Comedian Eric Andre took to Instagram on Sunday to allege that he was “racially profiled” by security at Melbourne Airport during a 25-hour trip to Australia. In a video shared with his followers, Andre recounted being “detained,” “pulled out of a lineup,” and subjected to a thorough dog search in a special line. “Those dogs…
Tag: Politics
Blind runner speaks out against inclusion of trans competitor in Paris Paralympic Games
Italian track athlete Valentina Petrillo, Muller-Rottgardt said, “has lived and trained as a man for a long time, so it is clear that her physical requirements are different than those of someone who was born a woman. This could give her an advantage.”
Shroud of Turin does in fact date back to time of Jesus, researchers claim
Italian researchers have recently uncovered evidence suggesting that the Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth believed by many to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ, may indeed date back to the time of Jesus. This finding adds a new layer to the long-standing debate over the authenticity of the Shroud, which has been the…
FOMC Minutes Preview: Any Hints For Powell’s J-Hole Address?
FOMC Minutes Preview: Any Hints For Powell’s J-Hole Address?
Via Newsquawk,
JULY MEETING:
The FOMC left rates unchanged, but it made tweaks to its statement that appeared to leave the door open to a September rate cut. The Committee is now attentive to risks on both sides of its mandate, a change from the June statement, where it said it was ‘highly attentive’ to inflation risks. The statement said there has been ’some further progress’ towards its inflation goal, whereas in June it said there had been ‘modest’ progress.
And it now says that risks to achieving its employment and inflation goals continue to move into better balance, whereas in June it said it was moving ’towards’ better balance. The Fed did however reiterate that it does not expect that it will be appropriate to lower rates until it has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably towards target, suggesting that the Committee still wants to see favourable data before pivoting to rate cuts.
At his post-meeting press conference, Chair Powell revealed that there was a real discussion about the case for reducing rates at this meeting; a strong majority supported not moving (he later said that overwhelmingly’ policymakers felt it was not the time yet). The Fed Chair noted that the policy rate is clearly restrictive, and it is coming to the point where it will be appropriate to start rate cuts and dial back restrictions to support the continued progress of the economy. He added that the Fed does not need to be 100% focused on inflation given upside risks to prices have decreased while downside risks to employment mandate are real now, noting that the chances of a hard landing are low as the economy was neither overheating nor sharply weakening. A theme throughout Powell’s Q&A was that he tied any future move on the incoming data.
The Chair was coy on giving any specific nod to rate cuts, noting that it could reduce rates zero times this year, or even several – it all depended on incoming data.
COMMENTARY:
Recent Fed commentary has been focused on when the next rate cut will come, and generally, September seems on the table.
Members continue to stress the importance of data dependence, however, and how the balance of risks has shifted towards both sides of its dual mandate, rather than just the inflation side of the equation.
Highlighting this, Bostic (voter) recently stated that he is open to a September rate cut as inflation cools, adding that price pressures have eased, and therefore officials also need to be conscious of their mandate of maintaining full employment; Kashkari (2026 voter) noted the balance of risks has shifted more towards labor market and away from inflation side.
RECENT DATA:
Since the last FOMC meeting, data has been mixed, but some concerns surrounding the labor market and growth have diminished in recent weeks. As mentioned above, the Fed’s focus is now shifting more towards its dual mandate, not just inflation, and the recent inflation data continues to suggest that the Fed has got it under control. Highlighting this, the July PPI was cooler-than-expected across the board, while CPI was as forecasted (aside from core Y/Y, which was also shy of consensus). However, employment data has been more mixed: July’s NFP and ISM Manufacturing PMI disappointed expectations, stoking recessionary fears, and saw money markets at its peak price in 130bps of rate cuts by year-end (vs 66bps post-Fed); since then, the last two weekly initial jobless claims reports have come in beneath expectations, while retail sales were much better than forecast in July, helping to sooth the recent economic concerns, and push back against expectations for a larger 50bps rate cut from the Fed in September.
MINUTES:
The minutes will reveal the extent to which a rate reduction was considered at the July meeting, as well as officials’ views on the labour market and the subsequent impact on monetary policy.
However, as always, the minutes are stale by a couple of weeks.
