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Global tipping point? Half the world is now 'middle class' or wealthier

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Something of enormous global significance is happening almost without notice. For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty. By our calculations, as of this month, just over 50 percent of the world's population, or some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered "middle class" or "rich." About the same number of people are living in households that are poor or vulnerable to poverty. So September 2018 marks a global tipping point. After this, for the first time ever, the poor and vulnerable will no longer be a majority in the world. Barring some unfortunate global economic setback, this marks the start of a new era of a middle-class majority.


Comment: This article was published in September 2019... Welcome to 2020! With its near global lockdown that accelerated the impending world economic crisis.


We make these claims based on a classification of households into those in extreme poverty (households spending below $1.90 per person per day) and those in the middle class (households spending $11-110 per day per person in 2011 purchasing power parity, or PPP). Two other groups round out our classification: vulnerable households fall between those in poverty and the middle class; and those who are at the top of the distribution who are classified as "rich."

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Attention

Deutsche Bank: Supervolcano eruption or worse-than-covid plague will likely hit us over 10 years

Deutsche Bank
© REUTERS / Ralph Orlowski
The risks report by a major bank has predicted at least four biblical-like cataclysms that may befall our planet, with the fallout likely to be worse than the continuing coronavirus healthcare crisis.

There is a high probability that a major disaster could strike the world within the next 10 years, new research by a top international financial institution, Deutsche Bank, has predicted, as cited by the Daily Star, putting a staggering 33 percent chance stake on the forecast.

The latter centres around the possibility of four biblical-level disasters befalling the world - a massive killer flu pandemic wiping out two million people, a supervolcano eruption, a major solar flare from the Sun, or even World War 3.


Comment: What, no killer asteroids?


The authors of the report believe any of these could lead to total chaos in global infrastructure. For instance, if a solar flare like the one reported 150 years ago hit, it could arguably render major infrastructure, like electrical grids, satellite networks, and the internet inoperable. The 1859 solar storm referred to as the Carrington Event, the strongest on record, set auroras flaring as far south as Cuba, and caused telegraph lines across North America to fail.

Light Saber

Covid-19 psychosis defeated: How Belarus ignored the WHO and beat coronavirus

Alexander Lukashenko
© SputnikAlexander Lukashenko
Speaking to Grodno labor collectives on June 16, President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko explained that his country's experience in combating coronavirus infection has already become "the property of the whole world", and the World Bank is even ready to allocate $ 300 million to Minsk to share the details of its tactics.

Such statements by the Belarusian leader during the Covid-19 pandemic are not new. He had previously said that the situation in Belarus had become interesting to the world community, since they didn't go along the path recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), preferring not to quarantine the country. At the same time, Minsk always reminded that not only Belarus decided to act according to a similar scenario, citing Sweden as an example.

The Belarusian authorities have repeatedly emphasized that they managed to prevent high mortality from coronavirus in the country due to the fact that the Soviet health care system was preserved here, and all necessary measures were taken to fight for every human life. According to the official position of the head of the Belarusian Ministry of Health, Vladimir Karanik, it helps to cope with the disease by the fact that "unlike most European countries, Belarus has maintained a sanitary and epidemiological service, the country is also provided with doctors, a bed facility, oxygen access points, and mechanical ventilation devices (mechanical ventilation) , an adequate level of laboratory diagnosis. "
"In general, low mortality in patients with coronavirus infection in the republic is explained by early diagnosis and detection of infection in people who do not have symptoms, effective measures to isolate patients and contacts. Effective epidemiological measures to protect vulnerable groups of the population - the elderly and senile, as well as those with some chronic diseases, also explain the low mortality from Covid-19 infection, " the Belarusian department noted earlier.

Comment: See also: Why Belarus hasn't faced massive spike in deaths despite lack of coronavirus lockdowns


People 2

How trans ideology took over

lgbt protest
© Getty
Amid the recent clamour to denounce JK Rowling for her sacrilegious utterance of the word 'woman' came some good news. A slipped-out government announcement revealed - at long last - some badly needed pushback to the demands of transgender activists. In a paper due to be published at the end of July, the government is expected to drop plans to allow transgender people to change their birth certificates without a medical diagnosis and to put in place new protections to safeguard female-only spaces such as refuges and prisons.

This is not before time. The drawn-out conflict between defenders of sex-based rights and believers in gender self-identification has benefitted no one. And, let's not forget, this was a conflict largely prompted by a Conservative government. It was back in 2018, on Theresa May's watch, that the consultation to the Gender Recognition Act (2004) was launched, paving the way for gender self-identification and calling into question once taken for granted assumptions about biology, sex and what it means to be a woman.

But to understand how institutions such as the police, prisons, schools and medical services became so transfixed by the ideology of transgenderism that they were prepared to jettison the safeguarding of children and turn back the clock on women's hard-won rights, we have to look beyond government announcements and consultations. We need to ask how, in little more than two decades, 'transgender' morphed from a term representing individuals, and little used outside of specialist communities, to one signifying a powerful political ideology driving significant social change.

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Attention

Democrats' hypocrisy on riots reveals political nature of coronavirus lockdowns

Protesters in New York City
© Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty ImagesProtesters in New York City
Viruses don't discriminate based on politics, but many Democratic governors and mayors sure seem to do so. Democratic leaders' sudden about-face in response to the protests, rioting and looting that have followed the tragic killing of George Floyd proves that their earlier condescending condemnations of anti-lockdown protesters were motivated primarily, if not entirely, by rank partisanship.

