imposing Carbon Pricing onto all carbon sinners. Many nations have already gotten onboard that bandwagon with Sweden, Lichtenstein and Canada leading the race charging $129, $96, and $91 per ton of carbon emissions respectively. Coming out of Biden’s Climate Summit, Canada’s Justin Trudeau committed to raising this cost to $170/ton by 2030 while U.S. National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy announced will soon rise to $56/ton in the USA (a seven fold increase from the $1-7/ton price under Trump).

Additionally, cap and trade schemes are always there for wealthy polluters to purchase unused carbon quotas from poorer polluters at home or abroad, so revenue can certainly be found that way. If all else fails, just raise taxes.

In case poor nations of the world might feel like avoiding this sinking ship in order to work more closely with Russia and China, Biden was kind enough to announce a new international green finance strategy to assist the developing sector in their decarbonizing aspirations.

The Problem with Green Energy

For those who doubt the idea that the USA can or even should meet those 2035 carbon reduction targets, they might have solid reasons for their assumptions. For one thing, the USA currently relies upon 1,852 coal fired power plants which would mean that 11 plants would need to be shut down every month until 2035. What would compensate for this loss of capacity?

Obviously not nuclear, since that has become politically-radioactive in the minds of most of Biden’s liberal constituency.

Would it be green energy that fills the gap? Considering that green energy is magnitudes more costly, and unreliable relative to fossil fuels, hydro or nuclear power, that is also unlikely. The truth is, as Germany discovered recently, shutting down coal and nuclear at home, simply forces a nation to keep fossil fuel plants running as back up for the unreliable green energy grids while increasing imports of coal/natural gas-driven electricity from other countries. In Germany’s case, imports of nuclear and coal-generated electricity from Poland and the Czech Republic increased by 60% since the nation’s industrial base understood that green energy sources could never meet it’s needs. In the USA’s case, Mexico would most likely be the top supplier. Across the European Union where most nations have entirely submitted to pressure to “decarbonize” by 2050, coal, gas and crude oil imports now make up 2/3rds of all energy imports.

While some advocates of the Green New Deal applaud the amazing breakthroughs in green energy tech over the past years which they say has reduced the price per kilowatt hour from an unreasonably high 35 cents to as low as 4 cents today… the truth is that the technology remains largely identical to the photovoltaic cells and windmills of yesterday with the only difference being the massively increased infusions of government subsidies given to private companies producing the green energy which the IMF calculated to be $5.2 trillion in 2017 alone (aka: 6.5% of the global GDP). And where do those subsidies come from? you guessed it. The tax payers.

Lest we forget the oft-overlooked fuel source of bioethanol, over 40% of the USA’s corn production currently gets burned in the form of biodiesel and ethanol while billions starve and suffer food shortages around the world. The high cost of being green.

Geopolitical Incompetence 101

You might now be asking: Why would the USA which has admittedly chosen to define itself as an existential rival to Russia and China to the point of risking a full-scale nuclear war, be so intent on subverting its own economic foundations at a moment that both Russia and China (and over 136 nations of the world) have chosen to move on toward a diametrically opposing paradigm of large-scale infrastructure growth and scientific progress?

If we take the old adage “whom the gods would destroy they first make mad” as a truism, then signs for a bright future for the Green New Dealing western community poor indeed.

Since Biden’s first days as president of the USA, the entire fabric of U.S. governance from top to bottom was completely overhauled in the form of omnibus executive orders designed to make the global climate emergency the top priority for all branches and levels of government- economic, military, intelligence, health and beyond. Under this green geostrategic paradigm, vast starvation, migration patterns, and wars have much less to do with imperial abuse, and everything to do with global warming.

Biden created new directorates of climate policy with offices in the White House, demanded that the Director of National Intelligence and State Department overhaul their governance around dealing with the climate crisis and even passed executive orders banning all oil and natural gas drilling and exploration projects on land or offshore where government land is held. Biden even went so far as to assert that 30% of the entire surface of the USA would be brought off limits to all development by 2030.

Sustained vs Sustainable Development

Compare this with China which has simultaneously committed to building green energy systems without deluding itself into thinking that fossil fuels, nuclear or hydro could be taken out of their energy baskets.

In fact, the primary fuel sources driving the large-scale development corridors of the New Silk Road are considered “dirty” sources verboten by the west like coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear and hydro. This fact even drove a delusional Biden to attempt to pressure Xi Jinping to speed up their phase out of coal by 2030 to which the Chinese leader responded “no”.

Biden had earlier described China as the primary climate offender of the world saying: “China is far and away the largest emitter of carbon in the world, and through its massive Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing is also annually financing billions of dollars of dirty fossil fuel energy projects across Asia and beyond.” He even demanded that leaders of the west “rally a united front of nations to hold China accountable to high environmental standards in its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects, so that China can’t outsource pollution to other countries.”

In his remarks at the Climate Summit, President Putin re-emphasized to the western puppet heads of state who were busy massaging each other and chanting “build back better” in unison, that “green growth” should not occur at the expense of “sustainable growth”. Simply put, Putin is committed to putting people before ivory tower energy policies that may demand human sacrifices at the alter of Gaia, and emphasized Russia’s commitment to nuclear power, raising its fertility rate, raising average life expectancy which has already grown from 56 years/male and 61/female in the mid-1990s to 70 years today and plans are to increase that to 78 years by 2030.

The irony about all of this is that China and Russia are increasingly adopting a system of political economy which is fundamentally OPEN and driven by scientific and technological progress without any supposed limits on its potential for improvement. This paradigm is fundamentally in harmony with the original New Deal policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt who himself envisioned a post-imperial world of win-win cooperation (in opposition to a dystopic closed-system world envisioned by Winston Churchill). The USA on the other hand, which professes to be the heir to the New Deal reforms of Franklin Roosevelt has come to embody the worst aspects of the Malthusian elite managing the British Empire for centuries which FDR devoted his life to stop.

