• Chinese Communist Party Is "Cornered" As World Awakens To Its Abuses
  Chinese Communist Party Is “Cornered” As World Awakens To Its Abuses

  Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times,

  More than ever, the Chinese Communist Party is finding itself backed into a corner as the world wakes up to its human rights atrocities, according to Nury Turkel, the vice chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

  “China has never been this isolated in the recent memory, and the isolation is making them belligerent,” Turkel told The Epoch Times at the annual International Religious Freedom Summit.

  “That’s why they are picking fights with camp survivors,” he added.

  Turkel was referring to attempts by Chinese officials to publicly shame Uyghur women who gave first hand accounts of sexual abuse at the internment camps in Xinjiang, where up to 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are held under what the regime claims to be a “counter-terrorism” campaign.

  

  Nury Turkel, the current vice chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, speaks in an interview with The Epoch Times in May 2021. (The Epoch Times)

  In a February press conference, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson held up pictures of the former detainees and called one of them, Tursunay Ziyawudun, an “actress” and accused her of “spreading lies.”

  Such behavior, coming from a government official, hardly measures up to the image of “the country that everybody’s scared of,” said Turkel.

  

  Activists including members of the local Hong Kong, Tibetan and Uyghur communities hold up banners and placards in Melbourne, Australia, on June 23, 2021, calling on the Australian government to boycott the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over China’s human rights record. (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

  Ziyawudun shared her story at the opening of the second day of the Summit. During her year in a camp, beginning in 2018, Ziyawudun said, she saw police officers take Uyghur women from the cells to do “whatever they wanted.” Some of the women were brought back near the point of death. Some others had lost their minds. She witnessed a Uyghur woman in her 20s being raped, while three Han police officers did the same to her.

  “These memories make my heart bleed,” she told the attendees on July 14.

  Turkel noted that virtually every speaker on Wednesday highlighted the suppression in Xinjiang, which, following the U.S. lead, a growing number of countries have recognized as a “genocide.”

  “That’s a miscalculation on Beijing’s behalf,” Turkel said of the regime’s human rights abuses.

  “They think that they could get away with this as they have done to the Falun Gong practitioners and they have done to Tibetans for years and years.”

  Global outcry over human rights atrocities in China have been increasing, with lawmakers pushing for a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics from within their respective governments.

  Over the past week, the U.S. blacklisted over a dozen Chinese entities that had a role in aiding abuses in the Xinjiang region and the regime’s military modernization, while at the same time it dialed up warnings of business risks in Xinjiang. Forced organ harvesting, a state-sanctioned practice primarily targeting Falun Gong practitioners but also other prisoners of conscience, is also drawing greater scrutiny.

  The mounting pressure is not being missed in Beijing. For Chinese leader Xi Jinping to call for communist officials to create a “lovable” Chinese image—this in itself is a sign of insecurity, according to Turkel.

  “They are cornered,” he said.

  

  A file image of Nury Turkel, the vice chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, meeting with the then U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and Chinese dissidents in July 2020. (Ron Przysucha/U.S. State Department)

  An Uyghur American attorney, Turkel was born in a Chinese re-education camp in Kashgar where his mother was imprisoned. That was during the height of the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long violent campaign that swept China into chaos and killed millions.

  Turkel has not returned to China since coming to America 26 years ago. Two years after he left, the regime’s military crushed a large demonstration in his father’s hometown.

  The global push back, in his eyes, has come “a little too late.”

  It “shouldn’t take a genocide” and it shouldn’t be the end of Hong Kong democracy “for the international community to have this rude awakening,” he said.

  A Brookings Institute report, published last year, estimated that the regime has exported its mass surveillance platforms to over 80 countries since 2008. Chinese influence in the West is “everywhere,” in the business, media, academia, and government, Turkel said.

  With the regime continuing to project its narrative worldwide, the United States should instead break out of that framework and stop worrying about “how the CCP does things,” said Turkel.

  “As a free nation, as a free people, we should do what is right,” he said, adding that “eventually, this will force them to change.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 23:40

• Lego Demands US Gunmaker To Halt Sales Of "Block 19" Pistol 
  Lego Demands US Gunmaker To Halt Sales Of “Block 19” Pistol 

  Danish toymaker The Lego Group has slapped a US gunmaker with a cease and desist letter after it sold Glock handgun kits that resembled Lego blocks, according to The Guardian. 

  Utah-based Culper Precision marketed their handgun as the “Block 19,” a “childhood dream come to life.” 

  On June 24, Precision posted an image of a Glock 19, decked out in blue, red, and yellow blocks that make the weapon nearly indistinguishable from a child’s toy, besides the butt of the ammo clip. 

  “Here’s one of those childhood dreams coming to life, the Block 19 prototype, yes you can actually build Legos onto it. That RMR is comprised of miscellaneous pieces and a red lightsaber. We superglued it all together and surprisingly it survived a little over 1500 rounds in full auto at Shootah this past weekend!” the company wrote on the social media platform. 

  The kits sold for $549 to $765 and made the Glock 19 look harmless because it appeared to be built out of Legos. 

  

  Gun control activists were angered with Precision and demanded The Lego Group send a cease and desist letter.

  “Our organization reached out to Lego, which then sent a cease and desist letter to the reckless gun maker,” said Shannon Watts, founder of the group Moms Demand Action, which promotes stricter gun controls.

  Culper Precision’s president, Brandon Scott, told the Washington Post a lawyer advised him to stop selling the Block 19 because The Lego Group might have a solid case. He agreed to comply with the cease and desist letter. 

  “They had a similar reaction to you,” Scott said. “Where it was like: ‘Is it wise to make a gun look like a toy?'”

  While Precision might not be able to sell the Block 19, it’s only a matter of time before the 3D-printing community of gun buffs creates a computer-aided design of lowers and or uppers for pistols and or even rifles that resemble harmless Legos. 

  We’ve already mentioned that people are disguising weapons as Nerf guns. 

  Once the 3D-printing community grabs hold of something on forums, there’s no way to stop it. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 23:20

• White House Admits To Flagging Posts To Be Censored By Facebook
  White House Admits To Flagging Posts To Be Censored By Facebook

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  We have previously discussed the extensive censorship programs maintained by Big Tech, including companies like Twitter and Facebook taking sides in major controversies from gender identification to election fraud to Covid-19. The rise of corporate censors has combined with a heavily pro-Biden media to create the fear of a de facto state media that controls information due to a shared ideology rather than state coercion.  That concern has been magnified by demands from Democratic leaders for increased censorship, including censoring political speech, and now word that the Biden Administration has routinely been flagging material to be censored by Facebook.

  

  White House press secretary Jen Psaki admitted that the Biden administration is working with Facebook to flag “problematic” posts that “spread disinformation” on COVID-19. She explained that the Administration has created “aggressive” policing systems to spot “misinformation” to be “flagged” for the social media companies.

  Psaki doubles down on calls for censorship of “disinformation:”

  “It should not come as any surprise we are in regular touch with social media platforms…and we want to know that the social media platforms are taking steps to address this.” pic.twitter.com/YxIsFJ2iwg

  — Benny (@bennyjohnson) July 16, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The concern is obvious that this allows for a direct role of the government in a massive censorship program run by private companies. There have been repeated examples of the censoring of stories that were embarrassing or problematic for the Biden Administration.  Even when Twitter expressed regret for the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election, there was an immediate push back for greater censorship from Democrats.

  The concern is that these companies are taking to heart calls from Democratic members for increased censorship on the platform. CEO Jack Dorsey previously apologized for censoring the Hunter Biden story before the election. However, rather than addressing the dangers of such censoring of news accounts, Senator Chris Coons pressed Dorsey to expand the categories of censored material to prevent people from sharing any views that he considers “climate denialism.” Likewise, Senator Richard Blumenthal seemed to take the opposite meaning from Twitter, admitting that it was wrong to censor the Biden story. Blumenthal said that he was “concerned that both of your companies are, in fact, backsliding or retrenching, that you are failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.” Accordingly, he demanded an answer to this question:

  “Will you commit to the same kind of robust content modification playbook in this coming election, including fact checking, labeling, reducing the spread of misinformation, and other steps, even for politicians in the runoff elections ahead?”

  “Robust content modification” seems the new Orwellian rallying cry in our society.

  Here’s more of Jen Psaki issuing decrees on who should and shouldn’t be allowed to use social media, then smugly scoffing at the notion that this should concern anyone on the ground that we’re going to die if we don’t submit to the White House’s orders:https://t.co/3bAR2J9RMF

  — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 16, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The same problems have arisen on Covid stories. For a year, Big Tech has been censoring those who wanted to discuss the origins of pandemic.  It was not until Biden admitted that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan lab that social media suddenly changed its position. Facebook only recently announced that people on its platform will be able to discuss the origins of Covid-19 after censoring any such discussion.

  DOOCY: “Facebook used to block people from posting that covid may have originated from a lab… Is there any concern things you are trying to block may some day turn out to be accurate?”@PressSec: “We don’t take anything down. We don’t block anything.” pic.twitter.com/EmGqS44F2G

  — Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 16, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The back channel coordination with Facebook further supports the view that this is a de facto state-supporting censorship program. That is the basis for the recent lawsuit by former President Donald Trump. As I have previously noted, there is ample basis for objection to this arrangement but the legal avenue for challenges is far from clear. The lawsuit will face difficult if not insurmountable problems under existing law and precedent. There is no question companies like Twitter are engaging in raw censorship. It is also true that these companies have censored material with a blatantly biased agenda, taking sides on scientific and social controversies. A strong case can be made for stripping these companies of legal protections since they are no longer neutral platforms. However, private businesses are allowed to regulate speech as a general matter.  It will take considerable heavy lifting for a court to order this injunctive relief.

  Here’s a mashup of VACCINE MISINFORMATION from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

  Does Jen Psaki want Big Tech to CENSOR this?pic.twitter.com/vqnucmZjnj

  — Kyle Martinsen (@KyleMartinsen_) July 16, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  That is why we need legislative action. That includes removal immunity protections. However, the government should also consider the creation of an alternative to these companies which are now a threat to our political system. A few companies now control a huge amount of the political discourse in this country and have shown a clear bias in taking sides (even on issues later found to be wrong). Since litigation is likely to fail, legislation would seem an imperative. Congress has been spending hundreds of billions with utter abandon. Yet, there is little discussion over a government subsidized platform for social media or other measures to break up this unprecedented level of corporate control over our political discourse. I am no fan of government programs, particularly as it relates to media. However, Apple, Google, and these other companies are now operating like monopolies, including crushing competitors like Parlor. That is a direct and growing threat to our political process.

  We need to consider a short-term investment in a social media platform that will focus any censorship on direct threats or criminal conduct. There is currently a lack of not only competition but any real opportunity for competition to challenge these companies. Either we have to redefine what we treat as monopolies or we need to invest in the establishment of competing platforms that are content neutral like telephone companies.

  This is why I have described myself as an Internet Originalist:

  The alternative is “internet originalism” — no censorship. If social media companies returned to their original roles, there would be no slippery slope of political bias or opportunism; they would assume the same status as telephone companies. We do not need companies to protect us from harmful or “misleading” thoughts. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not approved speech.

  If Pelosi demanded that Verizon or Sprint interrupt calls to stop people saying false or misleading things, the public would be outraged. Twitter serves the same communicative function between consenting parties; it simply allows thousands of people to participate in such digital exchanges. Those people do not sign up to exchange thoughts only to have Dorsey or some other internet overlord monitor their conversations and “protect” them from errant or harmful thoughts.

  The actions by Twitter and Facebook on Election Day were reprehensible and wrong. That should have been sufficient cause for action by Congress. It is now growing more precarious and chilling by the day.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 23:00

• Amazon Wins FCC Approval For Radar Device To Monitor Sleep
  Amazon Wins FCC Approval For Radar Device To Monitor Sleep

  Amazon.com Inc. has been granted a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) waiver to use radar to monitor people’s sleep. 

  The FCC approval document, published last Friday, described a device to include a “radar sensor” for “contactless sleep tracing.”

  

  The federal agency that regulates communications across the country wrote that Google made a similar request for its Pixel smartphone in 2018. “As with Google, Amazon describes how it plans to use its Radar Sensors to enable touchless control of device features and functions.” 

  The capability of the new device “can aid persons with disabilities, as well as to provide sleep-related health and wellness applications,” the FCC continued. 

  “The use of Radar Sensors in sleep tracking could improve awareness and management of sleep hygiene, which in turn could produce significant health benefits for many Americans,” Amazon said in its filing. “Radar Sensors will allow consumers to recognize potential sleep issues.”

  The company provided very few details about what products the new radar sensor would be embedded into but provided a hint that the device would be “non-mobile.” The thought here is that it could be equipped with Echo devices.

  There was no timeline on when the radar-equipped devices would be unveiled, nevertheless, shipped to customers. 

  Amazon has been making a strong push into the health space between Halo wristbands and Amazon Pharmacy. Now the mega-corporation wants to monitor your sleep and extract whatever valuable data it can to subliminally sell you products to improve your well-being. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 22:40

• Democrats And Republicans Unite To Demand US Invasion Of Cuba
  Democrats And Republicans Unite To Demand US Invasion Of Cuba

  Authored by Michael Tracey via mtracey.substack.com,

  There are some parts of the US where municipal elected officials who ordinarily concern themselves with things like trash removal, parking regulations, and petty graft are occasionally expected to take passionate stances on foreign policy issues. Israel would be that issue in certain heavily Jewish enclaves around the New York City area, although recently those political dynamics have shifted somewhat. In select Hudson County, NJ towns like North Bergen, West New York, Guttenberg, and Union City — that foreign policy issue is Cuba. 

