Musk went on to mock those in attendance by stating any Chief position, like CEO or CFO is a made up position. He stated that the only positions that matter when filing for a corporation are the titles of President, Secretary and Treasurer.

Elon also stated in the interview that the Federal Budget Deficit is “insane” and called for President Biden’s Build Back Better Plan to be “deleted.”

But the real highlight came when Elon stated that the government allocates capital very poorly, and capital allocation should be done by private people who can do it properly. He then described the government as a corporation with a monopoly on violence, a phrase that is popular with libertarian thinkers.

While in past years Elon Musk has described himself on Twitter as having socialist tendencies, it appears he’s had a degree of reconsideration. Especially considering socialism is heavily reliant on this monopoly of violence.

This shift in thinking was very noticeable during an exchange Elon Musk had on Twitter with David Beasely, the Executive Director of the UN’s World Food Programme. 

After claims that $6 billion of Elon’s money would solve world hunger were made by CNN, Researcher David Eli inquired why the UN couldn’t solve world hunger last year when it had amassed more than $6 billion. Elon replied that if the UN could prove how $6 billion could solve world hunger, and be transparent about how funds were used, that he would immediately sell $6 billion worth of stock and donate it.

David Beasely with the World Food Programme chimed in stating that CNN’s claim was not accurate (no surprise there), but essentially stated “it’s a start” while seemingly not accepting Elon’s condition of transparency and accountability.

Elon then replied “What happened here?” and linked an article about UN Peacekeepers forcing children in impoverished countries to perform sex acts on them for food.

Apparently government programs are only not very good at resource allocation, but they’re also incredibly sinister about it.

Watch the entire interview with Wall Street Journal below.

The post Elon Musk: “Government Is A Corporation With A Monopoly On Violence” appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Harry Wilmerding on November 3, 2021

The company behind popular snacks like Oreos announced Tuesday that it would increase its prices to combat the rising cost of inflation, multiple sources reported.

Mondelez International, the company behind Oreo cookies, Ritz crackers and Sour Patch Kids, is expected to raise prices by up to 7% in the U.S. through 2022 to offset the high costs for ingredients, transportation, increasing wages and growing demand, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“We’ve been increasing prices, and we plan to increase prices more than we’ve done at least in the time that I’m here and probably for quite a while as a company,” Mondelez chief executive Dirk Van de Put told the WSJ.

Van de Put told CNBC he expects cost inflation to increase 6% in 2022, citing higher commodity prices and ongoing transportation shortages. He highlighted the difficulty in keeping stores stocked, saying inventory is “nowhere near where we would like it to be.”

The issues impacting the company have been felt globally, but the impact on the U.S. has been especially strong, Van de Put told CNBC. The company expects price increases in Brazil, Mexico, Russia and Southeast Asia, the WSJ reported.

Demand for Mondelez’s snacks has remained strong as consumers have spent less eating out at restaurants, Van de Put told  CNBC.

“The average consumer around the world spends 15% more time at home than before,” Van de Put said. “It happens that these categories, biscuits and chocolate, are also something that is more consumed at home.”

Food prices have surged recently as companies combat increasing costs, labor shortages and supply chain problems, the WSJ reported. Consumer spending at grocery stores was 4% higher in August than the same month one year prior, but food prices increased 1.2% in September.

Major food companies like Kraft Heinz, Conagra Brands, General Mills and Nestle have all announced price increases to offset the costs of materials, transportation, supply chain issues and increasing wages.

Mondelez International did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

The post The Price Of Oreos Is Going Up Because Of Inflation, Manufacturer Says appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Ailan Evans on October 4, 2021

Platforms owned by Facebook all experienced outages at the same time late Monday morning, and could not be accessed.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all went down Monday morning, according to outage tracking site Downdetector. Facebook was first reported down around 11:15 a.m., with reports peaking around 12 p.m. with over 100,000 reported outages, according to the site.

When users attempted to access Instagram, a message reading “5xx Server Error” appeared. A message reading “Sorry, something went wrong” appeared when users tried to access Facebook.