It was this empire that considered it “scientifically necessary” to subjugate India, China, Ireland, Africa and every other rival to lives of poverty, war, famine and stupidification.

This was the empire which the republican revolution of 1776 aimed at overthrowing- not only from the Americas, but internationally. It is this same empire which was nearly destroyed by the Russian-U.S. alliance that shaped much of the 19th century and which again arose during WW2 as FDR and Stalin recognized they had much more in common with each other than either had with arch-racist Churchill. The British Empire was always run as a “closed system”, scientifically managed intelligence operation following Malthusian principles and adherence to strict mathematical equilibrium. In this formula for domination, military forces have typically been less important than control of nerve centers of finance, narcotics and other levers of corruption mental and spiritual corruption than many people- even among the most educated historians realize.

And so we have come full circle. The gods have certainly made those elites managing the west mad, but whether or not the entire world will have to pay the price of their insanity yet remains to be seen.

Tyler Durden Fri, 04/30/2021 - 23:40
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Biden's Anti-Eurasian Green Delusion And America's Race To Irrelevance

NYPD Puts Down Robot Dog After Backlash 

The New York Police Department (NYPD) will part ways with its controversial robotic dog after mounting uproar from the public and lawmakers. 

John Miller, the NYPD deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, told NYTimes that it ended a leasing contract with Boston Dynamics early for the four-legged robotic dog called "Digidog." 

A subpoena from City Councilman Ben Kallos and Council Speaker Corey Johnson revealed the NYPD's leasing contract with Boston Dynamics, amounted to $94,000. The leasing agreement was terminated on April 22. The original lease agreement was through August.

The termination of the lease was due to a series of incidents where the four-legged robot was deployed to a house invasion in the Bronx in February and a low-income housing project in Manhattan for patrol. Critics likened it to a surveillance robo-dog out of the dystopic TV series "Black Mirror."

Miller said the contract was terminated because the police force was improperly using the device to fuel heated discussions about race and surveillance. 

"People had figured out the catchphrases and the language to make this evil somehow," Miller said.

He did not rule out the possibility of Digidog returning to the police force at some future date. 

"But for now, this is a casualty of politics, bad information and cheap sound bytes," he said. "We should have named it 'Lassie.'"

In February, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounced the robot, saying police officers were targeting low-income communities. She also had an issue with the funds spent to lease the device. 

"Please ask yourself: when was the last time you saw next-generation, world-class technology for education, healthcare, housing, etc consistently prioritized for underserved communities like this?" Ocasio-Cortez tweeted at the time.

Bill Neidhardt, a spokesman for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, said he was "glad the Digidog was put down."

A spokesperson for Boston Dynamics said Wednesday its robots are not designed to be used as weapons nor used to intimidate people. 

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NYPD Puts Down Robot Dog After Backlash 

Blighted San Francisco Diagnoses Its "Perilous Trifecta" ...And Bungles The Cure

Authored by Christopher Rufo via RealClearInvestigations.com,

San Francisco is coming undone. In recent years, the city has manifested a series of visible and persistent inequalities, with a spoils-to-the-victor world for its technological elite, and a chaotic, brutalized world for its dispossessed. In the city’s Tenderloin district, men openly hawk drugs on the street corners, desperate addicts are crumpled across the sidewalks, and first responders dart through the chaos to revive overdose victims.

The city has become a web of contradictions. There are thousands of new millionaires, and, by the latest estimates, 18,000 people in and out of homelessness. The headquarters of Uber, Twitter, and Square are blocks away from the open-air drug markets of the Tenderloin, Mid-Market, and SoMa. Wealthy families attending an art opening at the Civic Center have to cross through the tent encampments that line the sidewalks.

Residents, property owners, and small businesses—who pay an enormous premium to live and work in San Francisco—have begun to erupt in frustration. Citizens tell pollsters that homelessness is the city’s most pressing issue and business owners tell pollsters that "conditions on [the] streets have progressively deteriorated.”

Mayor London Breed of San Francisco: Trying to address the city's problems by expanding institutions the chronically homeless keep cycling through.

City Hall has begun coming to terms with the crisis. Mayor London Breed recently hired a director of mental health reform, Dr. Anton Nigusse Bland, who compiled a statistical summary of the problem. People have long known that San Francisco has a homelessness problem, but Nigusse Bland discovered a population-within-a-population—the so-called “perilous trifecta”: 

4,000 men and women who are simultaneously homeless, psychotic, and addicted to alcohol, meth, or heroin.

About 70 % of them have been on the streets for more than five years; 40% have been on the streets for more than 13 years.

This is the city’s fundamental predicament.

How do you help people in the grips of the perilous trifecta? What interventions could make progress? Where do social workers even start?

It’s almost impossible to understate the depths of this challenge.

Dr. Anton Nigusse Bland, city mental health director: Identified 4,000 suffering from the "perilous trifecta" of homelessness, mental illness, and addiction

San Francisco’s current policy toward the perilous trifecta can be best described as compassionate neglect. Every year, the chronically homeless cycle through the institutions of the socialized state, from hospitals, jails, and shelters, to sobering centers, case management appointments, and 72-hour psychiatric holds. Local government provides enough to meet an outward standard of compassion, but not enough to alter the trajectories of the homeless. The result is a disaster, which has drawn criticism across the political spectrum. Progressives are demanding more funding for existing programs, while moderates are bewildered by the eternal recurrence of tents, needles, and feces in their neighborhoods.

The current policy regime can be divided into three domains -- the hospital, the jail, and the subsidized apartment.

Together, these institutions represent the new orthodoxy of the modern urban approach: Homelessness is reduced to a set of social-scientific variables, to be manipulated through the intensive application of the medical and social sciences.