  

  Example: Although he conceded he was “not an expert” and therefore not in a position to recommend any specific US policy action in response to protests currently underway in the island nation, North Bergen “Public Safety” commissioner Allen Pascual told me this week he longed for the days when the “Rat Pack” could run wild in Cuba. So that’s the kind of Wikipedia-level cultural nostalgia driving at least some portion of Cuba-related opinion among these low-level municipal officials. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. serenading succulent young ladies amidst plumes of cigar smoke and organized crime oligopolies, or something.

  Pascual had been participating in an emergency “Cuban Liberation” rally and march that kicked off in his stomping grounds of North Bergen, then proceeded south down through Guttenberg, and culminated at City Hall in West New York. I would estimate there were somewhere between two and four thousand people there — but don’t hold me to that, because attempting to guess crowd sizes always leads to trouble. In any event, the participants were substantially more rabid than I would expect to see at any “pro-Israel” rally under present circumstances. And I say “rabid” not necessarily as a pejorative — just to capture how uninhibited and enthusiastically expressive these Cuban-American rally-goers were. It’s likely a function of Cuban-Americans operating within their own relatively-more-insular political/demographic subgroup than “pro-Israel” factions.

  Sometimes referred to as “Havana on the Hudson,” this area is populated by the largest enclave of Cuban-Americans outside Florida. Hudson County is also a place where you can simultaneously serve as a NJ State Senator and Mayor, which is absolutely brilliant for accumulating and entrenching political cache, as well as accumulating and entrenching one’s public pension. Brian Stack has been mayor of Union City for nearly 21 years, and a simultaneous NJ State Senator for 13. (Four years of faithful NJ Assembly service before that.) 

  

  As one of the few English-speakers addressing the rally, Stack really let loose and explicitly called for a US military invasion of Cuba. “The same as we’ve liberated other countries,” he subsequently told me. “We should’ve been in Cuba many many years ago… just like we went in and liberated Kuwait.” He continued, “Cuba, no doubt about it — this should be a democracy. And we have a great opportunity now with something that’s 90 miles off the Florida Keys, to make it a democracy.”

  Asked (by me) whether recent US military inventions should inspire confidence in the success of this plan he was proposing, Stack said: “Listen, I’m not here to judge the invasions around the world.”

  Fortunately for those who regard a potential US invasion of Cuba as insane, Brian Stack doesn’t have direct influence over the conduct of US foreign policy. He’s an elected official in one of the few parts of the country where there is genuinely a mass constituency for US military action against Cuba, and from the standpoint of political self-interest his rabble-rousing activities are perfectly explicable. But he does have influence over Democratic Party machine politics in New Jersey. As a resident of the area, I can attest that there are currently campaign billboards all over the place emblazoned with his photo smiling alongside Gov. Phil Murphy, with both having just prevailed in uncontested Democratic state primaries. (Although, side note: Stack is one of the many New Jersey Democratic power brokers who endorsed Chris Christie.) 

  And he was not a mere participant at this “Cuban Liberation” extravaganza; Stack personally organized the rally on 24 hours’ notice along with fellow Democratic mayors Nicholas Sacco, Wayne Zitt, and Gabriel Rodriguez. So this was effectively a state-run and state-endorsed event, which is a curious contrast with other forms of less “official” public protest. (Avowed state-backing was also a feature of many “BLM” rallies that took place last summer.)

  Sacco is another quintessentially NJ political creature. Amazingly, he’s been mayor of North Bergen since 1991 and a State Senator since 1994, thus drawing two public salaries (“double-dipping”) for a whopping 27 years. This dual office-holding practice was legislatively banned in 2008, but Sacco was “grandfathered” in, as was Stack. That frees them both up to engage in a little military intervention advocacy on the side. “If it takes the force and strength of the United States, it should be used to free those people,” the famed double-dipper Sacco declared Tuesday. 

  While anything could happen, it’s doubtful that Joe Biden will accede to these demands for military intervention. But in some ways, the pro-intervention advocacy on display in New Jersey could be even more influential on a Democratic administration than the pro-intervention advocacy also rabidly underway in South Florida, where Cubans are more reliably Republican. (GOP mayor of Miami Francis Suarez just called for US airstrikes.) Hudson County, NJ on the other hand is a major Democratic stronghold, and so calls for military action emanating out of it could scramble some of the expected partisan configurations surrounding the issue.

  But perhaps most importantly, Union City is the political base of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), a former Senate colleague of Biden and the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He preceded Stack as mayor of Union City. While Menendez generally takes a predictably hard line on Cuba policy, just as he does on most other foreign policy issues including Israel and Iran, as yet he’s refrained from following in the footsteps of his mayoral successor Stack to endorse outright military intervention. (Although he did just proclaim this week on MSNBC, “We Have To Challenge The Regime,” whatever that means exactly.) Here is what Juan Pachon, a spokesperson for Menendez, told me:

  To answer your question, Chairman Menendez was absolutely clear at a press gaggle earlier this week in saying there will NOT be military invasion or intervention in Cuba. I’ll let you quote from him but he went through the history of how even the most anti-regime and anti-communist presidents going back to Reagan had never entertained that as a real possibility. To my boss, that is exactly the type of rhetoric and theories that the regime wants to push

  So, that’s the best indicator one’s likely to get that no military intervention is in the cards. In the Biden-to-Trump transition, Menendez has supplanted Marco Rubio (R-FL) as the most influential Senator on the matter vis-a-vis Executive Branch policy. Rubio, no doubt smarting from his demotion as Trump Administration pointman for fomenting regime change across Latin America — with his fevered antics having backfired spectacularly in Venezuela — now has limited sway. He’ll have to content himself with whipping up Twitter frenzies, and sporting a brand new repurposed Communist “raised fist” logo as his profile pic.

  

  It should not be under-stated how fervently these Cuban-American populations want concrete US military action. With the exception of one sole person, every rally attendee I spoke to was explicit that the “help” they were seeking from the US was a military intervention. I deliberately did not “cherry-pick” these answers — it was the clear sentiment of Cubans-Americans engaging in public activism right now.

  No matter how alienated the US populace is purported to be with US interventionism after so many failed misadventures of late, the logic of interventionism always seems to resurface. Which makes sense, given that the US is one of the few countries with the capacity to overthrow foreign governments at will. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is reported to have once said: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” 

  It’s extremely easy to posture as an “anti-interventionist” in the abstract — few would overtly brand as a committed “interventionist” these days — and then throw your skepticism out the window when it comes to specific circumstances in which you think it’d be a great idea to deploy US power to topple a foreign government.

  Read the rest of the report here.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 22:20

• Mountain West Attracts New Residents
  Mountain West Attracts New Residents

  Idaho is America’s fastest-growing state, according to data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Its population increased by 2.1 percent to almost 1.8 million from July 2018 to June 2019. Nevada is the second fastest growing state, followed by Arizona.

  As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, new residents moving in from other parts of the U.S. have for some years been responsible for the population increase in the U.S.’ three fastest-growing states in the Mountain West and Southwest of the country. The fourth fastest-growing state, Utah, is growing because of an excess of births over deaths.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Ten U.S. states decreased in population – if only slightly – between the two years.

  Even before the coronavirus pandemic, New York state was among them.

  The state has lost population due to a decline in immigration that used to make up for people moving away. Population decline affected states in the Northeast as well as West Virginia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska and Hawaii.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 22:00

• The News Killed Satire
  The News Killed Satire

  Authored by Patrick Armstrong via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

  Given what they say every day, how would you tell the difference between solemn official announcements and mischievous satire?

  

  A couple of years ago a colleague suggested the idea that a group of us attempt to counter the rising passion of anti-Russia propaganda by satirising it. My reaction was that that was probably going to be a waste of effort because – this was in Trump’s time with Rachel Maddow and the rest spewing ever more preposterous conspiracy notions 24/7 – they were already well past the point of even being capable of noticing satire.

  Nothing has made me change my mind since. Read this, for example, from Australia’s most-read newspaper – it’s about China but the point stands.

  cuddly elephants are the latest weapon in President Xi Jinping’s propaganda offensive to present a more “lovable” global image of China.

  In other words, to distract the West from noticing the millions of Uyghurs shackled together in chain gangs tearing down mosques while being force-fed pork sandwiches, the communist dictators in Beijing have unleashed stories of cute cuddly animals. How could anybody satirise that? And if someone tried, would anyone notice that it was satire? How would you tell the difference between satire and earnest pronouncements from “scholars” at “think” tanks? Cuddly elephants are believable but cuddly pandas are over the top?

  Or how about the BBC solemnly explaining three years ago How Putin’s Russia turned humour into a weapon. What’s next? Putin weaponises cheese? Oops, Masha Gessen’s already done that with her unforgettable paean to

  My little Gorgonzola. My little mozzarella. My little Gruyere, chevre and Brie. I held them all in my arms — I didn’t even want to share them with the shopping cart – – and headed for the cash register.

  Putin weaponises your breakfast cereal! Falls rather flat after that, doesn’t it? All you’re left with is killer squids – nope, that’s been done too: Is 14-legged killer squid found TWO MILES beneath Antarctica being weaponised by Putin? (That cunning Putin has even managed to add six killer tentacles to the octopod – another breakthrough in Russian darkside science!) Beluga whales? No, too late!

  In 2018 Rachel Maddow, on MSNBC, which modestly describes itself as “the premier destination for in-depth analysis of daily headlines”, spent nearly three in-depth minutes explaining in depth that Russia had a border with North Korea which, somehow, showed that Putin’s stooge Trump was doing something horrible. Watch it yourself, unless you have a root canal appointment you’d rather go to. Again, satirise that! Now it is possible that she was performing an education service for those Americans who thought North Korea was in Australia or Oman. But, on the other hand, given that a court determined that

  Maddow’s show is different than a typical news segment where anchors inform viewers about the dailynews. The point of Maddow’s show is for her to provide the news but also to offer her opinions as to that news.

  Perhaps it already was a sort of satire.

  These “news” items above are, of course, themselves deflections. The Uyghur stories are mostly nonsense as this former believer explains. The torn-down mosques are selectively-used satellite pictures as this explains (and here’s the ever-ready Bellingcat selectively using the very same pictures). And the witnesses are always changing their stories as documented here. So it’s not actually Beijing that’s using stories about wandering elephants to distract attention, in fact: it’s just the other way around. Putin’s “weaponised humour” was directed at the ever-changing Skripal story – here is a short list of the preposterosities the officials expect us to swallow – so the BBC’s accusation is another deflection from reality. Weaponising cheese was anti-Putin nonsense that has already blown up now that Russia is basically self-sufficient in food – just another missed prediction from her ever-expanding list. As to Maddow, well she’s still weaving a Brownian movement of dots into webs of Russian conspiracies.

  In the past I’ve done my own attempts at collecting the ever-churning nonsense about Russia and Putin that we’ve been subjected to: here in 2015 (Asperger’s syndrome, gunslinger walk), in 2019 at the height of the Trumputin insanity – remember this one?: Trump wanting to buy Greenland is yet another sign of Putin’s puppetry. How do you satirise that? Or this disgusting cartoon from the source of “All the News that’s Fit to Print“; that’s already been turned up so far past eleven that no satirist could turn the volume higher.

  I challenge any satirist to do a skit on how four years of shrieking about Putin’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election came to a sudden slamming stop with the most secure election in history of 2020. Did Putin & his league of spooks suddenly forget how to rig foreign elections after, we were told, many many successful attempts? Was there a change of heart in the Kremlin and they tearfully realised it was wrong to swing foreign elections? Did they decide Biden would be better than Trump in their scheme to bring down the USA? Did Putin’s stooge Trump somehow so fortify the American election system that Putin was unable to put him back in? Has Rachel Maddow ever explained what happened? Or the WaPo? Or CNN? Four years of ranting about Putin’s control of US elections disappeared in an instant. Widespread knowledge of Why US Elections Are So Vulnerable to Russian Hacking turned, overnight, into a despicable conspiracy theory – Donald Trump’s Big Lie explained. And this at a time, mind you, when Russian hackers were supposedly hacking everything in the USA except its election. Satirise that, if you dare.

  Of course the real answer is obvious: this time the “right guy” won and there was no need to invent a Russian collusion story to weaken the “wrong guy”.

  I am 100% going to say it, and I 100% believe that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out. I came to CNN because I wanted to be a part of that.

  So, when the need disappeared, so did the story and US elections became airtight again. But how do you satirise that? They knew what they were doing and telling the truth was the least part of it.

  Which brings us to the real point and the reason why satire is a waste of time: you’re not supposed to remember the details; they don’t put details into their propaganda stories so you can remember them and compare them with other details. Not at all: the point is to leave an impression behind. In the foregoing case the object was to leave a bad smell around Trump’s victory – it was somehow – the details changed but the smell remained – wrong and illegitimate. Pee tapes came and went, Mueller rose and fell, Maddow found a map; always something new when the last thing rolled away. Satire can’t touch that – by the time the satirist has got his skit together about pussies, it’s time for the “all 17 intelligence agencies”; when the Mueller prayer candles burn out, Putin’s bribing Afghans to do what they happily do for free. But always Trump is somehow – can’t quite remember exactly how – suspiciously linked to an evil – forgotten the details there too, but undeniably evil – foreign bad guy. The show rolls along always with a new squirrel to distract you.

