The Big Story
The Chinese government has officially lifted its lockdown on Shanghai, bringing to an end one of the largest prison experiments in human history, in which some 25 million people were forcibly confined to their homes. The strict lockdown crippled the economy in the financial and commercial hub: total retail sales in Shanghai were down 48.3% in April from the same period last year, the equivalent of more than $10 billion in lost revenue, according to statistics released last month by Shanghai’s government. The major exception to the lockdown was made for workers deemed critical, a group including automakers and chip producers, who spent the past two months sleeping inside factories and offices, isolated from their families. The full human toll of the policy in Shanghai, including the number of people who may have died during or due to the lockdown, is not yet clear. With residents free to move again, the government of Shanghai just banned use of the word lockdown in the media, according to a new report in the China Digital Times. Despite China’s strict media controls and censorship, numerous videos were released during the lockdown showing Shanghai residents complaining about a lack of access to food and critical medical supplies. “This virus can’t kill us. Starvation can,” a man says in a montage video called “The Voice of April” that was disseminated on Chinese social media platforms. In other videos, residents could be seen begging for food and threatening to riot while Chinese state officials in full-body protective suits threaten and arrest non-compliant citizens. While China’s “zero COVID” approach to the pandemic was justified by the government and its defenders as harsh but effective, in fact its health benefits are impossible to verify due to China’s record of concealing and falsifying data related to the disease—a pattern that goes back to the origins of the virus.
Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/shanghai-workers-cheer-as-covid-lockdown-ends-no-more-bunking-at-the-office-11654167420
In The Back Pages: The Banality of Lockdown Evil
The Rest
→ A real, working ear formed from human cells was made in what appears to be the first successful use of living tissue as the raw material for 3D printing. Do you hear me? They made an ear! The ear, manufactured by a Queens, New York-based company called 3DBio Therapeutics, was successfully transplanted onto a human patient in March. Because it was made from her cells, scientists say it’s unlikely the graft will be rejected. The new ear, which was printed to match the exact look of the woman’s other ear, is not only functional as a hearing organ; it’s also able to grow new cartilage tissue. “Further down the road,” according to scientists who spoke to The New York Times, “3D printing could even produce far more complex vital organs, like livers, kidneys, and pancreases.” We officially take back—for today, at least—the skepticism that The Scroll normally evinces toward the scientific and medical establishments. Sometimes technology is a miracle for humanity.
→ A mass shooting on Wednesday at an Oklahoma hospital in which four people were killed appears to have been targeting a surgeon who had performed back surgery on the suspected gunman. In a letter recovered at the scene of the shooting, the suspected shooter, who died from what law enforcement officials believe was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, declared his intention to kill the doctor whom he blamed for his ongoing back pain as well as “anyone who got in his way.”
→ A U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday halted a Texas law governing moderation policies for social media platforms and laid the groundwork for a forthcoming landmark First Amendment decision on social media censorship. Known as HB 20, the Texas law, signed last September by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, forbids social platforms with more than 50 million active users from restricting user posts because of “the viewpoint of the user.” Abbott called the law a bulwark against the “dangerous movement by some social media companies to silence conservative ideas and values.” But trade groups representing Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter challenged the law, saying that it violated the tech companies’ First Amendment rights and ran the risk of forcing the companies to host “pornography, spam, and material harmful to children.” After the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a lower court’s injunction blocking the rule, the platform trade groups sought an emergency ruling from the Supreme Court. The 5-4 ruling in the case was made with unusual coalitions on both the majority and dissenting sides, including conservative and liberal justices.
→ Legendary Israeli filmmaker Uri Zohar, who became famous for directing a series of comedies before abandoning film in the 1970s to become an Orthodox Haredi rabbi, died on Thursday. He was 86. Several of Zohar’s best-known films starred his close friend, singer Arik Einstein. Two of Zohar’s sons would go on to marry two of Einstein’s daughters.
Check out these stories from Tablet for more on Zohar and his place in Israeli culture and cinema.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-seven-quintessentially-israeli-movies
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/sex-beach-overrated
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/baal-teshuva-the-next-generation
→ The private equity industry often functions as a Ponzi scheme, according to Vincent Mortier, the chief investment officer of Amundi, a French asset management company that ranks as the largest in Europe and one of the 10 largest in the world. “Some parts of private equity look like a pyramid scheme in a way,” Mortier said during a presentation on Wednesday. “You know you can sell [assets] to another private equity firm for 20 or 30 times earnings. That’s why you can talk about a Ponzi. It’s a circular thing.” Investors tend to have their money tied up with private equity firms for several years, and the firms are not required to report on how those investments are doing. This, Mortier argues, incentivizes private equity firms to pass assets back and forth at inflated prices that don’t reflect the actual value of the asset. “Eventually there will be casualties,” Mortier said, as these assets are finally found to be wildly overvalued, “but that might not be for three, four, or five years.” Those casualties, meanwhile, will convulse the whole global economy, as private equity presently controls $6 trillion worth of global assets.