As part of its medical system, San Francisco currently spends more than $255 million per year on mental health and substance abuse programs, many of which cater to the city’s homeless. In a recent audit of the behavioral health system, the city’s budget and legislative analyst found that 70% of all psychiatric emergency visits involved a homeless individual and that 66% of all visitors had co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders. In total, the top 5% of “super-users,” totaling 2,239 adults, the majority of whom fall into the perilous trifecta, accounted for 52% of total systemwide service use. Doctors at San Francisco General see the same set of patients so frequently that they have developed an entire vocabulary to describe the population that circles in and out of their doors.

The jail system is next. According to the San Francisco County Jail, the homeless account for 40% of all inmates -- despite being less than 1% of the city’s overall population, and even after San Francisco decriminalized many quality-of-life crimes associated with homelessness. Again, the perilous trifecta looms large. Inmates with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse disorders are more likely to be homeless and more likely to be charged with a violent crime compared to the general jail population. The pithy observation about deinstitutionalization is largely true: The people who might have once lived in the state mental hospital have simply been transferred to the county jail.

Neither hospitals, jails, nor public housing have solved San Francisco's homelessness epidemic.

Finally, the public-housing complex is the new great hope, and fastest-growing public expenditure, for the homeless. Like many major West Coast cities, San Francisco has gone all in on “Housing First,” the theory that the municipal government must provide free housing for the homeless in perpetuity, with no expectations of sobriety, work, or participation in rehabilitation programs. For a city with a recurring homeless population of 18,000, this is an enormous expense. In 2019, San Francisco spent $285 million on shelters and “permanent supportive housing,” plus $65 million on traditional public housing, vouchers, and SRO units. At the same time, voters passed an additional $600 million bond to build “affordable housing.” But still, 67% of the Bay Area’s homeless are unsheltered.

Even as they tout “evidence-based interventions,” “data-driven solutions,” and “best practices,” leaders in San Francisco have recognized the failure of the current system and proposed an ambitious reform agenda. However, in broad terms, this agenda only deepens its dependency on the social-scientific model and doubles-down on its worst assumptions. It can be summarized this way: deinstitutionalization, destigmatization, and decriminalization.

In 2019, Mayor Breed and Supervisors Matt Haney and Hillary Ronen championed legislation for sweeping “mental health reform.” The plan would increase total spending on mental health and substance abuse to $500 million per year, and prioritize the homeless, create a central service center, and pressure private insurers to cover more costs. When it passed unanimously through the Board of Supervisors, Ronen celebrated it as a progressive milestone: “We just created the first universal mental health and substance use system in the country.”

San Francisco's homeless problem can be traced back to the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill after Ken Kesey's 1962 novel and this subsequent film.

But this universality is only a theoretical formulation. The legislation does not include a funding source and, more important, simply expands the existing behavioral health system rather than reforming it. For the perilous trifecta, the problem is often not access to services, but participation in services. According to the latest one-night count, only 17% of the homeless reported using mental health services and only 11% reported using substance abuse services. For the unsheltered population, these figures are almost certainly lower.

The problem is that members of the perilous trifecta are the least likely to seek services. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, approximately half the patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder suffer from anosognosia, which is the inability to understand their own disorder, often leading to a refusal to enter treatment and take medication. Adding a serious addiction to methamphetamine, which can cause paranoia, psychosis, hallucinations, and violent behavior, only compounds the problem.

In the past, the solution to this paradox was compulsion. The state took custody of the “gravely disabled” and treated them in long-term residential institutions. However, with the exposure of civil rights abuses and the release of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the United States gradually dismantled its mental health system, reducing the number of mental health beds per capita by an astonishing 95% between 1955 and 2016. Today, California has fewer beds per capita than the national average, with San Francisco having only 219 adult psychiatric beds available at a given time -- drastically insufficient for the number of people in need.

Although Mayor Breed has tentatively moved towards a return to short-term “conservatorships,” a form of involuntary commitment for individuals who present a grave danger to themselves or others, the plan has neither the scope nor the force to significantly reduce the numbers of the perilous trifecta. Because of pressure from disability activists and the ACLU, which have called conservatorships “the greatest deprivation of civil liberties aside from the death penalty,” the plan is limited to individuals who have had eight or more involuntary psychiatric holds in the past year, which, in practice, would mean less than 100 people citywide.

Mayor Breed did not return a request for comment.

San Francisco's progressive District Attorney faces recall efforts in response to rising crime.

Many progressive socialists argue that there is too much force in the system, not too little. San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, took office in January 2020 pledging to substantially reduce the county jail population, end cash bail, and decriminalize quality-of-life crimes associated with homelessness, including public camping, drug consumption, prostitution, and public urination. Boudin contends that the criminal justice system in San Francisco is a domain of persistent inequalities – locking up a disproportionate number of poor and minority residents – and has become the dumping ground for the addicted and mentally ill. Rather than continue this system, Boudin argues, the city must “implement a comprehensive transformation of the criminal justice system to decriminalize and treat mental illness, housing instability, and substance use as public health issues rather than criminal justice issues.”

Boudin’s formulation does align with a single-day snapshot of the San Francisco County Jail population from 2016, which found that 48% of inmates were African American, 70% self-reported substance abuse, and 10% were deemed to have a serious mental illness. However, the narrative that the city is somehow targeting non-violent drug offenders and “criminalizing homeless” is specious. The snapshot also shows that 68% of inmates were arrested for violence, weapons possession, and serious felonies. Contrary to progressive rhetoric, only 4% were arrested for drug crimes -- a vanishingly small number of people for a city in the midst of a heroin and methamphetamine epidemic.

Authorities have enabled massive open-air drug markets in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin.