  One of the delights of the Biden/Harris Administration is the return of old favourites.

  Here’s John Kirby explaining in 2014 why it’s Russia’s fault that it’s at NATO’s doorstep and, returned in 2021 as Pentagon spokesman, why Russia was “typically” disinforming us about firing warning shots at HMS Defender. I defy anyone to satirise that. Masters of BS – can’t say anything more than that, can you? Psaki and Kirby, together again. And where’s Harf, no mean practitioner herself? Prove them liars, they don’t care.

  It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.

  For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. (Harry G Frankfurt: On Bullshit)

  For satire to be effective, there must be some connection to reality; but these people don’t care about reality so there can’t be any satire. Putin weaponises humour, children’s cartoons, vaccines and many more – here’s a list – but, O would-be satirist, anything you can imagine is probably already been solemnly discussed by the usual consortium of ex-security organ apparatchiks posing as objective experts.

  And, given what they say every day, how would you tell the difference between solemn official announcements and mischievous satire anyway?

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 21:40

• "Woke" Pregnant Man Emojis Could Be Introduced This Year 
  “Woke” Pregnant Man Emojis Could Be Introduced This Year 

  The next emoji draft list was revealed Thursday by Emojipedia and contained a gender-neutral “person with crown,” interracial handshakes, and what appears to be a mustached “pregnant man.”

  Emojipedia blog appears to be highlighting their level of wokeness as they say the mustached pregnant man emoji “recognizes that pregnancy is possible for some transgender men and non-binary people.” 

  

  The creative minds, especially behind the pregnant man emoji, might be confused since men can’t get pregnant. Perhaps the emoji is just a man with a beer gut experiencing heartburn.

  

  Emoji fans are now voting on their favorite emojis in a draft that ends Saturday. “This isn’t a part of the approval process, just a fun way to gauge which draft emojis people are most keen to use. So get voting, and the winner will be revealed on July 17 aka World Emoji Day,” Emojipedia blog said. 

  Here’s the latest draft list of woke emojis. 

  

  Once selected, the most popular emoji will be finalized in September and released on Goggle Pixel in the fourth quarter and on Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and Samsung Galaxy within the first half of 2022. 

  

  The use of emojis has been soaring worldwide. 

  

  Twitter users mocked the pregnant man emoji: 

  I’m really over this pregnant man bullshit https://t.co/GT0vZxQaft

  — Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Just a little reminder that under no circumstances can men get pregnant. https://t.co/TfkjAG7YAV

  — Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Buzzing that the “after Sunday dinner” emoji is finally here 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻 https://t.co/5PeOgmBn4Z pic.twitter.com/sfpCsBJhld

  — Rich Glover (@rich_glover89) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The level of wokeness today defies logic. Perhaps it’s time for some people to wake up. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 21:20

• Taibbi: The Myth Of The Winnable Culture War
  Taibbi: The Myth Of The Winnable Culture War

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

  In response to the predictably voluminous criticisms of yesterday’s article, “Spying and Smearing is ‘Un-American,’ not Tucker Carlson”:

  

  I disagree with Tucker Carlson on a variety of issues. I’m not saying this to “distance myself,” but rather to make a point that imagine he’d agree with, also the point of the article: there’s a difference between disagreeing, and what we’ve begun to do in media since Trump’s arrival.

  Take one of Carlson’s most-criticized recent statements:

  #Tucker: Why does America benefit from having tons of people from failing countries come here? @FoxNews

  — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 30, 2017

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  I disagree with the assumption that people who come to America from countries more dysfunctional than ours will bring the problems of their home countries with them. It’s an oft-cited statistic, but Nigerian immigrants are the most educated people in America, with 61% holding at least a Bachelor’s degree, nearly twice the rate of both native-born Americans and immigrants overall. There are similar numbers involving immigrants from South Asia, Korea, China, and other parts of the world.

  Were this a debate with Carlson, I’d argue that conservatives are the ones who should be howling for more immigration, as three out of four naturalized immigrants say they are “very proud” of being Americans. This is a much higher number than native-born Americans, 69% of whom say they are “ashamed” of some parts of our culture (just 39% of immigrants agree). Immigrants work at a higher rate than native-born Americans, their children are educated at higher rates, and maybe the most patriotic.

  He’d counter, and I can imagine what some of those arguments would be. But he’d be happy to have the debate. He might change my mind about some things, perhaps I’d change his about others. The other day, he described looking on Twitter after the Cuba situation blew up. “Three separate prominent conservative figures were against American intervention,” he said. “That’s change.”

  The perception that conservatives don’t change their minds is as stupid as my belief that liberals would never cozy up to the CIA and NSA turned out to be. Conservative attitudes toward war, gay rights, surveillance and a host of other issues have shifted radically in recent years. Also, people don’t act and think solely as groups, as there’s enormous variance within every demographic. Pretending otherwise is a pernicious media myth. But I’m getting off track.

  Here’s what we do now, instead of arguing: we fling terms like “white supremacist,” “transphobe,” “conspiracy theorist,” and “fascist” around, knowing that if the words stick, they lead to outcomes: boycotts, firings, removal from Internet platforms, etc. When Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy compare Carlson to Alex Jones, they do this knowing Jones was booted off the Internet, so it’s a not-so-subtle way of voting for that same outcome.

  Fine, many of you will say; I want Tucker Carlson booted off the air, and the Internet. I’d argue there are a lot of problems with thinking that way (this is exactly what censorship proponents said they wouldn’t do three years ago when the Jones situation happened, i.e. start arguing for removal of more mainstream conservatives), but beyond that, the technique isn’t limited just to Carlson.

  When Ezra Klein proposed an open borders policy to Bernie Sanders years ago, Sanders balked, saying it was a Koch Brothers idea designed to provide big companies with cheap labor. Pundits were apoplectic. “Bernie Sanders’s fear of immigrant labor is ugly — and wrongheaded,” decried Vox. The Guardian said he’d fueled “domestic, nativist sentiments,” while Jacobin said he’d “played into a right-wing nativist trap.” Buzzfeed later compared his stance to that of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, “known for his anti-immigrant, white nationalist rhetoric.”

  Sanders spent much of his five years as a presidential contender fending off such not-so-subtle accusations of racism, nativism, misogyny, “toxicity,” being “alt-right” and “alt-left,” being a “white savior figure,” being a useful idiot for Russia, even anti-Semitism. When he criticized the press, or talked about “elites,” he was accused of being Trump. There was very little direct engagement with him on his policy beliefs, and a lot more rhetoric aimed at him as a person, most of which was unanswerable.

  Sanders, who was popular in the same media spaces I worked in, where being labeled a bigot is the worst thing imaginable, never quite figured out how to deal with these criticisms. He tried to change his message downplaying “identity politics,” proposed a near-total moratorium on deportations, and repeatedly made the mistake of validating bogus or bad-faith criticisms of him, for instance agreeing that online “Bernie Bros” were “disgusting” and pledging to do something about “that crap.

  None of it worked, and criticisms only intensified. He should have called out the tactic. Regarding Bernie Bros: all candidate bases have vicious online communities, and some are filled with clearly paid instigators, who even win praise in other outlets writing about other candidates. The Los Angeles Times saluted Kamala Harris for nurturing an effective “modern political army” in the “K-Hive,” which had trolls writing all sorts of racist and lurid things, like “Gotta kill, very violently.” As Matt Orfalea in Grayzone pointed out, the hypocrisy in the treatments of the two movements was transparent, as seen in this pair of Daily Beast headlines:

  

  This has become our whole style of political argument: hit someone with an unanswerable accusation and then, as Lyndon Johnson would say, make the sonofabitch deny it.

  It’s why so much effort was spent denouncing “economic anxiety” as code for racism, why Hillary Clinton accused both Jill Stein and Tulsi Gabbard of being foreign assets, why the New Yorker ran a story arguing Glenn Greenwald’s criticism of Russiagate was rooted in his disdain for “the ascendance of women and people of color in the [Democratic] Party,” why Cenk Uygur is accusing “alt left” enemies of being “paid by the Russians,” why Current Affairs went after impossibly congenial podcast host Krystal Ball by accusing cohort Saagar Enjeti of being a human gateway drug to Hitler, why critics went after Substack by claiming it was racist and transphobic (or, most amusingly lately, “bad for democracy”), why former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet was ousted for putting the lives of black staff “in danger” by running a Tom Cotton editorial, and, yes, why Andrew Weissman went after Carlson by saying sowing distrust in the NSA is “un-American.”

  These are all debate-pre-emptive strategies. When Clinton went after Gabbard, we stopped talking about whether or not military intervention in Syria was a good idea, and moved to debating whether Gabbard was an accomplice to genocide. Critics of Russiagate from the start had to calculate their appetites for being accused of supporting Putin or Trump. Anyone even considering going on Fox now can expect to spend years answering questions about abetting fascism and white supremacy. Argument goes out the door: the discourse becomes entirely about courage and career risk. How much flak are you willing to take? How much can you afford to take?

  This is why people who probably have very different or even opposite politics on the policy level, like Greenwald and Carlson, are suddenly in a broadcast partnership. They’re part of a dwindling club left in major media who are defying these tactics. In a hypothetical universe where this moral panic era subsides, one could envision them going back to violently arguing with one another over immigration, spending, policing, etc. But for now they’re on the same side, not on issues, but against a tactic.

  It’s become fashionable especially in Democratic Party politics (but more lately on the Republican side, too) to embrace this maximalist form of debate on the grounds that it works. De-platforming works, boycotts work, shaming works, they say; shaming is how we effect change. These people like to point to the fact that Alex Jones is effectively a non-factor in public life now, and Milo Yiannopoulos has vanished, even Donald Trump is a sideshow, and so on.

  Two things about this. One, just because you can’t see someone anymore, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Donald Trump’s 74 million supporters haven’t disappeared just because Trump’s off Twitter. They’re now listening in the tens of millions to shows like Steve Bannon’s War Room. True, advertisers are mass-boycotting Carlson, but if they succeed in getting his show pulled, that audience won’t go to CNN, they’ll find some other haven. Maybe their next broadcast guru will be someone who doesn’t ask Sidney Powell for evidence of election fraud, doesn’t warn about Covid-19 early, doesn’t argue against war in Iran or Syria. If you’re going to try to eliminate this or that voice, be aware there’s a downstream calculation involved that may not turn out the way you think.

  Point two is related: rhetorical coercion tends to backfire. For all the relentless messaging about how Trump’s racism left nonwhite voters with only one choice last fall — an idea symbolized by Joe Biden’s off-the-cuff “You ain’t black” comment — Trump gained with every nonwhite demographic last fall. This was an eyebrow-raising political story, but an absolutely extraordinary media story, one that spoke to the fact that even mass quantities of certain types of messaging can be counterproductive.

  Remember how Republicans in the Bush era talked about blue-state enemies? Their conventional wisdom was that liberals equated with terrorists, liberalism was a “mental disorder,” liberalism was “treason.” Their rhetoric did not include a vision for the other half of America outside of conversion or expulsion. Plenty of this is still going on, but the updated version is prevalent now among Democrats, who are trying to make a strategy of absolute non-engagement stick with additional tools like platform censorship and domestic surveillance.

  As any married person knows, there are certain words you never say in a fight, because you’ll still be living together when it’s over. Americans, like it or not, are married to one another. That’s not accommodationist talk, it’s just fact. The people we disagree with aren’t going anywhere, and it makes more sense to talk to them than not.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 21:00

• Betting On The Everything Bubble: Governments Worldwide Are Testing The New Limits Of Debt
  Betting On The Everything Bubble: Governments Worldwide Are Testing The New Limits Of Debt

  There’s nothing quite like being an observer of what is likely going to be one of the most important case studies in monetary policy and global economics in textbooks some years from now: the everything bubble.

  Among those taking stock of just how far countries around the globe have “pushed it” with the amount of debt they have taken on is the Wall Street Journal, who wrote this week about how the pandemic has inflated the everything bubble further than anyone could have imagined. 

  Those advocating for the debt say it could usher in global growth. Those opposing it make the obvious case that eventually the laws of economics will get the best of things and we’ll have to ‘pay the piper’. 

  Highlighting just how much we’re pushing it, the report notes that the U.S. government is on course for a budget deficit of $3 trillion for the second year in a row and that Japan’s central-government debt is about to surpass a quadrillion yen, or about $10 trillion. Japan’s inflation has stayed at zero despite $800 billion in economic stimulus as a response to Covid. 

  Worldwide government debt is up to 105% of GDP as of 2020. Prior to the pandemic, this number stood at 88%. The IIF predicts that this worldwide debt could rise by another $10 trillion this year, to reach $92 trillion. 

  Even countries like Greece – not far removed from almost being forced out of the Eurozone due to its debt – are pushing limits again. Former Italian finance minister Pier Carlo Padoan said: “The change is that there is no obvious ‘sinner’. After the financial crisis, there was a blame game. Covid was an exogenous shock. A huge policy response was necessary.”

  

  Not unlike an addict, the higher inflation goes, the more inexpensive government debt eventually becomes to pay back. The lower rates go (and stay), the higher the incentive to keep taking on debt. 

  While most of the world adopts this careless strategy, countries like China and oil producing countries in the Middle East have been adding to their savings by running trade surpluses and putting the proceeds into U.S. Treasury bonds. 

