Today's News: August 14, 2020

World News

Erdogan warns of ‘high price’ following attack on Turkish ship

NBC – Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that any attack on a Turkish ship exploring for oil and gas in disputed Mediterranean waters would incur a “high price” and suggested Turkey had already acted on that warning.
Tensions in the eastern Mediterranean have risen sharply this week after Turkey sent a survey vessel to the region, escorted by warships, in a move Greece decried as illegal.
“We said that if you attack our Oruc Reis you will pay a high price, and they got their first answer today,” Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara without giving details.
The Oruc Reis set out on Monday with its military escort to survey waters between Crete and Cyprus.
In response, President Emmanuel Macron said France would increase its military presence in the region and called on Ankara to stop its exploration work. French and Greek forces held military training exercises off Crete on Thursday.

US seizure of Iran fuel bound for Venezuela was largest confiscation of its kind ever, DOJ confirms

Fox – The Justice Department (DOJ) on Friday announced the U.S. government’s “largest-ever” seizure of fuel shipments from Iran in a successful disruption of a multimillion-dollar shipment by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated foreign terrorist organization, that was bound for Venezuela.
The Justice Department on Friday said it has “successfully executed” the seizure order and confiscated the cargo from all four vessels, which totaled approximately 1.116 million barrels of petroleum.

U.S. News, Politics & Government

Lockdown Restrictions Are A Test To See How Much Tyranny Americans Will Accept

Alt Market – The pandemic lockdowns are a complicated issue, and that is absolutely deliberate. The point of 4th Generation psychological warfare is to present the target individual or population with a hard choice – a no-win scenario. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I often equate this to the key moves in a difficult chess game; your primary goal is to create a dual threat and force your opponent to sacrifice one piece over another in order to escape with the least amount of damage. Do this a few times and you have won the long game.
There are multiple aspects to the global pandemic which seem engineered to push our society to make “sacrificial decisions”. We can choose to sacrifice the lives of those that are susceptible to the virus, sacrifice our economy, or sacrifice many of our freedoms with the promise that the economy and lives will be protected. The easiest choice is always to give away a little more freedom. We’ll get it all back eventually…right?
Of course, we don’t actually get to “choose” anything when we play along with this game. 4th Gen warfare is meant to eventually take IT ALL from the target population while making people think it was their choice to give those things away.
To be clear, it’s not only the pandemic being exploited as leverage to conjure these situations. The leftist riots are another example of a bought and paid for crisis that is being used in an attempt to convince half of Americans that breaking constitutional principles and instituting unprecedented government power is somehow an acceptable sacrifice. The riots and the virus response work hand-in-hand; one is created to get leftists to demand totalitarianism in the name of public safety, the other is created to get conservatives to demand totalitarianism in the name of public safety.
The solution always ends up being totalitarian government. There are those that would have you believe that this is the only way. The new propaganda meme out there is:
“Silly libertarians live in a fantasy world where freedom is valued over security in times of crisis. We don’t have the luxury of freedom when communist terrorists/deadly virus threaten to destroy the fabric of our society…”
Sound familiar? Yes, this nonsense narrative is everywhere on forums and message boards these days, almost as if someone was paying people to inject it into everyday discussion. The problem is, I’ve seen this all before. Right after the events of 9/11, America went insane for at least a few years, hyperfocused on the threat of terrorists while ignoring the greater root danger of all powerful government. The number of constitutional protections being violated in the name of “beating the terrorists” was staggering, and the number of mostly conservative citizens cheering for this at the time was immense.
Today’s calls for overreaching government power in the name of “beating coronavirus” or “beating the extreme left” are no different. In the wake of widespread fear, people suffer from fits of temporary madness that allows them rationalize moral relativism and unnecessary sacrifices.
I’ve never really understood that aspect of behavior among certain groups. I’ve never been so fearful of losing my life that I was willing to hand over anything including my freedom and my future on the mere chance that I could stay alive just a little longer. But for some, that fear dominates their every waking moment.
To me, this would be a torturous and empty existence. What do these people have to live for anyway? Obviously they don’t care about their children because they are willing to give away their children’s future just so they can feel safer today. Do they have some kind of epic contribution for the good of humanity and they feel they must do anything to survive long enough to make it happen? Are they working on the cure for cancer or a path to world peace? I doubt it.
More likely they work in an office building or a McDonalds or teach kindergarten at a public school. They aren’t contributing all that much, but they are perfectly willing to trade their freedom and everyone’s freedom for a little more time on this Earth. I’ve seen 85-year-old men that can’t move around without a walker raging about people who “don’t wear masks” and how they should be “thrown in jail”.