The hard reality is that the perilous trifecta has fueled a boom in property crime and public disorder. In 2019, at least 1,120 individuals in the trifecta spent time in the county jail. Although the homicide rate remained static during Boudin’s first year office, burglaries have soared in a city that already had one of the highest property crime rates in the nation, while authorities enabled massive open-air drug markets in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, which is a central hub for the homeless population.

The nexus between homelessness, addiction, and crime is clear: According to city and federal data, virtually all of the unsheltered homeless are unemployed, while at the same time, those with serious addictions spend an average of $1,256 to $1,834 a month on methamphetamine and heroin. With no legitimate source of income, many addicts support their habit through a “hustle,” which can include fraud, prostitution, car break-ins, burglaries of residences and business, and other forms of theft.

Boudin’s plan to decriminalize such property offenses – the mirror opposite of the low-tolerance “broken windows” approach adopted in the late 1980s as crime rates began historic declines – has contributed to the sense that he is not holding criminals accountable. In 2019, the city had an incredible 25,667 “smash-and-grabs,” as thieves sought valuables and other property from cars to sell on the black market. The following year, rather than attempt to prevent or even disincentivize this crime, Boudin has proposed a $1.5 million fund to pay for auto glass repair, arguing that it “will help put money into San Francisco jobs and San Francisco businesses.” In literal terms, Boudin is subsidizing broken windows, under the notion that it can be transformed into a job-creation program.

Boudin did not return a request for comment.

Some San Franciscans are pushing back. Earlier this year, a group of residents and business owners launched a recall effort targeting Boudin, arguing that his policies have enabled crime and not done enough to protect victims.           

The final plank of San Francisco’s policy platform is “destigmatization.” Public health experts in the city have gradually abandoned recovery and sobriety as the ideal outcome, preferring the limited goal of “harm reduction.” In a recent task force report on methamphetamine, the San Francisco Public Health Department noted that meth users “are likely to experience high levels of stigma and rejection in their personal and social lives,” which are “often reinforced by language and media portrayals depicting individuals who use alongside images of immorality, having chaotic lives, and perpetual use.”

On the surface, this is a strange contention. If San Francisco’s perilous trifecta is any guide, methamphetamine use is heavily correlated with chaotic lives, perpetual drug abuse, crimes against others, and various transgressions against traditional morality. The harm reductionists’ argument, however, rests on the belief that addiction is an involuntary brain disease, akin to Alzheimer’s or dementia. In this view, addiction is better seen as a disability, and any stigma associated with it is therefore an act of ignorance and cruelty. According to the Department of Public Health, the goal of harm reduction policy is to reduce this unjustified stigma and focus public policy on “non-abstinence-based residential treatment programs,” “supervised injection services,” “trauma-informed sobering site[s],” and “training for staff on how to engage marginalized or vulnerable communities in ways that do not perpetuate trauma or stigma.”

In practice, the task force recommendations would create an entire infrastructure to service addiction, rather than to reduce it. Although proponents of harm reduction claim the mantle of compassion, it’s a fatalistic theory. It assumes that most people cannot recover from serious addiction and, therefore, the social obligation is to provide the space and resources for addicts to pursue their own ends, which, for 40% of the perilous trifecta population, means 13 or more years in and out of homelessness. Activists have suggested that addicts can “reduce harms” by “[using] indoors instead of on the street,” “reducing how much [they are] using,” “transitioning from injecting to smoking,” and “continuing to use one type of drug but quitting another drug.” But in the face of the pathological overload of the perilous trifecta, these recommendations are negligently naïve, relegating a large portion of the homeless to a lifetime of chaos, sickness, and despair.

In the long term, the real danger of destigmatization is that it would lead to the normalization of serious addiction and its consequences. In San Francisco, progressives have attempted to normalize the worst aspects of street homelessness, minimizing the drug use, toxic waste, psychotic episodes, and related crimes; they have blurred the lines between sickness and health, madness and sanity. Moreover, without a trace of irony, they have weaponized destigmatization itself, stigmatizing anyone who opposes the breakdown of public order as “fascists” and “homeless haters.” 

An entire social media community has arisen documenting the descent of San Francisco's streets. Twitter/homelessphilosopher/@PoopScoopSF/@sfstreets1/ @PowelMason415/@CleanUpWestSoma/@EsmeAlaki/@missmrm/@markdfabela

The implicit wager of San Francisco’s policy is that the social-scientific apparatus can rescue people faster than the perilous trifecta expands its ranks. But the evidence suggests the opposite: that San Francisco has become a magnet for the troubled homeless. Methamphetamine deaths are up nearly 400% over the past five years; fentanyl overdoses doubled between 2019 and 2020. Meanwhile, the socialized state has reached a point of near exhaustion. First responders, police officers, and emergency room nurses are burning out. Psychiatrists at San Francisco General Hospital despair about the mass migration of out-of-state residents in search of the “San Francisco Special”: “housing, a psychiatrist, case manager, primary care provider, and transfer of Medicaid or general assistance.”

The political class has insisted on greater control over the corporations, developers, and landlords, while deregulating life at the bottom. The result has been a deepening inequality, and an even more anarchic world for the poor. There is an entire social media community of mostly anonymous accounts who document the squalor of the encampments and psychotic episodes in the streets; they are the last resistance to the normalization of the perilous trifecta, and maintain their anonymity, it seems, out of fear of retribution. It’s a dark reality, but perhaps a warning of what’s to come.

In the end, San Francisco finds itself fighting a monster. “Homelessness isn’t just a problem; it’s a symptom,” says its mayor. “The symptom of unaffordable housing, of income inequality, of institutional racism, of addiction, untreated illness, and decades of disinvestment. These are the problems. And if we’re going to fight homelessness, we’ve got to fight them all.” But this is part of the reason homelessness has become so intractable -- —the political class has haunted its own world with abstractions; it has projected its own ideological premises onto the brutal reality of the streets.