  But believe it or not, there are some who simply think rates can stay low and inflation can run hot forever. Summing up the method of thinking for those advocating for unlimited debt is Paul Sheard, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He said: “The world has changed. The intellectual frameworks have evolved. We don’t need to worry about debt.”

  Advocates at J.P. Morgan claim that the U.S.’s rate of borrowing “will barely make a dent in global gross savings, which are worth more than $25 trillion a year,” the Journal reports.

  Elena Duggar, associate managing director of credit strategy and research at Moody’s Investors Service, said: “There’s something that saves the advanced economies from that pickup in debt we see, and it’s the low debt-servicing costs.”

  

  But critics point out the obvious: spending in the U.S. has simply gotten out of control and we may have already let the inflation “genie” out of the bottle, which could decimate quality of life for many middle and lower class Americans. 

  Charles Goodhart, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee and an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics thinks that governments are learning that reactions like those we took in 2008 “work” at the same time they are beginning to “fail”. In other words, he thinks we’re behind the 8-ball in how we’re addressing current policy versus historical policy. 

  “The generals are always fighting the last war. Governments didn’t do enough before, so they’re going to overdo it this time,” he said.

  “If you look at the path of global fiscal policy, it’s a massive bet on the secular stagnation hypothesis. It’s a bet on a massive private savings glut and investment dearth for a long time to come,” Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said in 2014. 

  De Grauwe concluded: “There are still limits to government debt. They are just much further out than we used to think.”

  You can read the full WSJ writeup here. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 20:40

• 'Defund the Police' Advocate Rep. Cori Bush Spent $54,000 On Private Security Company: FEC
  ‘Defund the Police’ Advocate Rep. Cori Bush Spent $54,000 On Private Security Company: FEC

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  

  Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), a member of the far-left “squad,” spent over $50,000 on a private security firm over the past three months, according to campaign filings.

  Federal Elections Commission (FEC) filings show her campaign spent more than $54,000 on RS&T Security Consulting, LLC., for “security services” between April 15 and June 28.

  A cached version of RS&T Security Consulting’s website—which is offline—shows the business provides “executive protection agents” for “first-class executive protection and security for national and international figures.” It’s not clear why the website was taken down or if the business is still active.

  The website also shows Secret Service-like agents as an example of what services are provided.

  “Our Protection Specialists are highly skilled in a multitude of armed and unarmed protective services, surveillance system instillations and private investigative services,” the website says. “Our diverse close protection teams are trained, licensed personnel whom are experts in the private and public sector in 136 cities throughout the United States,” it adds.

  She also paid $15,000 to a Nathaniel Davis for “security services” around the same time. It’s unclear who Davis is or what services he offered, although Davis’s address in the filings is the same as Bush’s campaign headquarters, Fox News reported.

  Since she was elected into office, Bush has consistently called for defunding or “transforming” police departments. When various cities cut police funding in the midst of left-wing riots and demonstrations last year, the Missouri Democrat cheered the move.

  “Today’s decision to defund the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department is historic. It marks a new future for our city,” Bush said in an April statement when the City of St. Louis stripped funding to the St. Louis Police Department. “For decades, our city funneled more and more money into our police department under the guise of public safety, while massively underinvesting in the resources that will truly keep our communities safe,” Bush added.

  Bush also praised the City of Austin, Texas, for defunding its police department.

  “Defunding the police isn’t radical, it’s real,” she wrote in January on Twitter of the move.

  Other than Bush, fellow “squad” members Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have also spent their campaign funds on private security—although apparently not nearly as much as Bush has. According to FEC filings, Ocasio-Cortez spent about $4,000, Omar paid $2,800, and Pressley paid $3,500.

  Bush, meanwhile, spent $35,000 on security services from RS&T, Maryland-based private security firm Whole Armor Executive Protection, and Davis during the first three months of 2021, federal records show.

  The Epoch Times reached out to Bush’s office for comment.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 20:20

• Olympic Staffer Hospitalized In First Serious COVID Case Tied To Summer Games
  Olympic Staffer Hospitalized In First Serious COVID Case Tied To Summer Games

  It’s ironic that despite all the efforts undertaken by the Games organizers to ensure the safety of Olympic athletes during the upcoming Tokyo Summer Games will likely be all for naught – as the Games seems almost pre-destined to be labeled a “super spreader event’ after the fact.

  Even though spectators have been banned from all Olympic events, a Nigerian delegate has become the first visitor to Japan admitted to the hospital after testing positive for COVID, according to local media reports.

  The delegate, who isn’t an athlete, is in their 60s. They tested positive Thursday as Tokyo reported a new record tally of daily new cases.

  

  What’s more, athletes are already testing positive. On Friday, the Australian Olympic Committee revealed that tennis player Alex de Minaur, who is ranked 15th in the world, has tested positive prior to his departure for the Games, meaning he will need to sit out the competition for which he has been training for years.

  “We’re very disappointed for Alex,” said Australia’s chef de mission, Ian Chesterman. “He said that he’s shattered, not being able to come … but he has sent his very best wishes for the rest of the team.”

  De Minaur returned two positive tests in Spain before he was due to fly to Japan, David Hughes, the AOC’s chief medical officer, told a news conference.

  In the US, USA Basketball revealed Thursday that Washington Wizards star Bradley Beal had tested positive. Other athletes and staff associated with the Games have tested positive in Tokyo and abroad as Delta drives cases higher. Japan has aggressively accelerated its vaccine rollout, but only 30% of its adult population has received at least one dose.

  But COVID isn’t the only issue plaguing the Olympics. On Friday, a top Japanese government spokesman Katsunobu Kato revealed that a Ugandan athlete had gone missing. Police and the team’s host city, Izumisano in western Japan, are mounting a search, he said. Izumisano city authorities identified the missing athlete as 20-year-old weightlifter Julius Ssekitoleko.

  With the Games set to begin next week, Tokyo is confirming new COVID infections at the fastest pace in six months.

  The disaster that the Olympics have become is having a serious backlash for Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, as millions of Japanese feel they have been robbed of the pomp and celebration (not to mention the economic boost) that typically accompany an Olympics hosting duty. The latest polls show support for Suga is teetering just north of the “danger zone” – less than 30%. That’s the level below which many of Suga’s predecessors have either quit, or been forced out.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 20:00

• Biden Mulls Intervention In Cuba To Provide WiFi Remotely
  Biden Mulls Intervention In Cuba To Provide WiFi Remotely

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  The US is considering ways to provide the people of Cuba with internet access, President Biden said on Thursday. The Cuban government reportedly cut off internet access in response to protests that took place earlier in the week, but according to AFP, the access was restored Wednesday, although social media sites are still restricted.

  “They have cut off access to the internet. We are considering whether we have the technological ability to reinstate that access,” Biden said at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

  

  It’s not clear how the US would provide internet inside Cuba since the government would likely view it as a violation of sovereignty. Biden made the comments after Florida Governor Ron Desantis sent the president a letter urging for the federal government to take action to restore the internet. Desantis insisted that the technology to do it remotely exists.

  “Technology exists to provide Internet access into Cuba remotely, using the innovation of American enterprise and the diverse industries here,” Desantis wrote. He drew parallels to the Cold War when the US government-funded radio broadcasting into the Soviet Union.

  “Similar to the American efforts to broadcast radio into the Soviet Union during the Cold War in Europe, the federal government has a history of supporting the dissemination of information into Cuba for the Cuban people through Radio & Televisión Martí, located in Miami,” he said.

  Radio & Televisión Martí is a US state-funded radio broadcaster that started in the 1980s to transmit news into Cuba. It was based on the model of Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Liberty, which was initially funded by the CIA and broadcast in Soviet states.

  “I urge you to act immediately to provide all necessary authorizations, indemnifications, and funding to American businesses with the capability to provide Internet access for the people of Cuba. Steps must be taken immediately,” Desantis wrote.

  The people of Cuba are engaged in the noble cause of fighting against a communist dictatorship. One of the most effective things we can do as a country to support the Cuban people is to get internet connectivity back on the island. Time is of the essence in Cuba.

  — Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  On Tuesday, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez accused the US of inciting unrest in Cuba through a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #SOSCuba. It’s not clear if the US government was involved in the Twitter campaign, but Washington has a history of trying to use social media to stir unrest in Cuba.

  In 2010, the US launched a social media network in Cuba that used text messages known as ZunZuneo. US government documents revealed in 2014 showed that the idea of the project was to develop a “Cuban Twitter” that would build a userbase using “non-controversial content.” Then, when there were a substantial number of users, the US operator would introduce political content to form “smart mobs” to rally against the government.

  ZunZuneo reached a peak of 40,000 users, but was dissolved in 2012. While it sounds like a CIA project, ZunZuneo was funded by the US Agency for International Development.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 19:40

• Federal Judge Rules DACA Is Illegal, Blocking New Applications
  Federal Judge Rules DACA Is Illegal, Blocking New Applications

  DACA, the Obama-era program that gave illegal immigrants brought to the US as children protected status, is now facing serious legal jeopardy after a Federal Judge in Texas invalidated the initiative in a ruling that declared it illegal. It will (at least temporarily) block all new applications to the program.

  However, the ruling, handed down by Judge Andrew Hanen of the US District Court in Houston, would bar future applications but does not immediately cancel current permits for hundreds of thousands of people. Nuances in the judge’s decision will allow the program to stand – for now, at least.

  

  The DACA program offers temporary protections to any immigrants in the country without legal authorization who were 30 or younger when it was first introduced. To qualify, DACA recipients must have arrived in the US by 2007, before they turned 16, and they must satisfy other conditions like being a student or graduate and having no major criminal record. Obama created the program by executive fiat after a bill called the Dream Act failed to pass Congress. Recipients are often referred to by Democrats and the media as “Dreamers”, a label dreamed up by Democratic political strategists.

  If the government can’t “rectify” the judge’s complaints – something that would likely require Congressional action – then the program may be scrapped altogether. So far, the program has extended legal status to roughly 800k illegal migrants brought to the US as children.

  SCOTUS has already ruled on DACA in the past, but an expected legal challenge by the Biden Administration will likely see the issue wind up in front of the court once again.

  The state of Texas led the effort to terminate the program, along with Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina and West Virginia. Officials in those states had argued that the program was improperly adopted and left them with the burden of paying for education, health care and other benefits for the migrant children.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 19:20

• The Greens Hijack Biden's $3.5 Trillion Budget Proposal (That Could Be A Blessing)
  The Greens Hijack Biden’s $3.5 Trillion Budget Proposal (That Could Be A Blessing)

  Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

  The Democrats’ Congressional proposals keep getting sillier and sillier…

  

  Deal or No Deal?

  BREAKING: Clean Electricty Standard is included in budget deal.

  CES is the cornerstone of the progressive, practical transformation to a clean energy future we urgently need.

  — Senator Tina Smith (@SenTinaSmith) July 14, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  “Deal” means agreement among radicals. The Greens hijacked Biden’s already strained budget.

  Clean Electricity Standard

  Please consider Reconciliation Package to Include Clean Electricity Standard.

  In an interview with The Hill prior to her tweet, Smith, who is crafting the clean electricity standard legislation with Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), said she had expected the standard to be part of the legislation.

  The senator also told The Hill that while the details of the standard will have to be worked out in negotiations, she’s hoping to see a requirement for 80 percent clean electricity by 2030.

  “My goal is to get to 100 percent clean electricity as soon as possible. President Biden’s goal is to be doing it by 2035,” she said, referencing Senate rules that allow reconciliation bills to raise the deficit for no more than 10 years. 

  White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy has said that the clean electricity standard is among her priorities for the legislation. 

  Smith said she’d include power coming from wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric or nuclear — and fossil fuels only when they use carbon capture technology to prevent their emissions from going into the atmosphere.

  Smith also stressed the importance of the clean energy standard, calling it the “centerpiece of our strategy for addressing climate change.”

  She said she opposes partial credit for unabated natural gas, which is less carbon-intensive than coal and oil, but still emits planet-warming gases.

  Taxing Imports is Part of the Plan

  The New York Times reports Taxing Imports is Part of the Plan. 

  Democrats have agreed to include a tax on imports from nations that lack aggressive climate change policies as part of a sweeping $3.5 trillion budget plan stocked with other provisions aimed at ratcheting down fossil fuel pollution in the United States.

  The move to tax imports was made public Wednesday, the same day that the European Union outlined its own proposal for a similar carbon border tax, a novel tool that is designed to protect domestic manufacturing while simultaneously pressuring other countries to reduce the emissions that are warming the planet.

  Unlike the Europeans, who outlined their plan in a 291-page document, Democrats released no details about their tax proposal on Wednesday. Calling it simply a “polluter import fee,” the framework does not explain what would be taxed, at what rate or how much revenue it would expect to generate.

  Carbon Emissions in Tons

  

  Carbon Emission Percentages

  

  Economic Madness 

  The US only accounts for 14.5% of carbons and the EU another 8%.

  It is well beyond crazy for the US and EU to propose to tax the word to reduce carbons by 55-80% by 2030.

  Yet, that is the goal of economic illiterates on both continents.

  EU Kicks Off Biggest Push Yet on Climate, Braces for a Fight

  Meanwhile, in Europe, EU Kicks Off Biggest Push Yet on Climate, Braces for a Fight.

  The European Union rolled out an ambitious climate plan to transform every corner of its economy on Wednesday, and braced for years of tough negotiations to turn it into reality.

  Every industry will be forced to accelerate its shift away from fossil fuels in order to cut pollution by at least 55% from 1990 levels by 2030. To achieve that, the bloc will bring new industries such as shipping into what’s already the world’s largest carbon market; ban new combustion-engine cars by 2035; impose new costs on dirty home heating; and force the aviation industry to emit less and pay more.