When state and local leaders first began issuing stay-at-home orders in response to the coronavirus pandemic, we were told that the lockdowns were necessary to "flatten the curve" and to prevent our health care system from being overwhelmed.

We appear to have largely achieved that goal — albeit at a staggering cost, as more than 40 million Americans were forced to file for unemployment benefits and businesses have required hundreds of billions of dollars in federal assistance to avoid bankruptcy.

Instead of easing the painful restrictions and striving to reopen America, many Democratic mayors and governors, infuriatingly, sought to extend them even further — sometimes in open defiance of the First Amendment and always in open defiance of the concerns expressed by ordinary citizens desperate to be allowed to go back to work and live their lives.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for instance, condescendingly quipped that anti-lockdown protesters who want to earn a living should simply "take a job as an essential worker."

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Star of David

Flashback From occupation to 'Occupy': The Israelification of American domestic security

IDF soldiers
One of the first comprehensive surveys of Israeli training of US local and federal law enforcement officials.

(Editor's note: The eruption of national protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd have shed new light on Israel's training of local police officers across the country. 100 members of the 800-strong Minneapolis police department were trained at a conference in Israel in 2012. That means at least one of every eight members the city's force has been influenced by the methods of an occupying apartheid entity. The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal produced one of the first comprehensive surveys of Israeli training of US local and federal law enforcement officials in the following article published by Al Akhbar English in 2011.)

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote "mutual response," collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent "Occupy" movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, "Law enforcement agencies responding to...Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork."

Pistol

Shootings surge in NYC amid disbanding of NYPD's plainclothes anti-crime unit

Police at the scene of a shooting in Brownsville, Brooklyn earlier this week.
© Stefan JeremiahPolice at the scene of a shooting in Brownsville, Brooklyn earlier this week.
Shootings are surging this week in New York City, with 28 incidents and 38 victims reported since Monday — the day the NYPD disbanded its plainclothes anti-crime unit, The Post learned on Friday.

By comparison, the same week last year there were only 12 shootings for the entire week.

In the most recent reported shooting, at 4 p.m. Friday in East New York, Brooklyn, a 27-year-old man died of multiple gunshot wounds to his torso, face and leg in front of 640 Stanley Avenue.

A 17-year-old boy who was also shot there was in stable condition, police said.

"This is what the politicians wanted — no bail, nobody in Rikers, cops not arresting anyone," one angry law enforcement source said Friday.

"All those things equal people walking around on the street with guns, shooting each other."

The shooting spree includes at least five murders, sources told The Post.

Arrow Down

Monument to Russian revolutionary erected in German town despite vehement opposition from city authorities

Vladimir Lenin statue
© Global Look Press / dpa / Caroline SeidelA statue of Vladimir Lenin is seen in front of the headquarters of the left-wing MLPD party in Gelsenkirchen, Germany on June 20, 2020.
A small German party has installed a monument to the first Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, in the western city of Gelsenkirchen. City authorities sought to block the initiative but ended up launching an online educational campaign.

The former West Germany has seen the very first monument to Lenin erected on its soil on Saturday, courtesy of a tiny fringe party, the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD). The party proudly unveiled the over two-meter (6.5-foot) tall statue, originally produced in the former Czechoslovakia in 1957 and now placed outside of its office in Gelsenkirchen.

Bullseye

SOTT Focus: Some Data-driven Questions About 'Excess Deaths' For Lockdown Apologists

empty london street lockdown
We now have mortality data for the first few months of 2020 for many countries, and, as you might expect, there were steep increases associated with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in each one.

Surprisingly, however, these increases did not begin before the lockdowns were imposed, but after. Moreover, in almost every case, they began immediately after. Often, mortality numbers were on a downward trend before suddenly reversing course after lockdowns were decreed.

This is an astonishing finding. But before I discuss its full import, and pose some questions to those who still defend the utility of lockdowns, I want to present the data that proves it.

Here's a series of charts by the Financial Times showing overall mortality and "deaths in excess of normal levels" in 2020 for a number of countries:

Comment: In short, they did the reverse of what they said the lockdowns were for: they spiked what would otherwise have been a 'normal, seasonal' curve by prematurely killing off hundreds of thousands of elderly and immune-compromised people.

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Heart - Black

Lockdown 'has left pupils withdrawn and disturbed', says top London head

Battersea school UK
© REUTERSChildren arrive for school with social distancing in Battersea
Children have been returning to school withdrawn, disturbed and traumatized, the head of London's biggest academy chain warned today.

Sir Daniel Moynihan, CEO of the Harris Federation, said some children have been severely damaged by the lockdown and have gone backwards in their emotional development.

The Harris Federation runs 48 schools, meaning it educates one in every 41 pupils in London.

Sir Daniel told BBC Radio 4's Today program: "It's fair to say many children have been severely damaged educationally by this necessary shutdown.

"We have had a number of traumatized youngsters. Our schools are in very disadvantaged areas of the capital city and many of them have very difficult lives already, and this has worsened the situation."

Comment: What we're seeing now in terms of regression is likely to continue getting worse as the number of social and physical interactions kids have - interactions that children need to fully develop emotionally and mentally - are cut back to near zero. Governments are destroying the mental and emotional well being of children, and they're doing it all for nothing.