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Blighted San Francisco Diagnoses Its "Perilous Trifecta" ...And Bungles The Cure

Ammo And Primer Shortages Continue Into 2021 

Readers have been well informed about multiple shortages of ammunition and firearms in the last year due to a massive demand pull from frightened Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, social unrest in cities around the US, and the prospect of an anti-gun Biden administration. Now another shortage has materialized: the lack of bullet primers, which is the device responsible for initiating the propellant combustion that pushes the bullet out of the barrel. 

Besides the ammo shortage of last year, reloading components, like primers, and reloading tools, have become scarce. 

"Primers are tough for reloaders to find, too, as more and more of them are being used in making factory ammo," said gun website Wide Open Spaces. 

Bullets are relatively easy to produce. Brass casings can be reused, and powder is still plentiful, but there's a bottleneck in ammo production because of the lack of primers. 

There are only four domestic manufacturers in the US: Federal, CCI, Remington, and Winchester. These firms supply primers to the military and law enforcement and the retail market. 

So in 2020, when more than 7 million people became first-time gun buyers. They had to buy bullets too. And as a result of the unprecedented demand for ammo, selling out at Walmart, local gun shops, and online websites, the great primer shortage continues. 

Gun owners are clearly frustrated with excessively high ammo and primer prices that have more than doubled the prices than pre-COVID times. 

The fact is, ammo companies didn't have enough capacity to meet demand last year. 

 President of ammunition for Vista Outdoors, Jason Vanderbrink, speaks more about the primer shortage. 

Due to the ammo and primer shortage, the 3D-printed gun community develops electrical ignitions that replace primers due to the shortage. 

There are no signs that ammo and primer shortages are abating anytime soon.

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Ammo And Primer Shortages Continue Into 2021 

The American Right Is The New Target Of Washington's "War On Terror"

Authored by Tho Bishop via The Mises Institute,

The security walls around the US Capitol may be removed, but the federal response to the January 6 protests has only just begun. The Democrats in Washington are determined to treat the incident as on par with the events of September 11, which may explain a troubling report about the potential use of the famed No Fly List.

Yesterday Nick Fuentes, a right-wing social media pundit who attended the January 6 protests in the capital, alleged that he has been placed on the federal no-fly list, preventing him from traveling to Florida for a political rally. While Mr. Fuentes shared on social media audio of an airline employee suggesting that his flying restriction did come from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), later that night Tucker Carlson informed his audience that his staff could neither confirm nor deny the report. While critics pointed to previous social media posts which documented his being removed from a plane for failing to comply with mask policies, Fuentes has noted that he had no problem flying to Washington in January.

It is unclear whether federal authorities will be in any rush to clarify the situation, but there is no reason not to assume that federal authorities would attempt to use this war on terror tool against political opponents. From its inception, what originally began as sixteen names federal authorities had connected to potential future terrorist attacks quickly grew to over 1 million. As is the case with other surveillance tools handed over to the deep state, there is very little oversight or due process involved in how federal authorities handle potential “terrorist threats.”

Since January there has been a concerted effort by Democrat leaders, former deep state officials, and America’s most despicable neoconservatives to push the Biden administration to utilize the power of the federal government against the supporters of Donald Trump. While the incidents at the Capitol on January 6 are used to justify these calls, the weaponization of federal power against political opponents goes back almost as long as the federal government itself. In more recent years, President Biden’s previous service in the White House saw a Democrat administration that used both the IRS and Department of Homeland Security to target conservatives.

Another reason to expect escalation from the Biden administration against vocal figures like Fuentes is the unique critique of the current regime from the right. The majority of Republican voters do not simply oppose President Biden due to politics, but flatly reject his democratic legitimacy.

As Murray Rothbard explained, it is precisely this sort of attack that the state fears most:

The increasing use of scientific jargon has permitted the State's intellectuals to weave obscurantist apologia for State rule that would have only met with derision by the populace of a simpler age. A robber who justified his theft by saying that he really helped his victims, by his spending giving a boost to retail trade, would find few converts; but when this theory is clothed in Keynesian equations and impressive references to the "multiplier effect," it unfortunately carries more conviction. And so the assault on common sense proceeds, each age performing the task in its own ways.

Thus, ideological support being vital to the State, it must unceasingly try to impress the public with its "legitimacy," to distinguish its activities from those of mere brigands….

The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State's openly assigned priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d'être.

This perspective explains the disproportionate treatment that mostly peaceful protesters at the Capitol in January have received in contrast to those arrested during riots in American cities throughout the past year. The state will always treat those who seriously threaten its perceived legitimacy with greater zeal than those guilty of simply destroying the livelihoods of its citizens.

This also highlights the self-defeating nature of the modern American conservative movement.

For decades now, the same political party that often gives lip service to “federalism” has often been the party directly responsible for the growth of federal power. As noted earlier, it took exactly one administration before the Department of Homeland Security, created by the Bush administration, began to target the very voters who elected him to office. It was just two election cycles before the PATRIOT Act was used to target a Republican presidential campaign.

The biggest question that now lies in American politics is whether conservatives are capable of learning from these examples. If the American right is capable of fully absorbing the reality that the greatest threat to their lives, liberty, and prosperity lies domestically—and not abroad—perhaps there is potential for a political rollback of the American empire.

If not, American conservatives will come to understand how little constitutional rights truly mean in the face of a hostile state.

Tyler Durden Fri, 04/30/2021 - 22:20
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The American Right Is The New Target Of Washington's "War On Terror"

US Intelligence Tells Congress China's Nuclear Arsenal "On Track To Exceed Our Previous Projection"

A hearing held by the Senate Armed Services Committee this week on the range of threats the United States faces globally focused on China and Chinese leadership viewing US power as "declining" while Beijing is "rising" on the world stage.