Facebook did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” company spokesman Andy Stone wrote on Twitter Monday around 12 p.m. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”

Facebook has been the subject of controversy over the past few weeks following an investigation by The Wall Street Journal into documents leaked by a whistleblower showing the company’s inner workings.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated.

The post Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp All Go Down At Once appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Thomas Catenacci on May 26, 2021

• Liberal media fact checkers were quick to label reporters and lawmakers who supported the lab leak theory as conspiracy theorists in the wake of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak.
• “We can’t disregard these as lunatic conspiracy theories on the fringes,” Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, a progressive media watchdog, stated in an April 2020 article about the lab leak theory. “These speculations, rumors and outright lies have a way of starting in partisan media.”
• Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton was labeled a conspiracy theorist by liberal outlets, which dismissed his arguments that coronavirus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Liberal media fact checkers were quick to label reporters and lawmakers who supported the lab leak theory as conspiracy theorists in the wake of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak.

Fact checkers repeatedly labeled comments and reporting that referenced evidence of a lab leak theory — the hypothesis that coronavirus came from a Wuhan, China lab instead of a food market — as harmful misinformation. Recently, however, evidence that three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers were hospitalized with an unknown illness in November 2019, has been revealed suggesting the theory isn’t baseless.

“Beijing has claimed that the virus originated in a Wuhan ‘wet market,’ where wild animals were sold,” Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton wrote in an April 2020 Wall Street Journal editorial. “But evidence to counter this theory emerged in January.”

“This evidence is circumstantial, to be sure, but it all points toward the Wuhan labs,” he said. “Thanks to the Chinese coverup, we may never have direct, conclusive evidence—intelligence rarely works that way—but Americans justifiably can use common sense to follow the inherent logic of events to their likely conclusion.”

In response, Cotton was labeled a conspiracy theorist by many liberal outlets, which dismissed his arguments. A Vanity Fair article accused Cotton of adding a “scary new layer to Donald Trump’s blame-China strategy,” the BBC reported that his claims were “unfounded” and a Snopes fact check characterized his allegations as “speculative.”

“We can’t disregard these as lunatic conspiracy theories on the fringes,” Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, a progressive media watchdog, stated in an April 2020 article about the lab leak theory. “These speculations, rumors and outright lies have a way of starting in partisan media and bubbling up to a level where they affect our political discourse and public health.”

Former President Donald Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz were also criticized for bringing attention to the lab leak theory.

Washington Post fact check editor Glenn Kessler criticized Cruz in May 2020 after the senator suggested the virus might’ve leaked from the Wuhan lab. Kessler said it was “virtually impossible” the virus jumped from the lab.

“We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves,” Kessler added.

The New York Times said the chances Trump and Pompeo were correct in their assertions that coronavirus may stem from the Wuhan lab were “slim” in a May 2020 article. Axios reported that, based on comments made by Anthony Fauci and the U.S. intelligence community, it was safe to say the virus “evolved naturally.”

NPR even interviewed experts who worried that the Trump administration’s apparent support for the lab leak theory paralleled the government’s messaging that ultimately led to the invasion of Iraq. The NYT also made a comparison between Trump’s support for the lab leak theory and former President George W. Bush’s administration insisting Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction in the early 2000s.

Altogether, The NYT, Reuters, CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, NPR, PolitiFact, Snopes, The Guardian, Vox, Vanity Fair and other outlets all published articles casting doubt on the lab leak theory. Some have recently posted editor’s notes, backtracking on their original reporting.

While liberal news outlets and fact checkers repeatedly downplayed both the lab leak theory and those who supported it, outlets like The Washington Times and Daily Caller News Foundation investigated the theory rather than dismissing it. But Facebook suppressed such reporting by labeling it with a “False Information” tag, according to various outlets.

In February 2020, Facebook suppressed a New York Post editorial that called the lab leak hypothesis “a possibility,” the Post reported. The social media platform’s fact checkers also labeled a Washington Times article, which has since been confirmed by other outlets, reporter Bill Gertz recently said.

Facebook has stopped banning and suppressing posts that say coronavirus is man-made, a spokesperson told Politico Wednesday. The company will continue to update its policies as “new facts and trends emerge.”