Additionally, Chair Powell is due to speak at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium (on Friday at 10:00EDT/15:00BST), which will likely overshadow the minutes, with traders likely to put greater weight on his remarks to gauge how the Fed may respond in September.
* * *
Bear in mind that Jackson-Hole has tended to be a ‘sell-the-news’ moment in recent years…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/21/2024 – 13:36
Bosnian janitor opens fire at school over labor dispute
A tragic incident took place on Wednesday morning when a gunman at a high school in Bosnia, who is believed to have been a former employee at the school, opened fire with an automatic weapon, leaving three employees killed. The shooting took place around 10:15 am in Sanski Most, which is located roughly 180 miles…
JACQUELINE TOBOROFF: New York City is the Left’s testing ground for turning illegal immigrants into voters
There is a very real chance that, if the Biden-Harris-Adams playbook succeeds, illegal immigrants will determine the future of our nation’s leadership.
HUMAN EVENTS: Is that it, Democrats?
The DNC is something arguably worse than bad: it’s dull.
RFK Jr. Can Save Liberalism…By Endorsing Trump
RFK Jr. Can Save Liberalism…By Endorsing Trump
Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance
“The Democratic Party positions itself as the party of liberty. Kamala Harris says that Americans should make personal decisions without the government telling them what to do. Tim Walz’s Golden Rule is ‘Mind your own damn business.’
In view of the censorship, surveillance, vaccine mandates, and the confederacy of fixers openly working to prevent me from getting on ballots, this is like the arsonist telling us he’s a firefighter. I am running to make America once again the land of liberty.”
On Tuesday, one of the big headlines to hit the wire was that RFK, Jr. could wind up dropping out of the race to support Donald Trump. The speculation came after this interview of Nicole Shanahan talking about how the DNC sabotaged their campaign and how they are considering joining forces with Donald Trump.
“There’s two options that we’re looking at and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Waltz presidency because we draw more votes from Trump,” she says during the interview. “Or we walk away right now and join forces with with Donald Trump and explain to our base why we’re making this decision.”
Hilariously, the news comes just days after the left-wing propaganda machine Washington Post tried to pass off a story that RFK, Jr. had gone groveling to the Harris campaign in order to back them.
Upon seeing this headline last week, I contacted my sources in the RFK, Jr. campaign, which are extremely close to Mr. Kennedy and trustworthy enough that they helped set up my recent podcast with him.
Those sources told me that the reporting about Kennedy wanting Harris’ help was “a load of crap.” Instead, they informed me that a family member of RFK, Jr. had tried to convince him, at a wedding, to talk to Harris on the phone.
My source told me directly:
“…we were at a wedding and one of [RFK, Jr.’s] cousins was like ‘let me please put you on the phone with Kamala to just talk’ and then they didn’t want to have a phone call…”
“…[it is RFK, Jr.’s] deal is talk to anyone anytime so not out of character…”
I then tweeted out the refutation to that report last Friday, which was picked up by precisely zero media outlets, thereby demonstrating how extraordinarily easily fake or extremely unreliable news can conveniently make its way into liberal headlines when it benefits them.
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Given the events of last week, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see Nicole Shanahan’s comments today refuting the WaPo claims as well, as I’m sure the campaign was inundated with people sending emails like mine last week after the story dropped.
I had actually jotted down the idea of calling for RFK, Jr. to endorse Trump a week or two ago and was planning on writing an article about it anyway. Given that it’s now being talked about in the mainstream media, I’ll make my points extremely concise.
Many former Democrats and liberals have switched over to the conservative party in the last decade or so as the calibration of the parties has shifted significantly. Left-wing causes have become extraordinarily far-left, while “classic liberal” causes now look more towards the center, or even slightly to the right, because of the Democratic Party’s drastic shift further left.
Prime examples of this include stances on capitalism and war. Looking to former President John F. Kennedy as an example, he was staunchly anti-war and warned of the dangers of moving towards communism. He wanted peace by diplomatic means, and fought for the cause of freedom and liberty, which is something that Democrats used to embrace before the authoritarian shift they’ve undergone the last decade.