  “Nothing we presented today is going to be easy. It’s going to be bloody hard,” European Commission climate chief Frans Timmermans said. But he said the “existential threat which is the climate crisis” called for radical steps.

  EU officials are at pains to emphasize that the transformation must be fair. The bloc has earmarked 72 billion euros ($85.1 billion) in a new fund to help compensate those who lose out, with the money –which is based on current prices — coming from the expanded market for carbon emissions.

  291-Page Document No One Can Explain

  The EU border tax is scheduled for 2026. European officials propose a phase-in period to figure out how the tax would actually work in practice to give time for countries to prepare.

  “Europe was the first continent to declare to be climate neutral in 2050, and now we are the very first ones to put a concrete roadmap on the table,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

  Blessing in Disguise? 

  yes. To understand why, first let’s take a look at what is happening beneath the surface in the EU, then the US Senate.

  Eurointelligence discusses Opposition to 2035 CO2 Phase-Out

  FAZ writes this morning that there is opposition within the European Commission to the phasing-out of the fuel-driven motor car by 2035. Valdis Dombrovkis, Commission vice president, and Thierry Breton and Adina Valean, commissioners for the internal market and transport, favour a postponement to 2040. This debate reminds of us of the postponement of the exit from coal in Germany, which has been put back to 2038. What is happening right now all over Europe is that governments and the Commission are buckling under pressure from industry, and are choosing the soft option of delaying most of the adjustment to the next decade.

  Among governments, France is leading to those who favour 2040 as an exit. A 14-year transition phase is beyond the life span of current management boards of car companies. It’s the next guy’s problem.

  The other area of disagreement concerns interim targets. The original Commission proposal foresaw a 65% reduction until 2030. Realistically, that would only be achievable if manufacturers already start making and selling electric cars in large quantities by then. It will be interesting to see whether this number, too, will be watered down. If you pick 2040 as your zero target, it would be logically consistent to pick a lower reduction target for 2030 as well – in the order of 50%. That would mean that the whole timeline gets pushed back.

  It is also important to remember that this is just the proposal itself. We would not be surprised if the EU Council waters it down even further.

  Green Party Implodes in Germany

  

  On June 26, I noted Green Party Implodes in Germany

  An Infratest dimap poll, published June 10, debunked one of the more persistent myths about Germany – that it is naturally a green country. Germany has a strong Green party, but there is a specific history to that, one that one should not be confused with general attitudes in society.

  Here are some of the highlights. Should the state outlaw behaviour that is particularly damaging to the climate? 53% say No. Are you in favour of higher petrol prices? 75% say No. Should the government encourage a shift from fuel-driven to electrical cars? 57% say No.

  The Greens are back to where they were at the beginning of the year, at around 20-22% – which we think is where the current core support lies. 

  The above snips from Eurointelligence. 

  Reconciliation Odds

  The price tag of infrastructure is $1 trillion or so. Pelosi says she will not pass a standalone infrastructure bill. 

  The reconciliation package is another $3.5 trillion, and Bernie Sanders is arguing for $6 trillion. 

  I fail to see how Senator Joe Manchin (D) from West Virginia (a coal producing state) will get on board with the incredible demands of Senator Tina Smith. 

  Add Senator Jon Tester (D) Montana to that list of those questioning this madness. 

  Potential Saving Grave

  The more demands the extreme radicals place, the more likely the moderates will run away. In the US it only takes one moderate to avoid economic disaster. 

  If Tina Smith and Nancy Pelosi insist on economic nonsense, Biden’s entire $3.5 trillion reconciliation package will turn to ashes. 

  That is the potential saving grace of these economically mad proposals.

  *  *  *

  Like these reports? I hope so, and if you do, please Subscribe to MishTalk Email Alerts.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 19:00

• Insult To Injury: Russia Declares US Has Utterly "Failed" After 20 Years In Afghanistan
  Insult To Injury: Russia Declares US Has Utterly “Failed” After 20 Years In Afghanistan

  Russia this week warned the United States military to stay out of Central Asian nations bordering Afghanistan, such as Tajikistan, while emphasizing this is Russia’s own sphere of influence and that the window for American and NATO attempts to stabilize Afghanistan have long ago come and gone.

  This after earlier this month Taliban leadership boasted of having taken 85% of the country, something Kabul authorities balked at, while also admitting that clashes are growing fiercer and in many more places. President Biden last week also declared US “objectives achieved” and said the troop draw down would be “complete” by August 31st; however, the Kremlin is now declaring that Washington has utterly “failed” in Afghanistan after two decades there.

  The provocative comments by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov came in a press conference in Uzbekistan on Friday. He further strongly suggested that the US is now fumbling the draw down, which is contributing to the country once again descending into war-torn chaos. Crucially the security summit was attended Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

  

  Lavrov said the White House is steadfast on portraying the Afghan mission in “the most positive colors” while it remains that “everyone understands that the mission failed”.

  Among the specific dire outcomes he pointed to included the resurgence of Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists in the region, and that Afghan drug production and trafficking are booming. Russian officials have long maintained that instability in Central Asia has a direct impact on Russia’s own border regions.

  “In recent days we have unfortunately seen a rapid deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan,” he said according to Russian media. “In light of the hasty withdrawal of the US and NATO troops, there is huge uncertainty around the future of the political and military situation in this country,” he explained to reporters.

  “It’s clear that, in this situation, there is a real risk of instability spreading to neighboring countries“. Currently Russian allies like Tajikistan are greatly bolstering their border forces and are allowing Russian military drills. International reports indicated Tajikistan’s army is sending some 20,000 extra reservists to the border with Afghanistan, after thousands of refugees and even hundreds of Afghan national troops have poured in amid Taliban advances. 

  FM #Lavrov: US is not just withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan. It is withdrawing them de facto having admitted that its 20-year-long mission failed. The terrorist threat has not diminished. On the contrary, it has increased many times over since 2001, when the US went there pic.twitter.com/qYRw8yLvgB

  — Russia in RSA 🇷🇺 (@EmbassyofRussia) July 12, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Interestingly the Russian foreign minister also called proposed Pentagon plans to deploy forces to surrounding countries a ‘failure’ as well…

  “First of all, Pakistan and Uzbekistan have already officially announced that this is out of the question, they will not place such infrastructure on their territory. […] None of our allies announced their intention to expose their territory, their population to such a risk,” Lavrov said.

  Indeed late last month in an interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan slammed the door shut on the possibility of hosting CIA or US troops for cross-border security raid from his country.

  When asked by Swan , Khan said bluntly: “Absolutely not. There’s no way we’re going to allow it,” Khan said, before repeating resolutely, “Absolutely not.” Other regional countries have since followed in their voicing refusal to let the US establish a security foothold for potential future Afghan-related missions.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 18:40

• California Postpones New Social Justice Math Framework
  California Postpones New Social Justice Math Framework

  Authored by Jack Bradley via The Epoch Times,

  The California Board of Education voted unanimously to postpone a new mathematics framework that incorporates ethnic and social justice studies after critics argued it would “de-mathematize math.”

  

  The board postponed the Mathematics Curriculum Framework—a document guiding how teachers should implement the state’s math standards—during its July 13 meeting, following a letter signed by 468 higher educators and business leaders in the fields of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology.

  “California is on the verge of politicizing K-12 math in a potentially disastrous way,” Independent Institute senior fellow Williamson M. Evers said in a July 13 statement.

  “This postponement means the state board of education has heard the message loud and clear. STEM leaders don’t want California students left behind by introducing politics into the math curriculum.”

  Evers criticized the proposed Mathematics Curriculum Framework for including into the curriculum aspects of social justice, and racial equity.

  “A real champion of equity and justice would want all California’s children to learn actual math—as in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus—not an endless river of new pedagogical fads that effectively distort and displace actual math,” he said.

  Evers pointed out that the standards may distract from actual mathematics by tasking students to solve “problems that result in social inequalities,” and developing their “sociopolitical consciousness.”

  The framework “encourages focusing on ‘contributions that historically marginalized people have made to mathematics’ rather than on those contributions themselves which have been essential to the academic discipline of mathematics,” Evers said, citing the framework.

  One of the signees of the open letter said:

   “I consider myself a social justice warrior. Limiting access to advanced mathematics is not the way to address social inequity.

  “We believe infusing mathematics with political rhetoric is alien to mathematics as a discipline, and will do lasting damage—including making math dramatically harder for students whose first language is not English.”

  The board’s decision came nearly two months after the Instructional Quality Commission proposed necessary changes to the framework during its May 20 meeting.

  “The math framework development timeline from 2019 is out of date and needs to be adjusted to allow for completion of edits directed by the Instructional Quality Commission,” California Department of Education spokesperson Scott Roark told The Epoch Times via email on June 15.

  Educational equity policy groups Ed Trust-West and Californians Together have expressed support for the new math framework because it is “infused with the concepts of equity.”

  “In short, the revisions present an important opportunity for [English learner] advocates to uplift equity throughout the public education system,” Ed Trust-West and Californians Together said in a statement.

  Said Evers:

  “Its proposed Mathematics Curriculum Framework is presented as a step toward social justice and racial equity, but its effect would be the opposite—to rob all Californians, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, who always suffer most when schools fail to teach their students.

  Authors of the framework will incorporate requested changes and return it to the board for a vote in May 2022.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 18:20

• 73 Year Old Vietnam Vet Dead After Being Beaten In Broad Daylight During Attempted Carjacking In Chicago
  73 Year Old Vietnam Vet Dead After Being Beaten In Broad Daylight During Attempted Carjacking In Chicago

  Today in “Lori Lightfoot’s liberal utopia” news…

  As if we needed any further proof that Mayor Lori Lightfoot is grossly incompetent and has completely lost control of her city, a 73 year old Vietnam War veteran in Chicago passed away due to a heart attack after an attempted carjacking that left him beaten in broad daylight. 

  Keith Cooper, who served his country honorably during two Vietnam War combat tours, was pronounced dead on Wednesday this week after being “repeatedly punched in the head” after two carjackers demanded he turn over the keys to his car while he was out running errands. 

  “[The suspects] tried to steal his car. You didn’t even get his car when you took his life. It was two guys preying on a senior citizen,” the victim’s son-in-law told Fox News. “He was like a bonus dad. He was my father-in-law, but he was like a dad. He was the best. Keith was the best.”

  

  Witnesses attempted to stop the attack, the report says. His daughter, Kenika Carlton, said: “I’m just in shock. I’m still in shock because this is not the way I thought my day was going to go.”

  He died days before his 74th birthday, the report notes. Two suspects have been detained for questioning. 

  2020 saw a 135% spike in carjackings in Chicago compared to 2019. 2021 has seen one 24 hour span where “at least five” carjackings took place, the report notes. 

  Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office did not immediately return a request for comment from Fox News. Big surprise.

  Recall, just days ago Lightfoot was begging President Biden for help running her city. Meanwhile, when President Trump offered to “send in the Feds” to Chicago during his term, she declined. “I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think this is a matter of incredible urgency,” Lightfoot said about asking for help.

  But we think this Tweet says it best:

  Just resign if you can’t do your job https://t.co/HrXA1E2nDt

  — Quoth the Raven (@QTRResearch) July 7, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

   

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 18:00

• Federal Prosecutor Paused Hunter Biden Investigation Before Election, Shielding Then-Candidate Joe From Public Embarrassment
  Federal Prosecutor Paused Hunter Biden Investigation Before Election, Shielding Then-Candidate Joe From Public Embarrassment

  As the 2020 US election entered the home stretch last summer, Delaware US Attorney David Weiss chose to pause his investigation of Hunter Biden at a critical stage which would have publicly exposed the probe, according to Politico.

  

  Weiss, a Trump appointee (on the recommendation of two Democratic senators, Tom Carper and Chris Coons) who climbed the ranks at the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware starting in 2007, had received conflicting advice on whether to seek search warrants and a flurry of grand jury subpoenas. Ultimately, Weiss declined to take any action that could alert the public to the existence of the case – potentially causing a repeat of 2016 when the FBI reopened the Hillary Clinton email investigation after the Anthony Weiner laptop scandal forced their hand.

  The probe, which is focused on possible tax law violations, has also examined Hunter Biden’s business dealings with foreign interests — a topic that has animated Biden detractors — and its existence first came to light amid a controversy about the leak of Hunter Biden’s laptop files. Since then, the case has become a political football: Some critics have suggested that the Trump administration’s political agenda influenced a parallel federal probe that scrutinized Hunter Biden in Pittsburgh, while some Republicans have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to shield Weiss’s investigation from the influence of the Biden administration. –Politico

  Now, Weiss is weighing whether to bring charges against Hunter – the son of a sitting president who has leveraged his family name into lucrative international dealings – some of which Joe Biden was involved in (which he lied about).

  The rest of the Politico piece is essentially a biographical defense of Weiss.

  Weiss grew up in a middle-class home in northeast Philadelphia in the 1960s and went on to attend Washington University in St. Louis. He returned to the Philadelphia area to attend Widener University School of Law, where, in his final year, he met with a round of rejections after applying for jobs at several law firms.

  Instead, he got a gig clerking for the Delaware Supreme Court in 1984, then went on to take a job with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Wilmington, Del. One former colleague recalled a joke around the office that Weiss — who played third base for Wash U.’s baseball team — was hired to improve the office softball team. While there, he got his first up-close look at the underbelly of the Delaware Way.