Most notable from the testimony is US intelligence's view of China's expanding nuclear arsenal, which is projected to at least double over the next decade. While currently the Department of Defense estimates China's warhead stockpile to be in the low-200s, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, told the Senate hearing on Thursday that a rapid expansion of its stockpile is a top priority for Beijing. To the surprise of lawmakers, he strongly suggested that the DIA's most resent projections actually underestimated China's true nuclear expansion and ambitions.

China is growing more aggressive - expanding its power projection around the world, including in Africa. I’ve seen evidence of it myself. @DefenseIntel Director LTG Berrier confirmed today China is looking to place military forces in Africa, as well as in Latin and South America. pic.twitter.com/qB8RT54Tyl

— Sen. Jim Inhofe (@JimInhofe) April 29, 2021

"In the span of capabilities that they have, the nuclear piece has been one component. It has been a priority for them," Berrier told the lawmakers in response to a question by Sen. Tom Cotton, a well-known foremost China hawk. "And I think they have racked and stacked that in the things that they think that they need to get done by 2030 or 2035," the DIA director followed with.

Gen. Berrier explained that US defense intelligence now sees China as seeking to outpace even the earlier Pentagon projections. He said:

"China is expanding and diversifying its nuclear arsenal... Last year, we assessed that China had a nuclear warhead stockpile in the low-200s and projected it to at least double over the next decade.

Since then, Beijing has accelerated its nuclear expansion and is on track to exceed our previous projection. PLA nuclear forces are expected to continue to grow with their nuclear stockpile likely to at least double in size over this decade and increase the threat to the U.S. homeland."

And he further warned China is "probably" seeking to "match" many of America and Russia's more advanced nuclear warhead capabilities and delivery platforms:

China probably seeks to narrow, match, or in some areas exceed U.S. qualitative equivalency with new nuclear warheads and delivery platforms that at least equal the effectiveness, reliability, and/or survivability of some U.S. and Russian warheads and delivery platforms under development. The PLA continues to improve its pursuit of a nuclear triad, and increasing evidence indicates that Beijing seeks to keep a portion of its nuclear forces on a "launch-on-warning" posture.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Berrier elsewhere in the testimony affirmed that China is "the long-term strategic competitor to the United States" and remains "as a pacing threat, [Beijing] poses a major security challenge."

Via Japan Times

He said Beijing is focusing its defense technology efforts "almost certainly" toward holding" US and allied forces at greater risk and greater distances from the Chinese mainland."

In 2020 the Illinois-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimated that China possesses 350 nuclear warheads, a number far higher than the more conservative DoD estimate. In its report at the time the think tank wrote, "We estimate that China has a produced a stockpile of approximately 350 nuclear warheads, of which roughly 272 are for delivery by more than 240 operational land-based ballistic missiles, 48 sea-based ballistic missiles, and 20 nuclear gravity bombs assigned to bombers. The remaining 78 warheads are intended to arm additional land- and sea-based missiles that are in the process of being fielded."

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US Intelligence Tells Congress China's Nuclear Arsenal "On Track To Exceed Our Previous Projection"

The New Economic World Order After COVID-19

Authored by Fred Dunkley via SafeHaven.com,

"Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed."

- Chinese proverb.

A few days ago, China’s President Xi Jinping issued a thinly-veiled attack on the United States, condemning its economic and military hegemony and calling for a new world order whereby “International affairs should be handled by everyone.” Although Xi did not explicitly name the U.S. in his 18-minute speech, he took aim at Washington’s efforts to decouple supply chains from China, specifically the Trump administration’s ban on American semiconductors and other high-tech goods from being sold to Chinese companies such as Huawei.

Xi lamented the current unilateralism, saying the rules set by one or a few countries ‘‘should not give the whole world a rhythm.’’

Interestingly, Xi made those comments just days after U.S. President Joe Biden and Japan’s prime minister Yoshihide Suga committed to work together to oppose Chinese coercion in the South and East China Seas. 

Readers might be wondering which are these privileged economies that might be giving Xi hissy fits.

Well, it’s mostly the usual suspects, apart from the usual exceptions.

Whereas the Covid-19 pandemic has sent many economies into their worst economic recessions in recent history, the old world economic order remains mostly intact with the exception of a few notable changes. More importantly, the United States, China, Japan and Germany, in that order, still rank as the world’s largest economies.

However, some countries have moved places as a result of the pandemic while others are no longer among elite company.

The data is derived from CNBC, which compares nominal gross domestic product across countries provided in the IMF’s World Economic Outlook database.

So what are the biggest developments in post-pandemic economic rankings?

Here we go:

Brazil drops off

For starters, Brazil has dropped out of Top 10.

The big news in the New World Order is that Brazil went from being the ninth largest economy in 2019 to the 12th largest last year. Indeed, the South American powerhouse was the only country to fall out of the top 10 ranking.

Even worse news for BRIC investors: The IMF says Brazil’s time in the cold is likely to last until 2026 when it might return to the Top 10.

That revelation is hardly surprising, considering that Brazil is currently afflicted by the world’s third-largest caseload of Covid-19 infections, with the health secretary recently warning of an imminent collapse by the country’s health system.

On a brighter note, the IMF has forecast that Brazil’s economy will expand 3.7% in FY 2021 after contracting 4.1% in 2020.

South Korea rising

Naturally, there’s a new entrant to the Top 10, which happens to be South Korea.

With Brazil dropping out of the world’s 10 biggest economies, South Korea moved up to 10th place with the IMF predicting that it might maintain that spot till 2026.

South Korea has recorded some success against Covid-19 though cases have been surging again this month.

However, strong semiconductor exports have been instrumental in limiting economic contraction to just 1% in 2020.