Many of the causes that liberals used to support, like freedom of speech, have now become conservative talking points. An idea like Bitcoin would have been rabidly supported by the free thinkers, feminists, and hippies of the 1960s to the 1980s. Now, people like Elizabeth Warren think of it as the devil reincarnate because it doesn’t allow for enough government micromanaging or oversight.
Hell, former Democratic President Bill Clinton even went out of his way to balance the budget, an idea that is unconscionable for Democrats given today’s spending addiction and policy stances on the fiscal state of the country.
When you take a look at his policy choices, as he laid out to me on my podcast with him, RFK, Jr. really is a DINO in today’s age—a Democrat in name only.
Like Joe Biden, the party that he and his family have been threaded into for decades turned on him viciously and all but threw him out the back door and into the dumpster. His own family members have gone out and publicly railed against him in the press. His party wants nothing to do with him and sees him as a thorn in their side — they have infiltrated his campaign, taken him to court and fabricated headlines about him — as Shanahan described in the above interview.
The reasoning for this is simple: we simply don’t have a democratic process unfolding when it comes to selecting our next president.
At least in the Republican Party, people have started to unify around President Trump. If RFK, Jr. had been a Republican to begin with, the dynamic would’ve been interesting to watch, but he wasn’t. He was a Democrat before becoming an independent, and he went out on his own because, like Joe Biden, he had fallen out of favor with a select group of extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily rich elites that pull the strings for the entire party, arresting any true Democratic ideas or talking points that could get in their way fiercely and without hesitation. We all saw this in 2016 and 2020 with what they did to Bernie Sanders.
In short, the current Democratic Party is everything that former classic liberals used to fight against. They have become the party of reckless spending, the party of encouraging war, the party of censoring speech and media they don’t like, and the party of authoritarian oversight.
On top of this, on the economic side, the Democratic Party has simply become the party of socialism. As I stated in my last article about Kamala Harris, there’s no other way to describe her policy prescriptions other than the top of a very slippery slope that ends in communism. It broke today she is supporting Biden’s plan for 44% capital gains taxes and taxing unrealized gains, something that would undoubtedly destroy the U.S. economy in short order, as I wrote earlier this year.
With the nation running the multi-trillion-dollar deficit it’s running now, with our national debt skyrocketing and interest on the national debt over $1 trillion a year, while nations like China, Russia, and India are openly mounting a challenge to the U.S. dollar, it is unfathomable to me that a presidential candidate wants to make raising taxes further and price controls part of their fiscal policy.
Before we went off the gold standard, America became an economic powerhouse after World War II the old-fashioned way, with sound money. We had a bunch of people return to work, we became an extraordinarily productive nation, we balanced our checkbook, and we were modest with our spending, and, as a result, we saw the nation boom and even survived the inflationary crisis of the 1970s by hiking rates to a level that, today, would destroy the entire global economy.
How many policies that the Democrats support today would President John F. Kennedy have never thrown his support behind?
RFK, Jr. now has an extraordinary opportunity to recalibrate the legacy of his family’s name as standing for what they are best known for.
By withdrawing from the race and putting his support behind President Trump, he could easily help sway crucial votes that could help the nation return power to the people and away from the political elites who wield it now.
RFK, Jr. entered the race because he wanted to effect major change for the future of the United States for the better. Ironically, despite the fact that he won’t come anywhere near the vote total necessary to win, and despite the fact that he’s being left off of New York’s ballots, he still has that very same opportunity on the table, if he wants it, by endorsing Donald Trump and serving in his administration.
Now read:
- 1,307 Days: Kamala Harris Promises To Fix…Her Own Destructive Policies
- Tip Tax Toe: Kamala Harris’ Own IRS Pushed More Tip Tax Reporting Last Year
- Matt Taibbi: Kamala, Trump & The Death Of Objective Truth
- Modern Chickenshit Monetary Theory
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Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/21/2024 – 06:30
Emhoff Claims Kamala Harris Hits Cowards ‘Head On’ After Dodging Trump Debate
Vice President Kamala Harris deals with cowards “head on” and can “smell weakness,” her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, said on Tuesday during the Democrat National Convention (DNC) in Chicago.