→ The COVID-19 pandemic has produced more than 8.4 million tons of plastic waste, with some 26,000 tons of that ending up in the ocean, according to the first study of the ecological impact of the pandemic, published in November in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Of that waste, 87% came from hospitals and included plastic masks, gloves, and gowns. More recently, studies published in Nature Sustainability have found that, from March to October 2020, there was a 9,000% increase in the amount of mask-related pollution and that mask mandates that don’t also anticipate mask waste are key contributors to this problem. “If you start a mandate for something,” the study concluded, “also support its removal treatment.”
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Let us be clear, this committee would not order the leather community to wear polyester at the parade. This committee would not order the drag community to wear flannel. But they have told us, peace officers, that if we wear our uniforms, we may not attend.”
- From a statement released Monday by the San Francisco Police Officers Pride Alliance in response to the San Francisco Pride committee’s refusal to reverse a 2020 decision banning law enforcement from marching in uniform.
→ In another mark of NFTs growing legitimacy—you can’t call yourself a genuine currency without some old-fashioned fraud—the first NFT insider-trading charge was filed on Wednesday in federal court, when Nathaniel Chastain, a former product manager for an NFT marketplace, was arrested and charged with fraud and money laundering. “Today’s charges demonstrate the commitment of this office to stamping out insider trading—whether it occurs on the stock market or the blockchain,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. Chastain was tasked with featuring NFTs on the home page of OpenSea, a popular NFT marketplace; featured NFTs would often see their prices push up. Prosecutors allege that Chastain cashed in on his advance knowledge by buying up some of the products that would then be featured, buying dozens of NFTs with anonymous accounts and then selling them at two to five times the price he purchased them for.
→ Sheryl Sandberg, who has served as Meta’s chief operating officer for 14 years, announced on Wednesday that she’ll be stepping down from that role. Sandberg will remain on Meta’s board and says she’ll focus on “the next chapter of her life.” The first few chapters have been momentous ones: Sandberg served as the chief of staff to Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, before she joined Google to develop its targeted advertising program and then Facebook in 2008 to work with Mark Zuckerberg on the company’s global expansion. Google’s ads and Facebook’s growth have both been enormously lucrative projects that are now imperiled by more aggressive regulators in Europe and Congress, who recognize these companies as monopolistic, anti-competitive, and damaging to business and civic institutions. Sandberg thus leaves Meta as it faces considerable challenges, with no clear strategy for growth and regulators gathering at the castle gates. News of her departure, meanwhile, caused Meta’s stock to drop 2%, deepening its downward trend in 2022.
→ China has sought to shut down media coverage related to its aggressive maneuvers in Taiwan, where the Chinese military conducted a combat “readiness patrol” this week, which it said was necessary due to “collusion” between Taipei and Washington, D.C. The strong-arming from China, which has limited press access to officials traveling overseas and sent letters to newspaper editors countering their coverage, including to the editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post countering their coverage, comes as tensions between Taipei and Beijing continue to escalate. Beijing maintains that Taiwan is part of China, while the small, democratic island nation insists on its sovereignty. In May, when asked if the United States would defend Taiwan in the case of an attack from China—a question posed because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and President Xi Jinping’s support for that invasion—Biden bucked the previous U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” (perhaps unwittingly) by saying that he would.
→ Almost 7,500 pedestrians were killed in the United States in 2021, marking a 40-year high. This grim record is largely attributable to U.S. infrastructure, which prioritizes the speed of cars over the safety of citizens. See the map below for which states had the most pedestrian deaths per 100,000 residents.
See the map here: https://dataviz.nbcnews.com/projects/20220524-pedestrian-deaths-map/
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Tablet contributor Michael Senger has compiled a list of all the times that Western politicians and public health officials have endorsed or praised the Chinese government’s approach to handling the virus over the past two years. It’s a long list, and we are excerpting it here, but you can read the full version over at Senger’s Substack, “The New Normal.”
In Hannah Arendt’s report on Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, Arendt concludes that Eichmann was no unique monster but rather a very bland individual who never developed any moral center outside of the groups to which he belonged, and that he had been motivated primarily by blind dedication to the goals and incentives of the Nazi regime. Arendt coined this “the banality of evil.”
In our own time, “the banality of evil” could just as easily be “the banality of intelligence failures.” As Dr. Scott Atlas, former adviser to the White House coronavirus task force, observed:
The behavior of the United States and the Western world to this virus is just an obvious indication of how to bring the United States to its knees … And this is very frightening because if I were China—and I’m not a foreign policy person, but this is so obvious to me—anyone, North Korea, if they release a virus or even say there’s a virus, ‘Look, it’s killing our people,’ the United States shuts down immediately … There is no American strength in my view of its people to say no. We can’t even say no to having a five-year-old being mandated to have a mask on his face for eight hours a day.