A global shortage in semiconductor chips has been wreaking havoc on the tech sector, automotive industry, consumer electronics industry, and everything in between. After years of tepid demand, the COVID-19 pandemic spurred a huge tech buying spree with manufacturers of personal computers, tablets, laptops, and gaming consoles­ caught off guard. 

Indeed, the PC industry has been enjoying a major revival thanks to the work-at-home phenomenon with computer sales in 2020 exceeding 302 million units, good for a 13% Y/Y increase and the most since 2014. At the same time, webcam sales surged almost 360% with video conferencing becoming the new buzzword of modern communication.

The trade war between the United States and China has only served to make a bad situation worse.

In a decision announced last fall, the U.S. Commerce Department declared Chinese chip manufacturer Semiconductor Manufacturing International or SMIC, persona non grata after determining the company supplies the Chinese military with chips thus making it a threat to national security. The federal government restricted SMIC from obtaining some U.S.-regulated chip-making equipment leading to U.S. buyers cutting back orders from the company. SMIC is one of the largest manufacturers of semiconductor chips, accounting for about 5% of global semiconductor supply.

Luckily, South Korea’s chip manufacturers have largely remained in Washington’s good books.

U.K. leapfrogs India

Another piece of bad news for BRIC investors: India, the world’s fifth largest economy in 2019, slipped to sixth place after the U.K. leapfrogged it.

Unlike Brazil though, the IMF says the South Asian country could regain fifth place as early as 2023. 

India has struggled to contain the pandemic even amidst widespread lockdowns, with the IMF predicting that the economy contracted a whopping 8% in FY 2020 which ended in March 2021.

On its part, the U.K. has rolled out the second-most most successful Covid-19 vaccination program after the U.S. In fact, businesses in the country are doing brisk business after lockdown reopening--another big plus for the economy.

In the final analysis, the old order appears set to remain mostly unchanged especially at the top echelons. U.S. businesses remain eager to expand their operations in China after the Asian nation recorded 18.3% year-on-year economic growth in the first quarter of 2021 but are constrained by geopolitical tensions between the two nations remaining high with the Biden administration recently announcing that it will maintain most of the Trump-era tariffs. This is unlikely to change anytime soon.

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The New Economic World Order After COVID-19

Farm Robot Zaps Weeds With High-Powered Lasers, Eliminates Need For Toxic Herbicides

In the same way, a self-driving car sees its surroundings on city streets, sensors that use machine learning technology allow farm robots to navigate fields. Automation is a growing presence in the farm industry, and a new generation of autonomous robots is helping farmers shape tomorrow's crops.

Crops that can be harvested with barely any or no herbicides would be beneficial not just to humans but also to the environment. An oddly-shaped autonomous farm tractor can eliminate the need for toxic herbicides by using high-powered lasers to weed about 20 acres per day to solve this dilemma. 

Robotics company Carbon Robotics unveiled its newest weed elimination robot, Autonomous Weeder, which leverages artificial intelligence, sensors, and lasers to eliminate weeds on commercial farms.

"Traditional chemicals used by farmers, such as herbicides, deteriorate soil health and are tied to health problems in humans and other mammals. A laser-powered, autonomous weed management solution reduces or eliminates farmers' needs for herbicides," Carbon Robotics' website said. 

Autonomous Weeder offers an economical path towards organic farming that is generally labor-intensive. The robot also reduces the highly variable cost of manual labor. 

"AI and deep learning technology are creating efficiencies across a variety of industries, and we're excited to apply it to agriculture," said Carbon Robotics CEO and Founder Paul Mikesell. 

Mikesell continued: "Farmers, and others in the global food supply chain, are innovating now more than ever to keep the world fed. Our goal at Carbon Robotics is to create tools that address their most challenging problems, including weed management and elimination."

Here's a demo video of the farm robot zapping weeds in a field. 

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Farm Robot Zaps Weeds With High-Powered Lasers, Eliminates Need For Toxic Herbicides

The Need To Regulate Big Tech - Part 2: Moral Hazards In Space

Authored by Bill Blain via MorningPorridge.com,

Read Part 1 here...

“Insufficient facts always invite danger.”

Is it right to let a small number of very wealthy entrepreneurs fill Earth’s already crowded orbital space to establish non-terrestrial internet monopolies? What are the risks, and are the costs justified? Should orbital space be a public good?

A few years ago I read a Sci-fi novel where the moon breaks into three parts. Everyone oohs and ahhs at the beauty of the new multiple moon system until it becomes apparent the new moons are colliding, creating hundred of smaller pieces. The pace of collisions increases chaotically towards a tipping point as the number of rocks increases, until the space debris starts bombarding the earth, wiping out life on the planet. Devasting stuff, and very unlikely.

But there is a genuine scientific parallel.

There are already millions of pieces of space junk orbiting the planet – ranging from broken satellites to discarded space gloves, some spanners and lots of flecks of paint that’s broken off spaceships. These orbit at stupendous speed. If they hit anything, they have the potential to cause enormous damage. If they destroy anything, then a single piece of debris can create a whole cloud of debris, each piece of which can cause similar damage, raising the potential of critical out of control chain reaction and a cloud of debris making space travel very dangerous.

Scary… if you are spaceman.

Many smart Tech investors consider the most valuable private company on the planet is Elon Musk’s Space X and his internet constellation Starlink. There are a host of other firms also shooting for space-based coms dominance; including the UK government’s recently acquired OneWeb, Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper (funded by Amazon), ViaSat and Telesat. All of them want to launch satellites into low-earth-orbit to win a share of space-based internet.

Space X is doing a superb job transporting astronauts to the ISS. They are perfecting reusable rockets. I’m excited they may fly to the moon. I’ll be even happier if Musk gets his way and goes to Mars. I’ve written about the company a number of times: To the Stars, But Mars First, and Rocketmen and Viruses.