The post Doug Emhoff Claims Kamala Harris Takes Cowards ‘Head On’ After She Refuses to Debate Donald Trump appeared first on Breitbart.
From Agrarianism To Transhumanism: The Long March To Dystopia
From Agrarianism To Transhumanism: The Long March To Dystopia
Authored by Colin Todhunter via Off-Guardian.org,
“A total demolition of the previous forms of existence is underway: how one comes into the world, biological sex, education, relationships, the family, even the diet that is about to become synthetic.”
Silvia Guerini, radical ecologist, in ‘From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg: A Critique of Gender Ideology’ (2023)
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain.
The big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and big financial institutions, like BlackRock and Vanguard, are also involved, whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, pushing biosynthetic (fake) food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating and financing the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.[2]
The billionaire interests behind this try to portray their techno-solutionism as some kind of humanitarian endeavour: saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, ‘helping farmers’ or ‘feeding the world’. But what it really amounts to is repackaging and greenwashing the dispossessive strategies of imperialism.
It involves a shift towards a ‘one world agriculture’ under the control of agritech and the data giants, which is to be based on genetically engineered seeds, laboratory created products that resemble food, ‘precision’ and ‘data-driven’ agriculture and farming without farmers, with the entire agrifood chain, from field (or lab) to retail, being governed by monopolistic e-commerce platforms determined by artificial intelligence systems and algorithms.
Those who are pushing this agenda have a vision not only for farmers but also for humanity in general.
The elites through their military-digital-financial (Pentagon/Silicon Valley/Big Finance) complex want to use their technologies to reshape the world and redefine what it means to be human. They regard humans, their cultures and their practices, like nature itself, as a problem and deficient.
Farmers are to be displaced and replaced with drones, machines and cloud-based computing. Food is to be redefined and people are to be fed synthetic, genetically engineered products. Cultures are to be eradicated, and humanity is to be fully urbanised, subservient and disconnected from the natural world.
What it means to be human is to be radically transformed. But what has it meant to be human until now or at least prior to the (relatively recent) Industrial Revolution and associated mass urbanisation?
To answer this question, we need to discuss our connection to nature and what most of humanity was involved in prior to industrialisation — cultivating food.
Many of the ancient rituals and celebrations of our forebears were built around stories, myths and rituals that helped them come to terms with some of the most fundamental issues of existence, from death to rebirth and fertility. These culturally embedded beliefs and practices served to sanctify their practical relationship with nature and its role in sustaining human life.
As agriculture became key to human survival, the planting and harvesting of crops and other seasonal activities associated with food production were central to these customs.
Humans celebrated nature and the life it gave birth to. Ancient beliefs and rituals were imbued with hope and renewal and people had a necessary and immediate relationship with the sun, seeds, animals, wind, fire, soil and rain and the changing seasons that nourished and brought life. Our cultural and social relationships with agrarian production and associated deities had a sound practical base.
People’s lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.
Silvia Guerini, whose quote introduces this article, notes the importance of deep-rooted relationships and the rituals that re-affirm them. She says that through rituals a community recognises itself and its place in the world. They create the spirit of a rooted community by contributing to rooting and making a single existence endure in a time, in a territory, in a community.
Professor Robert W Nicholls explains that the cults of Woden and Thor were superimposed on far older and better-rooted beliefs related to the sun and the earth, the crops and the animals and the rotation of the seasons between the light and warmth of summer and the cold and dark of winter.
Humanity’s relationship with farming and food and our connections to land, nature and community has for millennia defined what it means to be human.
Take India, for example. Environmental scientist Viva Kermani says that Hinduism is the world’s largest nature-based religion that:
“…recognises and seeks the Divine in nature and acknowledges everything as sacred. It views the earth as our Mother and hence advocates that it should not be exploited. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse and the exploitation of the earth and its resources.”
Kermani notes that ancient scriptures instructed people that the animals and plants found in India are sacred and, therefore, all aspects of nature are to be revered. She adds that this understanding of and reverence towards the environment is common to all Indic religious and spiritual systems: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.
According to Kermani, the Vedic deities have deep symbolism and many layers of existence. One such association is with ecology. Surya is associated with the sun, the source of heat and light that nourishes everyone; Indra is associated with rain, crops, and abundance; and Agni is the deity of fire and transformation and controls all changes.