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden asked U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” in the investigation into the origins of coronavirus, he said in a statementWednesday. He ordered them to give him a detailed report listing their findings within 90 days.

The post ‘Lunatic Conspiracy Theories’: Here’s How Liberal Fact Checkers Treated People Who Supported Lab Leak Theory appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Andrew Kerr 

The Wall Street Journal left out a critical detail in its report Tuesday about China’s top virologist on bat-borne viruses saying her lab in Wuhan has no connection to the coronavirus outbreak.

TheWSJ did not include in its report that the virologist told the Scientific American in March she lost sleep worrying about the possibility that her Wuhan lab, which studies coronaviruses, could have been responsible for the release of the novel coronavirus when she first learned of the outbreak in late December 2019.

Shi Zhengli, known by her colleagues as the “bat woman,” told the Scientific American that she frantically searched for any evidence that laboratory records from her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology could have been mishandled when she first learned of the spread of viral pneumonia in Wuhan.

“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” Shi said, adding that she remembered thinking if coronavirus was responsible for the pneumonia outbreak, “could they have come from our lab?”

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is situated a handful of miles away from the wet market originally suspected to be the origin of the coronavirus outbreak.

Shi contributed to a study published in February reporting that the novel coronavirus is 96.2% identical to a viral strain that her team detected in 2013 from horseshoe bats in China’s Yunnan province, some 800 miles away from Wuhan.

The virologist told the Scientific American she was able to breathe a sigh of relief when results came back showing that the sequences for the novel coronavirus did not match any of the strains her team had sampled from bat caves.

Shi now aggressively denies her lab in Wuhan is connected to the release of the novel coronavirus.

The virologist wrote on Chinese social media in early February that she could “guarantee on my life” that her lab has no connection to the outbreak, adding: “I advise those who believe and spread rumors from harmful media sources … to shut their stinking mouths.”

Shi’s boss, a senior official at the Wuhan lab, told Chinese state television in April that “there’s no way this virus came from us,” according to TheWSJ.

U.S. Embassy officials issued two warnings in January 2018 about inadequate safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One of the cables mentioned Shi directly and her research into SARS-like coronaviruses.

Fox News reported earlier in April that the United States is conducting a full-scale investigation into whether the novel coronavirus could have entered the population due to a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Neither TheWSJ nor James Areddy, the reporter who wrote the article, immediately responded to a request for comment.

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Joshua Gill on February 7, 2019

• An Australian study found that researchers, clinicians and English language scientific journals have published data provided by illegal, forced organ harvesting from Chinese prisoners of conscience. 

• The study’s author called for the retraction of over 400 scientific papers allegedly tainted with such data, calling the journals and researchers complicit in the perpetuation of forced organ harvesting.

• Large discrepancies between China’s reported voluntary organ donation and the actual number of organ transplants performed, along with testimonies from former prisoners, doctors and investigators, indicate that China continues to forcibly harvest organs without consent on a massive scale.

An Australian study called for the retraction of over 400 scientific papers allegedly tainted with data obtained from forced organ harvesting from Chinese prisoners of conscience.

The study, published Tuesday in the scientific journal BMJ Open, alleged that Chinese authorities illegally harvest organs from detained underground Christians, Uighur Muslims and Falun Gong members to supply the demand for organ transplants. Wendy Rogers, the study’s author and a professor of clinical ethics, asserted that China researchers, clinicians and the English language journals that published their data, failed to ensure that the organ donations from which they obtained their data were done with consent of the donors and are therefore complicit in the harvesting.

The practice of ensuring consent from donors in organ donations is an international ethics standard.

“The transplant community has failed to implement ethical standards banning publication of research using material from executed prisoners. As a result, a large body of unethical published research now exists, raising questions of complicity to the extent that the transplant community uses and benefits from the results of this research,” Rogers wrote in the study.

“We call for immediate retraction of all papers reporting research based on use of organs from executed prisoners, and an international summit to develop future policy for handling Chinese transplant research,” Rogers added.