  Weiss’s big break came when Louis Capano Jr., a member of a family of prominent Delaware developers, brought a complaint to the state’s then-attorney general, Charles Oberly, as the two watched a Little League game. Capano was being forced to pay protection money to a member of the New Castle County Council, the body that oversees the Wilmington area and on which Biden had begun his political career.

  Oberly referred Capano to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. With Weiss’s participation the Justice Department set up a sting targeting the councilman, Democrat Ronald Aiello.

  In June of 1989, Weiss resigned his post as an assistant U.S. Attorney and was appointed special prosecutor to oversee Aiello’s case. Aiello went on to plead guilty to extortion.

  That said, Weiss isn’t exactly on team Biden. Far from it, in fact. In 2007, Weiss left private practice to work for a George W. Bush-appointed US Attorney, Colm Connolly – a staunch conservative with a reputation for aggressive prosecution. Connolly clashed with then-Senator Joe Biden – who effectively blocked him from a federal judgeship after Bush nominated him in 2008. Instead, Connolly (now a private judge) entered private practice and Weiss stepped in as acting US Attorney.

  Weiss and Connolly remain close.

  Meanwhile, Weiss oversaw the prosecution of Biden bundler Christopher Tigani – whose family owns a beer distributorship in Delaware and maintained a longstanding relationship with the Bidens. In 2007, Tigani served as a bundler for Biden’s presidential primary campaign – soliciting contributions from his employees and their partners.

  Tigani engaged in a “straw donor” scheme – whereby he would reimburse those employees for their contributions in order to evade a cap on how much he was able to personally give.

  In 2010, after the FBI assembled enough evidence against Tigani, Weiss got him to cooperate on a wide-ranging probe of corruption within Delaware politics.

  As POLITICO first reported last summer, Tigani, under Weiss’s supervision, wore a wire and recorded conversations with Biden’s former finance chief as well as a former Biden Senate staffer and a Delaware businessman close to Biden.

  Tigani said that at the beginning of his attempted cooperation, he met with Weiss and several other officials. He said that Weiss laid out the government’s theory that politicians in Delaware were complicit in straw donor schemes.

  The investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens, and, in the end, only Tigani was indicted on federal charges, to which he pleaded guilty. Tigani also later pleaded guilty to state charges of making straw-donor contributions to the campaigns of several Delaware politicians, including Beau Biden.

  Looking back on his downfall, Tigani holds grudges against just about everybody involved, from the Bidens, to the News Journal, which first brought attention to his political influence, to the federal judge who oversaw his case, to his own father, with whom he remains embroiled in long-running litigation related to the family business. The rare exception is Weiss. “He was a straight shooter,” Tigani said of the man who sent him to prison.

  By late 2018, Weiss’ office was investigating Hunter Biden in response to a number of leads – including his dealings with Chinese business associates. While pursuing allegations of money laundering and FARA violations, the criminal investigation eventually narrowed to whether Hunter had paid taxes on all of his income, according to a Politico source. By last summer, “the probe had reached a point at which investigators could have issued grand jury subpoenas and sought search warrants that might have revealed its existence at a time when many of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters were seeking to draw attention to Hunter Biden’s actions.’ Weiss, however, chose to delay taking any public actions against Hunter.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 17:40

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• Mass Protests Erupt Across Greece As Government Bans Unvaccinated From Public Spaces
  Mass Protests Erupt Across Greece As Government Bans Unvaccinated From Public Spaces

  A few days ago, French President Emmanuel Macron riled up vaccine skeptics across Europe when he made vaccinations mandatory for all health-care workers (many of whom had previously refused) while tightening COVID rules to pressure French citizens to get vaccinated. As other governments ponder whether to follow suit, thousands took to the streets of Athens in protest on Thursday to oppose vaccination programs.

  

  The biggest transgression, in the eyes of the protesters, was the government’s decision to bar the unvaccinated from certain public spaces. They’re also opposed to plans to immunize teenagers. The policy barring unvaccinated from bars, restaurants, theaters and other entertainment venues will take effect Friday and remain in place at least until August. Teens will be able to receive the vaccine starting Thursday.

  Massive protests all over Greece today after the prime minister issued what is essentially medical apartheid. The media is trying to spin it as an “anti vaccine” protest instead of what it’s really about : freedom of choice and bodily autonomy. https://t.co/tR2SoRlOc6

  — Ève (@EviEvakii) July 14, 2021

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  According to Reuters, more than 5K anti-vax protesters, some waving Greek flags and wooden crosses, gathered in the Greek capital, shouting “take your vacines and get out of here!” while calling on Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to resign.

  NEW 🚨 Plan to vaccinate teenagers in Greece sparks huge protests today in Athens and Thessaloniki. pic.twitter.com/I8WWfBBHPp

  — Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) July 14, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  With a heavy police presence to oversee them, protesters gathered outside parliament, taking their protest directly to lawmakers.

  

  Wednesday’s protest was the biggest demonstration of opposition to the inoculation drive. A recent poll by Pulse for Skai TV found most Greeks say they will get the vaccine when available, with the majority in favor of some form of mandatory vaccination for certain jobs or segments of the population. Already, 41% of Greeks have been fully vaccinated.

  “Every person has the right to choose. We’re choosing that the government does not choose for us,” said Faidon Vovolis, a cardiologist, who has questioned the scientific research around face masks and the vaccine and heads the “Free Again” movement, which called the protest. Vovolis said he started the group in response to the government’s “tough measures” to contain the virus.

  In addition to the massive crowd in Athens, thousands also appeared in Thessaloniki, the Greek Second City. Similar demonstrations also took place in France (in response to Macron’s latest edicts).

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 02:45

• EU: New Political Alliance To Fight Creation Of European Superstate
  EU: New Political Alliance To Fight Creation Of European Superstate

  Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

  The leaders of 16 political parties from across Europe have announced an unprecedented alliance to defend the sovereignty of European nation states, protect the nuclear family and preserve traditional Judeo-Christian values.

  

  The July 2 “Joint Declaration on the Future of the European Union” represents the first significant endeavor by euroskeptic parties to jointly oppose efforts by European federalists to transform the European Union into a godless multicultural superstate.

  Signatories include Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. The document, penned by former Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who leads the powerful Law and Justice (PiS) party, has also been signed by conservative parties in Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain.

  The document states that the European Union requires “profound reform” because, “instead of protecting Europe,” it has itself become “a source of problems, anxiety and uncertainty.” The signatories say that the EU has become a tool of “radical forces” that are determined to carry out a civilizational transformation of Europe. Their objective, they say, is to create a European superstate void of European traditions, social institutions or moral principles.

  The signatories say that conservative establishment parties in Europe have abandoned traditional Judeo-Christian values ​​and have aligned themselves with leftist positions for political gain. They are especially critical of mass migration policies that have allowed millions of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to settle in Europe even though many newcomers reject European values.

  Following is an English-language translation of the joint declaration, which can be found here in French and Spanish:

  “The recently launched debate on the future of Europe should include the voice of the parties committed to the freedom of nations and the traditions of European peoples, the parties representing citizens devoted to the European tradition.

  “The turbulent history of Europe, especially during the last century, brought many misfortunes. Nations that defended sovereignty and territorial integrity against aggressors suffered beyond human imagination. After World War II, some European countries had to fight the domination of Soviet totalitarianism for decades before regaining their independence.

  “This independence, the Atlantic link between the EU and NATO, as well as peace between cooperating nations, are great achievements for many Europeans, giving them a permanent sense of security and creating optimal conditions for development. The integration process has contributed greatly to creating lasting cooperation structures and to maintaining peace, mutual understanding, and good relations between states. This work must be maintained as an epoch-making value.

  “However, the series of crises that have shaken Europe over the past ten years have shown that European cooperation efforts are faltering, above all because nations feel that they are slowly being stripped of their right to exercise their legitimate sovereign powers.

  “The European Union needs profound reform because today, instead of protecting Europe and its heritage, instead of enabling the free development of European nations, it is itself becoming a source of problems, anxiety and uncertainty.

  “The EU is increasingly becoming a tool of radical forces that would like to carry out a cultural and religious transformation of Europe — and ultimately a construction of a Europe without nations. Their aim is to create a European superstate by destroying or cancelling European tradition and transforming basic social institutions and moral principles.

  “The use of political and legal structures to create a European superstate and new forms of social structuring is a manifestation of the dangerous and invasive social engineering of the past, which must elicit legitimate resistance. The moralistic overactivity that we have seen in recent years in the EU institutions has led to a dangerous tendency to impose an ideological monopoly.

  “We are convinced that the cooperation of European nations must be based on tradition, on respect for the culture and history of European States, on respect for the Judeo-Christian heritage of Europe and on the common values that unite our nations — and not in their destruction. We reaffirm our belief that the family is the basic unit of our nations. At a time when Europe is facing a severe demographic crisis with low birth rates and an aging population, pro-family policymaking should be the response rather than mass immigration.

  “We are convinced that the sovereigns of Europe are and will continue to be the nations of Europe. The European Union has been created by these nations to achieve objectives that can be achieved more effectively by the Union than by individual member states. However, the limits of the Union’s competences are set by the principle of conferral: all competences not conferred upon the Union belong to the Member States, respecting the principle of subsidiarity.

  “Through a constant reinterpretation of EU Treaties by the institutions of the European Union in recent decades, these limits have shifted significantly to the detriment of the member states. This is incompatible with the fundamental values ​​of the Union and leads to a decline in the confidence of European nations and their citizens in these institutions.

  “To stop and reverse this trend, it is necessary to create, in addition to the existing principle of conferral, a set of inviolable powers of the EU’s member states and an adequate mechanism for their protection with the participation of national constitutional courts or equivalent bodies.

  “All attempts to transform European institutions into bodies that take precedence over national constitutional institutions create chaos, undermine the sense of the treaties and call into question the fundamental role of the constitutions of EU member states. The resulting disputes over competences, in effect, settled by the brutal imposition of the will of the politically stronger entities on the weaker ones. This destroys the basis for the functioning of the European Community as a community of free nations.

  “We believe that consensus must remain the basic means of reaching a common position in the Union. Recent attempts to circumvent this procedure or the ideas of its abolition threaten to exclude some countries from influence in decision-making and to transform the Union into a special form of oligarchy. This could lead to the de facto incapacitation of national constitutional bodies, including governments and parliaments, reduced to the function of approving decisions already taken by others.

  “In the member countries there continues to be an overwhelming desire to cooperate, and a spirit of community and friendship permeates the nations and societies of our continent. It is our great capital. A reformed Union will make use of this capital, while a Union that rejects reform will squander it.

  “That is why today we present this document to all parties and groups that share our points of view as the basis for a common cultural and political work, respecting the role of current political groups.

  “Let’s reform the Union together for the future of Europe!”

  Europe’s ‘Civilizationalist’ Parties

  The document is a response to French President Emmanuel Macron, who, in March 2019, called for a “European renewal” based on more, not less, federalism. In the wake of an impending Brexit, he demanded a “common border force,” a “European asylum office,” a “treaty on defense and security,” and a “European Climate Bank” to “finance the ecological transition.” Macron further called for the creation of a “Conference for Europe” to counter “nationalists” who, he claimed, “exploit the people’s anger.”

  Since then, the Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare many failures of the European Union, including the disintegration of Europe’s open border system; the looming collapse of Europe’s single currency; the breakdown of Europe’s much-vaunted healthcare systems; and the “epochal failure” of the EU’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign.

  In April 2021, the 27 EU member states, after two years of bickering, grudgingly announced a plan to launch a “Conference on the Future of Europe” that will “invite” EU citizens “to contribute to shaping their own future and that of Europe as a whole.” Presumably, only ideas that promote further multicultural federalism will be welcome.

  Not everyone is convinced that more “Europe” is what is needed. Writing for Politico, Maïa de La Baume observed:

  “Some EU officials are doubtful that an additional layer of bureaucracy — the conference will have a ‘Joint Presidency,’ an ‘Executive Board,’ a ‘Conference Plenary’ and a ‘Common Secretariat’ — will solve the EU’s already confusing bureaucratic ills….

  “As the only institution that EU citizens directly elect, the Parliament positioned itself as the lead institution and main architect on the matter.

  “Yet while the European Council took many of the Parliament’s proposals on board in its declaration, the joint presidency will take away much of the power the Parliament had hoped to wield. And the final declaration also removed any mention of treaty change, another significant blow to the Parliament’s initial proposal.”

  European federalists spitefully have branded critics of a European superstate as “far right,” “neo-fascist,” and “radical right wing.” In fact, they could best be described as “civilizationalists,” a term coined by the American historian Daniel Pipes. In a November 2018 essay, “Europe’s Civilizationalist Parties,” he wrote:

  “Better to call them ‘civilizationist,’ focusing on their cultural priority, because they feel intense frustration at watching their way of life disappear. They cherish Europe’s and the West’s traditional culture and want to defend it from assault by immigrants aided by the left. (The term civilizationist has the additional benefit of excluding those parties that loathe Western civilization, such as Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn.)

  “Civilizationalist parties are populist, anti-immigration, and anti-Islamization. Populist means nursing grievances against the system and a suspicion of an elite that ignores or denigrates those concerns….

  “At the height of the migrant tsunami in 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to a voter worried about uncontrolled migration with… condescending advice about attending church services more often.