Poll: Majority Of Conservative Students Say They ‘Self Censor’ To Avoid Upsetting Leftists

Infowars- A survey conducted by College Fix recently has found that a majority of conservative students say they will ‘self censor’ around others so as not to offend or upset leftists.
“With the current political climate, do you expect to self-censor yourself in class this semester so your professors or peers don’t take offense at your ideas?” the survey asked.
A total of 54 percent of conservatives said they would indeed keep their political views to themselves for this reason.
On the flip side, only 15% of those who identified as Democrats said they would temper their political opinions so as not to cause friction.
As College Fix notes, this means that “Republican college students are three times more likely to self-censor than Democratic ones”

Trump Raises Possibility of Snowden Pardon

NY Post – President Trump polled his aides on Thursday about whether he should let anti-surveillance whistleblower and leaker Edward Snowden return to the US from Russia without going to prison, saying he was open to it.
“There are a lot of people that think that he is not being treated fairly. I mean, I hear that,” Trump told The Post in an exclusive interview in the Oval Office, before soliciting views from his staff.
Trump commented on Snowden for the first time as president after accusing former President Barack Obama of spying on his 2016 campaign.
“When you look at [former FBI Director James] Comey and [former FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe, and [former CIA Director John] Brennan — and, excuse me, the man that sat at this desk, President Obama, got caught spying on my campaign with Biden. Biden and Obama, and they got caught spying on the campaign,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments reflect a remarkable softening in his views about the man he once deemed a “traitor” worthy of execution. Republican lawmakers and the Justice Department’s inspector general recently highlighted misuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the secret FISA court to surveil former Trump adviser Carter Page.

Fauci says there is ‘no reason’ Americans can’t vote in person in November

Fox – National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci said this week there is “no reason” Americans can’t vote in person for the 2020 presidential election, so long as voters follow proper social distancing guidelines amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“I think if carefully done, according to the guidelines, there’s no reason that I can see why that not be the case,” Fauci told ABC News this week. “If you go and wear a mask, if you observe the physical distancing, and don’t have a crowded situation, there’s no reason why shouldn’t be able to do that.”

Economy & Business

Gold Prices Show There’s a “Big Short” Going on in Official Currencies

Mises – On August 4, 2020, the price of gold surpassed $2,000 per ounce, currently trading around an all-time high of $2,050 per ounce. While one may say that the price of gold is on the rise, it would actually be more meaningful to say that the purchasing power of the world’s fiat currencies vis-à-vis gold is on the decline, because this is what a rising price for gold and silver in, say, US dollars, euros, Chinese renminbi, Japanese yen, or Swiss francs really stands for: The higher the price of this precious metal, the lower the exchange value of official currencies.

Markets rise as economy struggles; ‘It does not make sense’

The Hill – The expression “stock markets are not the economy” may have never been truer.
The S&P 500, an index that tracks the country’s largest publicly traded companies, has all but erased its pandemic losses and closed within a fraction of a percentage point of its all-time high Thursday.
But far away from Wall Street, the economy on main streets in cities and towns across the country feel as if they are in tatters.

Health

Dr. Fauci says aiming for herd immunity would lead to ‘enormous’ death toll

NY Post – Dr. Anthony Fauci warned about a staggering death toll from the coronavirus, particularly among vulnerable people, if the US allows the infections to sweep across the country in a bid to achieve possible herd immunity.
“If everyone contracted it, even with the relatively high percentage of people without symptoms … a lot of people are going to die,” the nation’s top infectious diseases expert said during a live Instagram session Thursday with actor Matthew McConaughey, CNN reported.
“You look at the United States of America with our epidemic of obesity, as it were. With the number of people with hypertension. With the number of people with diabetes. If everyone got infected, the death toll would be enormous and totally unacceptable,” said Fauci, 79, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Vaccine Rush Leaves Little Recourse for Anyone It Harms

Bloomberg – Americans who suffer adverse reactions to coronavirus vaccines that the U.S. is racing to develop will have a hard time getting compensated for injuries from the drugs.
That’s because pandemic-related claims for vaccines will be routed to a rarely used federal program set up to encourage drugmakers to help combat public health emergencies. It spares pharmaceutical and device makers from costly liability lawsuits in exchange for taxpayers compensating injured patients — though it doesn’t guarantee there’s funding to do so.
Since it began in 2009, the program has paid out less than $6 million, and it has yet to receive any dedicated U.S. government funding for Covid-19.
“In the best case scenario, this is going to be a big deal,” said Richard Topping, a former Justice Department attorney who represented the U.S. during disputes over the debunked link between vaccines and autism in children. “Worst case scenario? It will be a crisis.”
President Donald Trump is pushing drugmakers to develop a Covid-19 vaccine in record time under an initiative known as Operation Warp Speed that seeks to deliver 300 million doses by January 2021. However, most Americans are unlikely to actually receive a shot until much later next year, according to U.S. top infectious disease doctor Anthony Fauci. As the U.S. vies to be first, Russia this week said it will soon start mass inoculations — even though safety and efficacy tests on its vaccine aren’t complete, causing concern in public health experts.

Intense workouts can stress immune system, heighten risk of respiratory illnesses, coronavirus: study

Fox – Extreme exercise routines like marathon running, Crossfit and working out to exhaustion could make some individuals more vulnerable to contracting COVID-19, new research suggests.
Doctors at the American College of Sports Medicine say that some high-intensity forms of fitness can increase a person’s risk of developing the new coronavirus because of increased stress to the immune system that makes it harder to fight off viruses for a short period of time.
“This may not be the time to train for peak performance,” doctors note in the August edition of ACSM’s “Current Sports Medicine Reports,” explaining that this is highly important for those with a heightened risk for coronavirus, who should “refrain from exhaustive exercise,” unusually high exercise workloads” and “overtraining.”
After a high-intensity workout like long-distance running or heavy lifting, ACSM Dr. Thomas Best, a team physician at the University of Miami, tells Fox News the immune system becomes suppressed for a couple of weeks following the exhaustive spurt of exercise, which can increase the risk for viral illnesses like COVID-19.