Rogers and other researchers from Macquarie University in Sydney found 445 scientific papers from China researchers published between January 2000 and April 2017 in English language journals that detailed data obtained from 85,477 organ transplants. Of those papers, 99 percent had no information about whether consent had been obtained from the donors while only 14 percent — 63 papers — had any information about the actual sources of the organs.

The researchers noted another red flag in the reports — transplants detailed in 43 percent of the papers were performed at a point in time when executed prisoners were the only source of available organs. But the number of executed prisoners, in conjunction with China’s policy of executing prisoners within seven days of doling out a death sentence, make that an impossibility, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Seven days is too short a time to match potential “donated organs” with transplant recipients, but Chinese medical facilities make it a practice to match organ donations with patients for on-demand service. In fact, documented cases show that doctors who ordered backup organs for transplant operations received those organs the next day — an astonishingly quick turnaround given that U.S. patients have to wait anywhere from months to years for a transplant organ to become available.

China also does not execute enough prisoners per year to account for all of the documented organ transplants, despite executing more prisoners than any other country.

China transplants between 60,000 and 100,000 organs in its hospitals each year, according to a 2016 report by former Canadian politician and prosecutor David Kilgour, lawyer David Matas and American journalist Ethan Gutmann entitled “Bloody Harvest/the Slaughter: An Update.” The country executes a few thousand prisoners a year and had only 6,000 official voluntary organ donors in 2018, who were said to have donated over 18,000 organs. China also does not have a history of voluntary organ donation culture, as exemplified by the fact the country only had 34 official donors in 2010.

The 2016 report also noted that the 18,000 transplants in 2018 were “easily surpassed by just a few hospitals,” with the Tianjin First Center, for example, performing over 6,000 transplants a year.

How does China makeup the difference? Researchers concluded that Chinese authorities have been harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience, some of whom are detained in internment camps, without their consent. A 2006 Kilgour–Matas report confirmed that hospitals offered organs from Falun Gong prisoners after they posed as organ buyers and inquired about Falun Gong organs.

Former prisoners have also testified to enduring forced medical procedures in internment camps, including having samples of blood drawn and their test results added to an organ donation database. Dr. Enver Tohti, who formerly served as a surgeon in Xinjiang where Chinese authorities have cracked down on Uighur Muslim communities, also detailed how he was ordered to forcibly harvest organs from a prisoner whose heart was still beating in 1995.

“We had been told to wait behind a hill, and come into the field as soon as we’d hear the gunshot,” he said, according to WSJ. “A moment later there were gunshots. Not one, but many. We rushed into the field. An armed police officer approached us and told me where to go. He led us closer, then pointed to a body, saying, ‘This is the one.’ By then our chief surgeon appeared from nowhere and told me to remove the liver and two kidneys.”

Tohti noted that the man’s wound was not immediately fatal, but removed his organs all the same.

The Independent Tribunal Into Forced Organ Harvesting From Prisoners of Conscience in China is currently investigating myriad claims like those of Tohti and former prisoners.

While the investigation is not yet complete, the tribunal did issue an interim ruling on Dec. 10, saying that those on the tribunal are “certain — unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt — that in China, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time, involving a very substantial number of victims.”Follow Joshua on TwitterSend tips to joshua@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.Click here for reuse options!
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Neetu Chandak on January 19, 2019

• The Los Angeles Unified School District lost around $100 million over five days due to the strike led by United Teachers Los Angeles, the district estimates.

• The district estimates student attendance is dropping substantially. 

• The union and district are back at the negotiating table, but strikes can be expected to continue if an agreement is not reached over the weekend.

The United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union and the Los Angles Unified School District (LAUSD) went back to the negotiating table Thursday as teachers were on strike, which the district claims cost an estimated $100 million over five days.

LAUSD has more than 600,000 students and district funding is based on student attendance. Close to 157,000 students attended classes Monday, but that number plummeted to around 85,000 by Friday, according to LAUSD numbers available at the time of reporting.

There were an estimated 60,000 people — including the union’s members, community members and parents — rallying as of Friday, CBS Los Angeles reported.

Metros were flooded with protesters as well.

Traffic was also shut down in parts of the southern California city due to the high volume of protesters, according to The Washington Post.