Despite my admiration… I am not convinced we actually need the Starlink system. The risk it might destroy the viability of future space-based businesses is very small. But do we really need multiple competing space-based systems? And if not, should not Orbital Space be a public good regulated for the good of all, rather than the enrichment of the few?

Wouldn’t it be better environmentally, at a much lower cost to simply continue to improve current terrestrial connectivity, rather than lob up hundreds of nasty big polluting rockets on the basis some Nutjob prepper in isolation in the Rockies will be able to post insane hatred on the internet? Maybe all these rockets could be used for obtaining resources from the solar system, or learning more about space based threats like asteroids or solar flares?

Space based internet is a reality. It’s interesting to note the French have now taken a stake in OneWeb, where the UK holds the golden share.

Today there may be 4000 satellites in orbit – a number that has nearly doubled in just a few years. That number is set to increase quadratically as all the new Satellite constellations go up.

It was once fun to spot the occasional satellite traversing the sky, or streaking across a telescope viewfinder. Astronomers increasingly report trains of satellites are obscuring their stellar observations. The new Starlink satellites are 99% brighter than other “objects of all types currently in Earth Orbit”, said a US University of Michigan astronomer. There are around 9000 visible stars – but they are increasingly fazed by clouds of satellites “crawling” across the skies.

Who cares about Astronomers when there is money to be made? Well… I do!

The Low Earth Orbital (LEO) space will become increasingly crowded with potentially 30-40,000 new active satellites to be launched in the next few years. The lower their orbits, the more dense and more concentrated orbital risks become – but the advantage is shorter latency, the time delay caused by distance. LEO satellites latency should compare with pre-5G terrestrial internet in terms of speed of communication.

But, as I said in the intro, space debris is a rising risk. A malfunctioning satellite is just a lump shooting round the planet at 25k mph looking for something else to hit. The denser the space becomes, the riskier it gets. For years space geeks have warned about debris circling the planet. The proverbial fleck of paint has enough momentum to destroy a satellite or puncture the International Space Station (ISS).

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering a request from Space X to lower the orbits of nearly 3000 licenced units from 1000 km to 550 km orbits, joining the 1400 Starlink birds already flying at 540-580 km. Jeff Bezos intends to layer his 3,236 unit Kuiper belt of satellites at 630km. Orbital Space is getting crowded.

The UK’s OneWeb claim Space X had a near collision with its satellites in early April – which Space X says never happened.  A battle is underway – Kuiper and OneWeb are objecting to the lowered Starlink orbits, noting a collision would be like a “bomb” going off. Their argument makes sense – if satellites collide they break up into lots of smaller random pieces of debris, each a little bomb in its own right.

Each little piece of debris has the potential to hit something else – a chain reaction creating more and more debris eventually obliterating all functional satellites in LEO, and potentially forming a barrier to future launches to higher orbits. It’s a doomsday scenario the boffins claim will happen.

Of course, boffins always predict the worse. The sky may be full of junk, but collisions are very rare. During the last unpleasantness in Europe, there were multiple predictions that bomber streams raiding Germany in the dark would experience multiple collisions – which seldom happened. There are far more instances of bombers being hit by bombs dropped from above them.

Musk also disagrees about the risks. His team say LEO is safer. Musk is very keen because he has identified that a vast constellation of LEO satellites covering the entire planet is his second road to riches. If he can charge $80 a month for access, he gets rich (see previous Morning Porridge:   He will also take a considerable subsidy from the US government ($20 bln over ten years) to provide rural internet services.

But do we need to use satellites?

The history of communications satellites goes back to Telstar in the 1960s. In the 1990s a host of telecoms companies including Globalstar and Iridium planned satellite coms networks, but with the rapid rollout and increasing speed of terrestrial internet and mobile phones left the ultra-expensive satellite systems floundering. They never found widespread adoption. (On the yacht I still have an Iridium phone – but I won’t renew any contract until I know I’m going to be miles offshore. A $89 Starlink connection might be a much better option.)

LEO Starlink satellites will only stay in orbit 3-5 years and then need replaced before they burn up in the atmosphere. They are cheap and cheerful to manufacture – which makes them look a viable alternative to terrestrial internet. However, the apparent simplicity hides the reality. The biggest cost is launch – even Space X’s reusable Falcon rockets cost money. Generally, costs come in at $45-65K per kilogramme. Then there is the cost of Earth Station Antennas. The new sat firms all expect widespread adoption will bring down costs. Expectations are just another type of hope – which is never a good investment strategy!

The bottom line is the evolving battle for Earth’s orbital space is another example where Tech is in danger of trumping common sense. Musk has first mover advantage, and he’s using his reusable rockets to establish himself as a monopoly supplier.

I will admit… I find Musk…. distasteful. There is a great article on him in this morning’s WSJ: Elon Musk’s War on Regulators.  To quote: “Federal Agencies say he’s breaking the rules and endangering people.” The article sums him up well.. A toddler who will do anything to get his way. A narcissistic showman with a nasty streak – his appalling treatment and slander of a British cave-diver who laughed at his showboating plans to rescue stranded children in a cave demonstrated his contempt for others and sense of entitlement.

I lost faith in Tesla around that time – it cost me the future stock upside when I dumped most of my position. I justify it because I ascribe to the view companies are part of society, and must follow social rules and conventions. Musk does not. He doesn’t do sorry, play by the rules or take responsibility for his actions. He gets away with it because he feels entitled to do so. He may or may not be a genius – that’s immaterial.

What are the dangers? 2000 satellites per annum crashing back on to the planet? Crowded orbital space? Small. But would you trust the future to Musk? Is it right he’ll get to farm monopoly profits by taking away our view of the stars and future?

Tyler Durden Fri, 04/30/2021 - 21:00
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The Need To Regulate Big Tech - Part 2: Moral Hazards In Space