from RT America
Murder Rates Rise Alongside Anti-Police Demonstrations
by Michael Ginsberg
DailyCaller.com
Nine cities with some of America’s largest murder rate increases hosted Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police protests in 2020.
Data analyst and criminologist Jeff Asher published a preliminary look at America’s skyrocketing murder rate. He found that murder rates rose year over year in 51 out of the 57 locales from which he accessed data.
Nine of the ten cities with the highest murder rate increases and more than 20 killings hosted sustained Black Lives Matter protests and riots during the summer. These are evidence of what Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald calls the Ferguson Effect, wherein anti-police protests and rioting lead to less proactive policing. The absence in police presence then leads to a spike in violent crime.
Padilla: Covid Numbers in California Due to ‘Covid Fatigue,’ People Not Taking Precautions, and Travel to and from ‘Less Restrictive’ States
by Ian Hanchett
Breitbart.com
On Tuesday’s broadcast of “CNN Tonight,” Sen.-Designate Alex Padilla (D-CA) stated that the large amount of coronavirus cases in California is due to “COVID fatigue,” people “getting a little too comfortable,” in addition to people traveling to and from states that are less restrictive.
Padilla said, “I think if you look at the numbers and the charts for the better part of the year, Gov. Newsom’s quick, bold action paid dividends. Our curve was relatively flat, especially on a per capita basis for a good chunk of the year. But again, as you said, we’ve been hearing about, whether it’s COVID fatigue, and people are maybe taking it a little — getting a little too comfortable, thinking they would be immune or that the worst of it was over when it wasn’t true. Second, California can do all the things it needs to do, but if you have people still coming in and out from other states that have been less restrictive, right? Arizona is just right next door, for example, or all the people that flew throughout Thanksgiving weekend, all that is now coming home to roost. So, once again, we’ve got to tighten the belt in terms of that mobility, in terms of public health and minimizing exposure to try to flatten the curve down once again.”
Five Times This Year the New York Times Accidentally Told the Truth
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
The American Institute for Economic Research
The paper of record in 2020 shifted dramatically to the most illiberal stance possible on the virus, pushing for full lockdowns, and ignoring or burying any information that might contradict the case for this unprecedented experiment in social and economic control. This article highlights the exceptions.
The first shocking sign of the placing of a persistent bias was a podcast with reporter Donald McNeil on February 27. This was the beginning. It was grossly irresponsible. He asserted that half the American public would get this disease and that it would have a case fatality rate of 2.5%, or 25 times as deadly as flu, hence 4.8 million dead people. No consideration of demographic gradients in risk and no knowledge of viral basics such as the tradeoff between severity and prevalence. Even if you leave aside the fog of fatality misclassification, he exaggerated the risk by 12 times but still spoke with a sense of certainty designed to create panic.
The Best of Humanity, and the Worst of Humanity…
by Michael Snyder
End of the American Dream
There are moments that restore our faith in humanity, and there are also moments that destroy it. We were created to love and to be loved, and in this article I will share a couple examples of incredible acts of love. But there are many others that have become so twisted that they will engage in unspeakable acts of evil without even thinking twice about it. Of course on Christmas Day we witnessed an unspeakable act of evil when Anthony Quinn Warner blew himself up in front of the AT&T building in downtown Nashville. But even in the midst of such a great tragedy, incredible things happened that are making headlines all over the globe. Light and darkness often coexist side by side, but sometimes things get so dark that we forget that the light is still there.
One story that encouraged me lately was the story of a 7-year-old boy named Eli that rushed into a burning home to save his 22-month-old sister…
Seasonal Rally Nipping at Bears’ Heels
by Rick Ackerman
RickAckerman.com
The broad averages have been lapping at some long-term rally targets this week, although not so voraciously that bears should dive for cover quite yet. A 304.07 target for DIA has been exceeded so far by 1.63 points; a 312.29 target in QQQ by 2.35 points; and 12,829 target in the E-Mini Nasdaq by 89 points, or 0.6%. These Hidden Pivot resistance points have already served us well, keeping us comfortably on the right side of powerful uptrends that flouted the pandemic’s fatal effect on a wide swath of the U.S. economy. Small businesses are failing by the thousands each day, creating structural unemployment problems that will be with us even if there are ten more stimulus packages yet to come. Wall Street seems not to care, as long as a handful of mega-cap companies that earn their money mainly from advertising continue to grow in value. They have been inflating ‘wealth’ by tens of billions of dollars each day, dulling whatever lessons investors may have learned from the last bear market. Please note that the Dow Industrials are poised to rally a further 2300 points, to at least 32,692, if the new year begins with a bang. It’s hard to imagine what could stop it.
What’s the Point? ER Nurse Tests Positive for Covid-19 Eight Days After Receiving Vaccine
Experimental vaccination proving to be a total failure so far
by Kelen McBreen
Info Wars
A San Diego, California ER nurse has tested positive for COVID-19, just eight days after receiving his first dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine.
After taking the vaccine on December 18th, nurse Matthew W. felt fine.
Six days later he came down with the chills, muscle aches and fatigue after working a shift in a COVID-19 unit.
Two days later and still under the weather, Matthew took a COVID-19 test that came back positive.