She notes that the Vrikshayurveda, an ancient Sanskrit text on the science of plants and trees, contains details about soil conservation, planting, sowing, treatment, propagating, how to deal with pests and diseases and a lot more.
Like Nicholls, Kermani provides insight into some of the profound cultural, philosophical and practical aspects of humanity’s connection to nature and food production.
This connection resonates with agrarianism, a philosophy based on cooperative labour and fellowship, which stands in stark contrast to the values and impacts of urban life, capitalism and technology that are seen as detrimental to independence and dignity. Agrarianism, too, emphasises a spiritual dimension as well as the value of rural society, small farms, widespread property ownership and political decentralisation.
The prominent proponent of agrarianism Wendell Berry says:
The revolution which began with machines and chemicals now continues with automation, computers and biotechnology.”
For Berry, agrarianism is not a sentimental longing for a time past. Colonial attitudes, domestic, foreign and now global, have resisted true agrarianism almost from the beginning — there has never been fully sustainable, stable, locally adapted, land-based economies.
However, Berry provides many examples of small (and larger) farms that have similar output as industrial agriculture with one third of the energy.
In his poem ‘A Spiritual Journey’, Berry writes the following:
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.”
But in the cold, centralised, technocratic dystopia that is planned, humanity’s spiritual connection to the countryside, food and agrarian production are to be cast into the dustbin of history.
Silvia Guerini says:
The past becomes something to be erased in order to break the thread that binds us to a history, to a tradition, to a belonging, for the transition towards a new uprooted humanity, without past, without memory… a new humanity dehumanised in its essence, totally in the hands of the manipulators of reality and truth”.
This dehumanised humanity severed from the past is part of the wider agenda of transhumanism. For instance, we are not just seeing a push towards a world without farmers and everything that has connected us to the soil but, according to Guerini, also a world without mothers.
She argues that those behind test-tube babies and surrogate motherhood now have their sights on genetic engineering and artificial wombs, which would cut women out of the reproductive process. Guerini predicts that artificial wombs could eventually be demanded, or rather marketed, as a right for everyone, including transgender people. It is interesting that the language around pregnancy is already contested with the omission of ‘women’ from statements like ‘persons who can get pregnant’.
Of course, there has long been a blurring of lines between biotechnology, eugenics and genetic engineering. Genetically engineered crops, gene drives and gene editing are now a reality, but the ultimate goal is marrying artificial intelligence, bionanotechnology and genetic engineering to produce the one-world transhuman.
This is being pushed by powerful interests, who, according to Guerini, are using a rainbow, transgenic left and LGBTQ+ organisations to promote a new synthetic identity and claim to new rights. She says this is an attack on life, on nature, on “what is born, as opposed to artificial” and adds that all ties to the real, natural world must be severed.
It is interesting that in its report Future of Food, the UK supermarket giant Sainsburys celebrates a future where we are microchipped and tracked and neural laces have the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms that could work out exactly what food (delivered by drone) we need to support us at a particular time in our life. All sold as ‘personal optimisation’.
Moreover, it is likely, according to the report, that we will be getting key nutrients through implants. Part of these nutrients will come in the form of lab-grown food and insects.
A neural lace is an ultra-thin mesh that can be implanted in the skull, forming a collection of electrodes capable of monitoring brain function. It creates an interface between the brain and the machine.
Sainsburys does a pretty good job of trying to promote a dystopian future where AI has taken your job, but, according to the report, you have lots of time to celebrate the wonderful, warped world of ‘food culture’ created by the supermarket and your digital overlords.
Technofeudalism meets transhumanism — all for your convenience, of course.
But none of this will happen overnight. And whether the technology will deliver remains to be seen. Those who are promoting this brave new world might have overplayed their hand but will spend the following decades trying to drive their vision forward.
But arrogance is their Achilles heel.
There is still time to educate, to organise, to resist and to agitate against this hubris, not least by challenging the industrial food giants and the system that sustains them and by advocating for and creating grass-root food movements and local economies that strengthen food sovereignty.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/20/2024 – 23:25