About 400 substitute teachers and 2,000 administrators with teaching credentials are replacing the missing teachers, according to the LA Times.

Video footage shows multiple instances in which protesters apparently blocked others from entering buildings. Those activists, however, were from the LA chapter of the Democrat Socialists of America.

“We say no to scabs because we care more about our children’s futures than a sub making them watch movies all day today,” DSA Los Angeles tweeted Tuesday.

WATCH:

The strike is the result of UTLA and LAUSD being unable to reach an agreement on a plan that lowers class sizes, increases raises by 6 percent and addresses public schools being turned into charters. LAUSD said it did not have control over charter schools as that was handled at the state level. The district added UTLA’s demands would cost nearly $800 million a year as LAUSD is running on a $500 million deficit.

LAUSD’s fiscal problem includes an unaffordable health care plan that started in the late 1960s, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. The district began giving eligible employees, retirees and their dependents free health care “without requiring them to contribute to the cost.” Health benefits for retired employees is estimated to cost LAUSD $314 million in 2019

“The average cost of health and welfare benefits that teachers receive is $14,562,” a LAUSD spokeswoman previously told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Los Angeles union said the demands were about serving students.

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley suggested in a Jan. 4 op-ed that the negotiations were highly political in nature. Increasing staff, for example, could bring in more potential union members, which would help UTLA regain control of the school board.

The LAUSD spokeswoman said a teacher with the right qualifications could earn around $74,000 annually.

“The salary for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 60 additional college credits is $74,141,” she said. “The average cost of health and welfare benefits that teachers receive is $14,562.”

Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who worked in the Obama administration, and California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom did not support the strike because they believed it would hurt students.

LAUSD says it has more than 80 percent of families living in poverty and 17,000 homeless students.

Big-name Democrats in support of the strike include New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.

Strikes can be expected to continue if a negotiation is not met between the union and district over the weekend.

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Neetu Chandak on January 9, 2019

A Los Angeles teacher’s union recently turned down the school district’s offer to reduce classroom sizes and increase staff numbers as a teacher strike looms if a deal is not met.

The Unified Teachers of Los Angles (UTLA) is demanding the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to:

• Use $1.9 million in unrestricted reserves for smaller class sizes and increase staffing,

• Invest more in early, bilingual and special education,

• And address how more than $600 million has gone toward charter schools instead of public schools.

UTLA also wants a 6.5 percent increase in salary, according to NBC 4.

The Los Angeles union claims the demands are to “serve our students.”

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley, however, suggests in a Jan. 4 op-ed the negotiations are highly political. Increasing staff, for example, could bring in more potential UTLA members which would help the union regain control of the school board.

LAUSD’s latest offer to the Unified Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) included:

• Increasing funds from $30 million to $105 million to hire 1,000 educators which would decrease all math and secondary English classes to under 40 students and keep grades 4-6 classes with a maximum of 35 students,
• And a 6 percent raise for employees with no contingencies and no additional training to receive the benefit.

The district acknowledged that charter schools cannot be bargained over as it is handled by the state, but the district is willing to have working groups to address location issues and oversight of charters within the district.

“We are extremely disappointed and frustrated that union leadership has turn down our offer and
– once again – failed to put forth any proposal to try and resolve the issues of class size and salary,” LAUSD wrote in a statement Monday.

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl believed the district’s proposal had “so little to offer,” the Los Angeles Daily News reported Wednesday. He added the deal would increase class size instead of decreasing it and the potential pay raise would still negatively impact future health care benefits.

“The salary for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 60 additional college credits is $74,141,” a LAUSD spokeswoman told The Daily Caller News Foundation over email. “The average cost of health and welfare benefits that teachers receive is $14,562.”

The average district class size was nearly 26 students.

Caputo-Pearl also believes the increase in staff would ultimately add one employee in each of the nearly 900 schools, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.

LAUSD says UTLA is being unreasonable for staffing increases, NBC 4 reported. UTLA reportedly wants a plan that would cost $786 million per year as LAUSD is currently in a $500 million deficit.

More than 30,000 teachers are ready to strike on Jan. 14.

UTLA did not immediately respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.

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