Dr. Christian Ramers, an infectious disease specialist involved in the vaccine rollout at the county level, told ABC 10, “It’s not unexpected at all. If you work through the numbers, this is exactly what we’d expect to happen if someone is exposed.”
Stocks and Precious Metals Charts – On the Road to Damascus
[…] The Dollar managed to hang on to the 90 handle today.
Gold gained slightly, while silver gave up a little of its recent gains.
Stocks were weak in the broader markets, but showed some buying in the ‘story stocks’ especially big cap techs.
Volumes and market activity remain very low due to seasonal factors.
You will be happier if you stop looking to see every little thing that people do that bothers you.
And it will give you more time to look at yourself.
That’s really the point of the distraction and obsession with finding faults in others— to prevent us from looking at ourselves, and into our own hardened and foolish and deluded hearts.
Have a pleasant evening.
Albert Edwards – Policymakers F**king it Up, Plus Gold, Silver and U.S. Dollar
from King World News
Albert Edwards says policymakers are f**kikng it up, plus a look at gold, silver and the US dollar.
F**cking It Up
December 29 (King World News) – Albert Edwards, Former Global Strategist at Société Générale: I think I prefer to remain what Summers terms “an Outsider”, especially when it’s people like him who are on the inside. They can sit in a room together and marvel at their own genius, shaping policy but f**king it up time and time again with zero consequences for themselves.
Gold
Ole Hansen, Head of Commodity Strategy at SaxoBank: Gold looks a bit tired as it continues to challenge the support line from the early December low, currently at $1873/oz. Upside limited to the band of resistance above $1900/oz
Finding Mining Stock Multi-Bagger Success as a Private Investor with Luc ten Have
Luc ten Have is well-respected mining speculator at CEO.ca where he is publicly recognized as a top contributor. On a prior MSE podcast, CEO.ca founder Tommy Humphreys said of Luc that he is “so good at finding opportunities as a retail investor.” Luc is a private mining investor based in Holland who has close to ten years’ experience speculating in resource stocks. In this interview, Luc discusses how he began investing in mining stocks, key lessons learned along the way as well as his current approach to mining speculation. Luc also shares a few mining stocks he thinks could perform well in 2021.
Click Here to Listen to the Audio
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More Terrorism on the Tracks? Officials in Washington Investigate Latest Train Derailment
from Zero Hedge
By Bill Wilson of RT&S,
Officials are trying to figure out how a BNSF train carrying crude oil derailed in Whatcom County, Wash., on Dec. 22. The accident caused a fire that lasted well into the night. First responders eventually got the fire under control.
About seven railcars left the tracks near Custer, Wash. No injuries were reported and the scene was still being cleaned the morning of Dec. 23.
Everyone within a half-mile radius was asked to evacuate, and the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office told people to stay away from the accident scene. Interstate 5 was closed between Grandview Road and Birch Bay Lynden Road for about one hour.
Ukraine Press Conference Explicitly Ties Hunter and Joe Biden to Corruption
by Andrea Widburg
American Thinker
A video from a press conference in Ukraine is going viral. It is the follow-up to a video press conference that Ukraine released over a year ago, in which members of the Ukraine Parliament demanded that President Zelensky and President Trump investigate billions of dollars of corruption in Ukraine that is tied to the U.S. The newly released video is meant to provide documentary and eyewitness information about the corruption — and the Biden family figures prominently in the story.
The video is long — over an hour — and not all of it involves the Biden family. This post quotes those portions of the press conference that address Biden family corruption. The gist of it is that, while Democrats obsess about Trump’s purported criminality, despite the absence of any evidence, their chosen standard-bearer is extraordinarily corrupt.
Tom Woods: Doctor Accidentally Tells Truth About Covid, Then Pretends it Never Happened
by John Rubino
Dollar Collapse
From the Tom Woods Show:
Two items for you today.
First, I couldn’t resist this Politico headline from last week: “Locked-down California runs out of reasons for surprising surge.”
After all, they’ve been among the most brutal, if not the most brutal, of the hard lockdown states.
And yet they’re claiming that their hospital system is on the verge of collapse.
And for those trying to pretend that it’s noncompliant Republicans driving the surge, why did the numbers shoot up in heavily leftist San Francisco as well?
Every Time Larry Summers Challenges Bernie Sanders, It Ends Badly for All Americans
by Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Wall Street on Parade
As Senator Bernie Sanders advocates for $2,000 pandemic relief checks for struggling Americans, Larry Summers is challenging the premise of $2,000 checks using ginned-up statistics that were dubiously published by Bloomberg News on Sunday.
Larry Summers stepped into Robert Rubin’s post as Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton after Rubin left to make $15 million a year serving on Citigroup’s board. Citigroup was the Frankenbank that both Summers and Rubin made possible by advocating for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. That seminal piece of legislation from 1933 had successfully banned the combination of deposit-taking banks with Wall Street’s casino trading houses for 66 years until these two men and their ilk got Clinton to sign its repeal in 1999.
At the November 12, 1999 signing ceremony for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the legislation that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, Summers said this:
The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing to Do with Trump
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom.
by Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald’s Blog
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.