I’d like to nominate Scott Atlas for “foreign policy person.” In this short quote, Atlas summarizes a gaping national security hole that, to this day, appears to elude our leading think tanks and officials. For all the trillions of dollars that NATO spends on military and cybersecurity hardware, much of which is meant to protect us from China, those in charge of our response to Covid have shown a staggering credulity in swallowing data and information about the virus—and about the effectiveness of totalitarian mandates in combating it—from our chief geopolitical adversary.
Worse yet, not only did the Chinese Communist Party exploit this fact during Covid, but it appears to have spent years deliberately boring this hole in our national security bureaucracy prior to doing so. The CCP carefully cultivated the World Health Organization over a decade, and there’s a growing mountain of evidence that it made significant headway in cultivating the health and security bureaucracies of many member nations as well. The fact that the pandemic plans of these nations were simply discarded to make way for lockdowns—and the public was neither consulted nor informed of this decision—suggests that the corruption might have run quite deep.
In fact, across institutions, the closer one gets to centers of power during the response to Covid—in government, media, and academia—the more likely the institutions and individuals have been to toe the CCP’s party line by insisting that China’s farcically forged Covid data is real. As a reminder, this is the narrative on which officials like these have been basing their guidance: A supervirus emerged that was so deadly, only Chinese totalitarianism could stop it; it caused mass death in Wuhan (but nowhere else) until Xi Jinping’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan eliminated it from all of China (but nowhere else), where a steady stream of “variants” now demand indefinite restrictions. And this is the data that officials like these have been instructing the world to try to emulate:
Here’s CDC Director Rochelle Walensky toeing the party line.
Here’s former CDC Director Robert Redfield toeing the party line.
Here’s former CDC Director Tom Frieden toeing the party line.
Here’s Anthony Fauci toeing the party line.
Here’s Bill Gates toeing the party line.
…
Read the rest of the article here:
Michael P. Senger is an attorney based in San Francisco and the author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World.
Biden: "perhaps unwittingly" ha! :-)
Traffic accidents and fatalities: around where I live, in New England, the increase is almost all due to one thing: drivers distracted by mobile devices and fiddling with their car controls. Maybe many are working from their cars.
Sheryl Sandberg: it was she who pioneered, not so much targeted advertising, but the "data exhaust" model of sweeping up the data you leave behind on the Internet and selling it. This was the key innovation at Google that she later took to Facebook.
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Where does one start with private equity (PE)? It might be, in parts, a Ponzi scheme. But that's not the real problem.
While leveraged buyouts (LBOs) have been around since the 1960s and became famous through a series of one-offs in the 1980s, PE as an industry started in the late 1990s, at the same time as the cottage industry of share buybacks. Both were and are driven by the Fed's generational policy of artificially low interest rates, which has encouraged everyone to lever up. This policy has produced an economy far more indebted than 30 or 50 years ago. It's also greatly inflated wealth inequality, because people who already have assets can borrow to buy more assets and drive up their prices.
Like many share buyback programs, PE often loads up target companies with lots of debt. The long-term effect is to shift the capital structure of the economy away from equity (ownership) to debt. In many cases, the debt burden is onerous, and the companies are forced to slash operations and jobs, selling off pieces to stay afloat. The PE firms make most or all of the money from these deals, although management is often brought into the deals to benefit and undercut any resistance to outside takeover.
The industry as a whole is parasitic, without a doubt. The easiest way to see this is just to ask what would happen if interest rates went back to a reasonable level, say, the short-term rates around or somewhat above the rate of inflation. Most PE business models would immediately go up in smoke. They're built on "borrow short at very low rates, invest long and hope for a large return." Money is made on that difference (spread). But short-term borrowing means that PE companies, like the risky mortgage investors of the 2000s, have to keep rolling over their short-term funding debt every week or month or whatever. It's quite fragile to a crisis. Making it more fragile is the fact that the long-term assets being invested in are often not that liquid; that is, it would be hard to find a buyer, at a reasonable price, in a pinch, when the PE or leveraged target firm needs to quickly sell assets to raise cash.
The share buyback industry got started about the same time (late 90s), for similar reasons and with similar effects. Some companies reduce their outstanding stock shares by repurchasing those shares with cash from operations. That may be a good use of the free cash. But the big poster children in this industry (Boeing, GE) rebuy their shares by issuing corporate bonds (that is, borrowing from the bondholders), directly replacing equity with debt. If someone else buys shares in such a company, they're unwittingly buying into a company where much of its capital value has been diminished by all the debt it's taken on. This happens because management are shareholders and effectively control the company treasury. If management is issued shares (as became popular in the late 1970s), it stands to benefit by selling back its personal shares to the company. Issuing shares to management worked as a way to discipline management for about 20 years. By the late 90s though, with artificially low interest rates, management had learned to game this policy.
The overall effect both activities is a kind of slow-motion looting of the capital structure of the economy, with someone else holding the debt that paid for deals that made immediate cash-out money for the PE or otherwise leveraged firms. (It's like a highly burdensome home equity loan, cashing out on the value of the house. But in the case of PE, the immediate beneficiaries of the cash-out are often not those carrying the debt burden.)