  “Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for migration, flatly announced that Europe ‘cannot and will never be able to stop migration’ and proceeded to lecture his fellow citizens: ‘It is naive to think that our societies will remain homogenous and migration-free if one erects fences. … We all need to be ready to accept migration, mobility, and diversity as the new norm.’

  “Former Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt argued for more migrants: ‘I often fly over the Swedish countryside and I would advise others to do. There are endless fields and forests. There’s more space than you might imagine.’…. Their contemptuous dismissal of anti-immigration sentiments created an opportunity for civilizationist parties through much of Europe….

  “Civilizationist parties, led by Italy’s League, are anti-immigration, seeking to control, reduce, and even reverse the immigration of recent decades, especially that of Muslims and Africans. These two groups stand out not because of prejudice (“Islamophobia” or racism) but due to their being the least assimilable of foreigners, an array of problems associated with them, such as not working and criminal activity, and a fear that they will impose their ways on Europe.

  “Finally, the parties are anti-Islamization. As Europeans learn about Islamic law (Sharia), they increasingly focus on its role concerning women’s issues, such as niqabs and burqas, polygamy, taharrush (sexual assault), honor killings, and female genital mutilation. Other concerns deal with Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims, including Christophobia and Judeophobia, jihadi violence, and the insistence that Islam enjoy a privileged status vis-à-vis other religions.”

  Additional Comments by Signatories

  The author of the document, former Polish President Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said that the EU is “preparing to carry out a cultural revolution that will destroy social structures, starting with the family and traditions, and create a new man.” He added: “We don’t want this revolution, which we believe will bring unhappiness and a drastic decline in the freedoms of individuals and countries.”

  Estonian MEP Jaak Madison, the deputy chairman of the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE), added that the declaration is the first step toward the consolidation of European national conservative parties:

  “With this joint declaration, a foundation has been laid for the creation of a potential new group in the European Parliament. This would be one of the biggest groups in the European Parliament, which would bring together Poles, Hungarians, Estonians, the French, Austrians, Danes, Finns, Italians and representatives of several more states in the European Parliament.”

  Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s conservative party Vox, said that the EU’s “Conference on the Future of Europe” demonstrates, once again, the disconnect between European institutions and European citizens:

  “The EU’s ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ has already written its conclusions. It seeks the forced federalization of the EU against the true will of European nations and apart from the national parliaments.

  “This initiative directly threatens the original European project and seeks to impose a model of society increasingly distant from the principles and values ​​that make up the Christian roots and history of Europe.

  “We do not want a federal Europe in which all decisions are made in Brussels. We have to show that millions of Europeans respect, value and want to preserve as something good, and that we are willing to defend the sovereignty of our nations and parliaments, our governments and our judges, the plurality and variety of our nations; that borders must be an insurmountable wall for those who enter illegally or do not have the will to respect Western civilization; that there can be no freedom without security and without justice; and that we firmly believe in the person, in life, in the family and in ideological freedom and thinking.”

  Marine Le Pen, leader of the French opposition party Rassemblement National (National Rally), said:

  “The European Union continues to pursue the federalist path which inexorably distances it from the peoples who are the beating heart of our civilization.

  “The ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ is just yet another smokescreen that will allow the EU to dispossess states of the capacity to control their destiny.

  “Armed with this observation, the most influential patriotic parties on the continent have understood the importance of joining forces to have more influence in the debates and reform the European Union….

  “This founding text brings together parties and political leaders who, in their respective countries, are the dominant or ascending forces. Carried by the popular will, these groups will soon be in the majority.

  “The signatories of the declaration plead for a Europe that is respectful of free peoples and nations. They cannot accept that the peoples are subjected to the bureaucratic and technocratic ideology of Brussels which imposes its standards in all aspects of daily life.

  “This in no way means that it is necessary to act in an isolated or reclusive manner: on the contrary, it is by combining the know-how and talents specific to each nation — and not by merging them into a whole without identity and therefore without flavor — that we will make our civilization shine.

  “At a time when the globalists and Europeanists, of whom Emmanuel Macron is the main representative in France, are launching the ‘Conference on the Future of Europe,’ which aims to increase the power of European bodies, today’s agreement is the first step towards the constitution of a great alliance in the European Parliament.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 02:00

• Biden's Vaccine "Strike Force" Plan Stinks Of Desperation
  Biden’s Vaccine “Strike Force” Plan Stinks Of Desperation

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  If there is one rule liberty minded people need to remember, it is that the establishment does not like losing control of the narrative. And when they do, noticeably weird things start to happen. For example, it is becoming painfully obvious that the narrative on the experimental mRNA “vaccines” has slipped right through the fingers of the Biden Administration, and as a consequence they are now in a scramble to get millions of vaccines injected into as many skeptical arms as possible before the public organizes for a full push-back against the agenda. It seems to me that they are in a bit of a panic.

  

  The issue became more evident since January when various government entities and the media began to openly complain about the number of vaccine doses that were being thrown in the garbage because of expiration. Why were the vaccines expiring before use? The media spin suggests that it was due to “government mismanagement”, while officials at the state level have admitted that it has been due to a significant drop in demand.

  In the meantime, Biden has shipped over 500 million covid vaccine doses overseas in June while at the same time claiming that the US was on track to meet his 70% vaccination goal by July 4th. Needless to say this never happened. The Biden admin now claims that the US population is now 67% vaccinated, and if this was actually true then it would be very close to meeting Anthony Fauci’s original guidelines for herd immunity. So why all the frantic hype about unvaccinated people?

  Firstly, Fauci has continually moved the goal posts for herd immunity to the point that he is now telling the public to ignore herd immunity altogether and that the only option is to get EVERYONE vaccinated. Many of us in the liberty media said this is exactly what he would do, and he has proven to be incredibly predictable. Secondly, the CDC vaccination numbers seem to be inflated in order to create a manufactured consensus.

  While claiming an overall vaccination rate of 67%, CDC stats indicate a maximum of around 184 million Americans with at least one dose, then indicate 160 million people with a double dose. Yet, according to the Mayo Clinic data map, only four states have a vaccination rate of 67% or more, all in the Northeast. Even California and New York are well under 67%, and the vast majority of states are sitting at around 50% or less.

  Frankly, I don’t believe the CDC vaccine numbers at all. New dosage numbers are plunging across the US according to state officials; anyone who hasn’t been jabbed by now is not going to get jabbed unless they are forced to. There are no long lines for vaccines. No wait times. The CDC has even removed the wait time between doses. And still, CVS and Walgreens have been throwing away expired doses by the hundreds of thousands.

  If we look at the CDC stats for full vaccination we are closer to 51% of the total US population, which matches more accurately with the Mayo Clinic state statistics. There is no indication that this percentage will be growing beyond the 51% mark anytime soon, if the stats are accurate at all.

  This means that at least half the US population is in defiance of the program. This is probably why Fauci and Biden have become more aggressive in their vaccination agenda the past month. If they were getting the nearly 70% vax rates they claim, then they would not be stomping their feet indignantly over unvacinated people. The stats show a HUGE number of Americans are refusing to take the jab – There’s a vast army of us out there, and this is a good thing.

  Why? Because there is simply no reason to take the experimental mRNA vaccine.

  FACT: Covid-19 has a median IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) of 0.26% or less.

  Why take an experimental vaccine over a virus that 99.7% of the population outside of nursing homes will easily survive? In my home county, only 17 people died from covid in 16 months time, many of them in nursing homes. The majority of the population also stopped wearing masks and ended the lockdowns about three months after the initial outbreak when it became clear that covid was a nothing-burger. The so-called “Delta variant is also prominent here, and neither deaths nor infections have increased in a noticeable way.

  Most people here have already had the virus, and it was essentially like a bad flu with an extra kick or extra brain fog. After around a week people recovered. Easy. I perfectly understand people’s concerns when the pandemic first started; we had no idea what we were dealing with. However, after a few months the reality was evident. The continued delusional fear and terror over Covid is just self indulgent paranoia at this point.

  FACT: Covid infections and deaths started collapsing LONG before the vaccines were widespread.

  The mainstream media continually suggests that the vaccines are the reason for the fall in infections, but this is a lie. Covid cases peaked in January of 2021 and then plunged precipitously. In February of 2021 only 5.9% of the US population had received at least one dose of the mRNA cocktail. In conservative states where mandates were lifted far ahead of blue states and vaccinations are lower, infections and deaths fell even faster. Vaccines have NOTHING to do with the lower infections. Nothing.

  FACT: At least 81% of people who have had covid are unlikely to be reinfected.

  Fauci continues to ignore the science on herd immunity and completely dismisses people who have had covid as being immune. Yet, this is the reality. If we count the large numbers of people that have had covid, then the US hit herd immunity many months ago. This is why infections and deaths dropped off a cliff, not because of vaccinations.

  FACT: The mRNA vaccines have NO long term testing data supporting them or proving their safety.

  Initial testing for the average experimental vaccine is 2-4 years, and then another several years of observation and further testing is required before approval. Overall, vaccines are supposed to be tested and retested for 10-15 YEARS before being released to the public. The covid mRNA vaccines were released to the public in a matter of months with no official FDA approval and no long term data, at least none that has been revealed openly. The bottom line is that we have no idea what the long term side-effects of these vaccines will be. Though, there are some experts that are sounding the alarm…

  FACT: Multiple vaccine experts are warning about potentially dangerous autoimmune disorders and infertility caused by experimental mRNA vaccines, including the doctor that invented mRNA technology.

  We have received numerous warnings by virology and vaccine experts calling for caution when it comes to the covid vaccines. Former VP of Pfizer Michael Yeadon and many of his medical associates have published a call for vaccinations to stop until more testing can be pursued. Yeadon specifically warned of possible autoimmune disorders as well as infertility side effects. He has since been attacked relentlessly by the media.

  MRNA vaccine inventor Dr. Robert Malone spoke out on the dangers of mRNA gene therapy, specifically noting that the spike protein which the covid vaccine instructs your cells to manufacture could pose long term health risks, including blood clots and infertility in women. Malone’s interview has since been erased from YouTube and his accomplishments have been quietly removed from websites like Wikipedia. He is slowly being non-personed.

  Finally, in hospitals across the country 30% of medical professionals have refused to take the vaccines. Some have only taken the jab because their jobs were threatened.

  The controlled media argument against warnings like these from experts in the field is that they are “crazy” and should be dismissed. So, only the medical professionals that get a government paycheck and agree with the government mandates are somehow “sane”? Interesting…

  When gaslighting doesn’t work, the spin doctors (no pun intended) pull out some classic fuzzy logic, claiming that there is “no evidence that the vaccines will cause any damage”. Well, that’s verifiably false as anyone doing a rudimentary search will see many people around the world have died or suffered health side effects right after taking the vaccine. But, of course, vaccine apologists then argue that this is not 100% “proof” that the vaccines are dangerous overall.

  Well, there’s also NO EVIDENCE that the vaccines are safe. There is no long term safety data. And in medical science the rule is to err on the side of caution, not take reckless risks over a virus that is a non-threat to 99.7% of the population.

  So let me make this perfectly clear to the covid cult which does not understand basic medical science – The burden of proof is ON YOU, on the government and on the pharmaceutical companies, not on on us. YOU must prove that the vaccines are safe, through long term testing. It is not for us to simply take the jab and become guinea pigs in the world’s largest medical experiment based on blind faith and empty opinions backed by zero data.

  Biden’s “Vaccine Strike Forces”

  These facts and more are being digested by the American public and the results are clear – Millions upon millions of us will not be taking the jab. It’s not going to happen. We will fight rather than comply, and eventually we will win. The globalist Reset agenda demands total vaccination, vaccine passports and complete compliance. They aren’t getting it, so, the natural outcome will be an attempt to force unvaccinated people to accept the jab.

  Recently, Biden announced a plan to field “survey teams” across America which would go door-to-door, like census agents, to determine who specifically has taken the vaccines and who hasn’t. These teams would also “encourage” people who are not vaccinated to take the jab at a nearby location.

  These surveys are, in my opinion, a ruse more than anything else. They could not possibly collect accurate counts because they have no way of knowing if people are telling the truth or not. The likely purpose of the surveys is to locate homes that refuse to talk to the teams on principle and mark them as “problematic”.

  Biden’s press secretary let slip some interesting language on these teams, perhaps revealing their true intent when she called them “strike teams”. Is this to say that the initial goal will be to force people to take the jab on their own doorsteps? No, not right away. However, I believe the survey teams are the next step towards that very policy in the future.

  For now, the covid cult is using corporations to enforce medical mandates by demanding employees and even customers get vaccinated before they can have access to employment or services. This is unacceptable, as many of these corporations have enjoyed endless stimulus injections from the government and are therefor beholden to taxpayers. Their private property rights do not extend to control over our personal medical decisions or histories.

  Any corporation or business that demands proof of vaccination on behalf of the government or the globalists should be picketed and run into the ground. Any competing businesses that refuse to ask for vaccine passports should be supported by the public and protected from government retribution. My home state of Montana has made it illegal for companies to ask for vaccine passports, but many states have not. It is up to regular Americans at the local level to let businesses know you will not be tolerating medical tyranny.

  By extension, Biden’s survey teams are a no-go. They are a precursor to door-to-door forced vaccinations and invasive pressure from the federal government on any number of other issues. This is called “incrementalism”, and they think we are too distracted to notice it. As the agenda continues to fall apart in the US, the establishment will get desperate. When the vaccine passport mandates by corporations fail (and they will), they will have to take violent action in the near term to get what they want.

  These teams should be kicked out of any community they show up in. They should not be allowed to go door-to-door. The liberty movement is gaining incredible ground in this fight, but this means that the elites will become more unhinged and more dangerous in their rhetoric and actions. When control freaks and psychopaths do not get what they want, they tend to throw epic temper tantrums.

  *  *  *

  If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 07/16/2021 – 00:00

• Ontario's Grade 9 Will Be Taught That "Mathematics Has Been Used To Normalize Racism"
  Ontario’s Grade 9 Will Be Taught That “Mathematics Has Been Used To Normalize Racism”

  It looks like the post-modern lot has finally reached what many would think to be a sacred science that usurps the boundaries of racism, equality or wokeness: mathematics.

  In Ontario, students in Grade 9 are now being taught about the “subjective” nature of math, including the historical use of math to “normalize racism”, according to the Toronto Sun. 

  Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced last year that changes in Ontario’s curriculum are inclusive of a ‘subjective’ and ‘decolonial’ approach to mathematics, the report says. 

  The Ontario Ministry’s website says “an equitable mathematics curriculum recognizes that mathematics can be subjective”. The post goes on to state: 

  “Mathematics is often positioned as an objective and pure discipline. However, the content and the context in which it is taught, the mathematicians who are celebrated, and the importance that is placed upon mathematics by society are subjective.”

  The curriculum continues: “Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges, and a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions.”

  

  “The Ontario Grade 9 mathematics curriculum emphasizes the need to recognize and challenge systems of power and privilege, both inside and outside the classroom, in order to eliminate systemic barriers and to serve students belonging to groups that have been historically disadvantaged and underserved in mathematics education,” it says.

  As part of the curriculum, teachers are going to be “required to promote cross-curricular learning and human rights to create ‘anti-racist, anti-discriminatory learning environments’,” the Sun reports.

  Caitlin Clark, spokesperson for Minister Lecce’s office concluded: “The world has changed, the economy has changed and so should the curriculum that inspires and informs our students and leaders of tomorrow. That’s why our government was proud to launch a new curriculum that is focused on the job market, gives young people skills they can apply to their lives, to their households, to their personal budgeting, with an emphasis on financial literacy.”

  “We are taking action to ensure all children, especially those facing barriers to success, have meaningful pathways to quality learning, graduation, access to post-secondary education and good-paying jobs.”

   

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 23:40

• Here's What Happened At Cyber Polygon… And You're Not Going To Like It
  Here’s What Happened At Cyber Polygon… And You’re Not Going To Like It

  Authored by Jeff Thompson via The Organic Prepper blog,

  Cyber Polygon 2020 – a simulation about a “cyber pandemic” – took place July 9, 2021. Many Americans felt widespread concern prior to the event. 

  

  Why is this? In short, because past simulations ended up becoming a reality. Could the Cyber Polygon simulation become a reality? Many Americans thought so. Derick Broze points out in his article that the world has experienced many simulations that came to fruition only a short time later.

  For example, on October 18, 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, and the John Hopkins Center for Health Security conducted Event 201. Event 201 was a simulation of how the world would react if a coronavirus pandemic swept across the planet. Less than six months later, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic.

  Interestingly, just as Cyber Polygon was about to start, a real attack occurred. From NBC News:

  One of the most prolific ransomware gangs, REvil, conducted its boldest attacks yet over the Fourth of July weekend, on Kaseya, which services customers who in turn contract with thousands of businesses. Though the dust has yet to settle, researchers say the hack allowed REvil to infect more than 1,500 different organizations. The gang seems to have bitten off more than it can chew and has asked for a $70 million lump sum to unlock all infected computers.

  Cyber Polygon 2020 Digital Pandemic is Now Complete

  Many may wonder just what in the world happened there. The convention was kind enough to publish the findings for the rest of us to peruse at our leisure.

  As noted by the official website, “The central theme of the event was a ‘digital pandemic.’ No surprise to those of us who paid attention. It’s because of this moniker that so many people have been concerned in the first place.

  Videos published by the World Economic Forum set mental alarms off for Americans nationwide. According to this video, a cyber attack could be 10x more prevalent than what we’ve experienced with COVID-19. The narrator within the video states, “Fortunately, at least until now, cyber-attacks have not impacted our health the way pandemics have. At least until now.”

  The video goes on to state, “The only way to stop the exponential propagation of a COVID-like cyber threat is to fully disconnect the millions of vulnerable devices from one another and from the internet.” 

  How Would a Full Disconnect Be Implemented and What Would the Effects Be?

  One possible way would involve the use of an internet kill switch. Not only do those exist, but the US government has access to one. Theoretically, if you can turn off the internet, large segments of the population will be disconnected from one another. Meaning, what happens in one geographic region will go utterly unrecognized by citizens everywhere else.

  Think about the practical implications of such. Think about the potential for further human rights violations. Perhaps a world where all news sources disappear overnight, with your favorite collectivist news agency being the only website still on the air?

  Just Take a Look at Egypt in 2011

  Protests by citizens fed up with the constant human rights violations they experienced under the current administration spread throughout the entire nation of Egypt in 2011. In an attempt to disband the protesters and keep them from organizing, Egypt hit its internet kill switch. 

  Egyptians responded by resorting to mesh networks such as Firechat (which is sadly now gone) to communicate with one another. Still, there’s no doubt that the internet shutdown was a significant blow to both the people and their businesses.

  Though the internet was “dead” for only five days, it cost the Egyptian economy approximately $90 million US. 

  Approximately 5 million People From 57 Nations Tuned in to the Live Stream

  The Cyberpolygon 2020 live stream “featured global leaders and experts, including Mikhail Mishustin, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, and Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum, as well as top officials from INTERPOL, ICANN, Visa, IBM, Sberbank, MTS and other organizations.”

  These leaders and experts spoke on the subject of cyber threats and cyber pandemics. But that wasn’t all.

  From the official website: The experts addressed the latest trends and technological threats, shared their experience in creating cybersecurity ecosystems, talked about the transforming threat landscape, and discussed the problem of fake news and how to discern misinformation on the Web

  Coincidentally, one of the end goals of Cyber Polygon was to determine how to do a more thorough job of silencing all criticism that goes against the mainstream narrative.

  If One Can Shut Down All Alternative Viewpoints, One Can Become the Sole Provider of “Truth”

  If you’re a regular reader of The Organic Prepper, you’ve already seen this up close and personal. We were defunded roughly just one month ago. Why? For being a ‘misinformation site.’

  It doesn’t matter how many scientists a person has to back up what they say. It doesn’t matter how many links to scientific journals a person adds. If anyone dares go against what the politicians and their ‘fact checkers’ deem to be correct, they will be silenced.

  I believe “alternative” news sites are the only trustworthy source of news at the moment. Sites such as Zero Hedge, Children’s Health Defense, Daily Expose, Activist Post, The Last American Vagabond, Technocracy News, Survival Blog (and of course The Organic Prepper) are the only sites I trust to give me accurate information.

  As far as I’m concerned, all else is misinformation. It’s propaganda.

  However, these sources are just a fraction of the size of the major players (and you know who they are). If they are successfully stamped out, we will quickly end up in the type of situation warned of by FA Hayek in his excellent book The Road to Serfdom.

  From Hayek: “If all the sources of current information are effectively under one single control, it is no longer a question of merely persuading the people of this or that. The skillful propagandist then has the power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses, and even the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated from all other sources of information.”

  (Hayek has much else to say about our current situation within the chapter ‘The End of Truth.’ It virtually reads as a play-by-play of the last year and a half.)

  Technical Training Followed the Live Stream

  Here, a collection of some of the best cybersecurity workers in the world gathered together into two teams to simulate a cyberattack of massive scope in real-time. This simulation involved 120 teams from 29 countries, and “the event was joined by state and law enforcement agencies, financial, educational and healthcare institutions, organizations from the IT, telecom, energy, metal, chemical, aerospace engineering and other industries.”

  The good guys were the Blue Team, which protected their little chunks of infrastructure from the cyber-attack. The bad guys who conducted the attack were the Red Team. This simulation split into two halves: the real-time threat and the post-attack investigation. Throughout the real-time simulation, the Blue Team had to contain the cyberattack as best they could. 

  The banking industry and companies within the realm of IT “demonstrated the highest resilience.” However, it was also discovered that, as a whole, “technical specialists are better prepared for investigation than for defense.” The entire investigation process involved regular forensics as well as a concept known as Cyber Threat Hunting.

  Cyber Threat Hunting is looking for cyber attacks that haven’t set off your early alert system. You may have anti-virus software, but it only alerts you to what it sees. If it doesn’t see it, no alarm is raised. With Threat Hunting, you seek to discover the hiding places where a cyber attack is lurking – or has already taken place – outside of the realm of where your traditional alarm systems would have guarded. 

  Cyber Polygon 2020 May Be Over, But it’s Not the End

  If you’re a regular reader of this site, you’re likely familiar with the concept of situational awareness. I’m of the mind that a thorough understanding of current events is a critical part of this. If you don’t know what’s going on around you, you’re going to get blindsided by reality. A working understanding of what is happening out there in the world – to me – is well worth the time. I believe an understanding of Cyber Polygon is a part of this.

  So continue to monitor the waters. Pay attention to what’s happening out there. In the past year alone, ransomware gangs have launched several high-profile attacks, including on a major pipeline and a meat supplier. If you’re looking for actionable steps you can take to mitigate your disaster risk, we have a host of articles detailing what you can do. 

  * * *

  As you may know, The Organic Prepper website has been defunded for being a “disinformation website.” Help us to keep bringing you the information you come here for by helping to sponsor this website via Patreon.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 23:20

• China's Mars Rover Travels 450 Meters, Spots Own Parachute From Lander 
  China’s Mars Rover Travels 450 Meters, Spots Own Parachute From Lander 

  Besides Sino-US tension spiraling lower and civil unrest in Cuba, Haiti, and South Africa flaring up, the battle for Mars continues with China’s Mars rover Zhurong traveling across the Red Planet. 

  Zhurong landed on Mars on May 14 after orbiting around the fourth rock from the sun for three months. Since landing, the rover has traveled 450 meters (or a little more than a quarter-mile) on an “exploration and inspection” mission, according to state-run press agency Xinhua News.

  The rover, which is part of the Tianwen-1 mission to Mars conducted by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), has captured images of the Martian landscape.

  The latest picture CNSA shows is the cover of the lander and parachute. 

  

  Readers may recall CNSA experienced “nine minutes of terror” as the lander descended toward the planet’s surface at a high rate of speed through the thin atmosphere in May. 

  

  Once the lander touched down, the rover was able to roll down a specially made ramp. 

  

  Meanwhile, NASA landed the Mars Perseverance rover in February and is conducting a mission for signs of ancient life. The rover also launched a helicopter called Ingenuity, which has flown a series of times. 

  The US and China have taken an interest in Mars because it’s packed with rare metals, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, niobium, molybdenum, lanthanum, europium, tungsten, and gold, essential minerals that will hopefully one day power the green economy of tomorrow. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 23:00

• Kyle Bass: US Should Ban China's Central Bank Digital Currency
  Kyle Bass: US Should Ban China’s Central Bank Digital Currency

  Authored by Frank Fang and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

  The communist regime in China is going to use its new state-controlled digital currency as a Trojan horse to project its authoritarianism all over the world, warns hedge fund manager Kyle Bass, and it could become a “cancer” plaguing the United States if it isn’t banned.

  

  “Imagine a currency that almost has a mind of its own,” Bass said in a recent interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

  “It knows your account data, it knows your birthday, your Social Security number, where you live. It actually knows your spending proclivities and how you spend it.

  “[Beijing’s] hope is to have a massive influence around the world to really leapfrog where they are today into a much stronger position economically and also giving them more control.”

  Bass, founder and chief investment officer of Dallas-based Hayman Capital Management, was referring to the digital yuan, a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that Beijing began researching in 2014 and rolled out pilot tests for in four cities in 2020.

  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has ambitions of being the first in the race between governments to roll out a digital currency. On July 8, China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, announced an expansion of its tests, saying that the digital yuan will be tested during the 2022 Winter Olympics Games in Beijing.

  The Chinese regime hasn’t been hesitant to speak of its motives behind its digital currency. On June 30, China’s hawkish state-run outlet Global Times reported that the digital yuan “could weaken the U.S. dollar’s role in global currency settlements.”

  Bass warned that once individuals predominately use the digital yuan, they could become targets of Chinese influence and coercion.

  “So imagine if you and I were sitting here in this interview, and I said something negative about the Chinese Communist Party and I had accepted the digital yuan as payment, they could just turn it off or they could restrict my ability to buy a plane ticket to China,” Bass said.

  “They could influence me the same way they influence their own people if they had their hooks into me enough, if I had enough digital yuan.”

  Bass said he doesn’t foresee digital yuan being a global reserve currency anytime soon, but its increased use in settling cross-border transactions would be worrisome.

  Currently, the Chinese currency, renminbi, only makes up a small fraction of cross-border payments, according to data from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), which is a cross-border payment messaging network for more than 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries and regions.

  As of January, the U.S. dollar accounted for more than 38 percent of global payments, followed by the euro with more than 36 percent, according to SWIFT (pdf). Meanwhile, China stood at 2.42 percent, an increase from 1.88 percent as of December 2020.

  China could force companies to adopt the use of the Chinese yuan if they wanted to invest in China, Bass said. Meanwhile, countries could also be forced to make a switch, particularly those that have signed up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

  BRI is the Chinese regime’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure scheme launched in 2013 to expand its trade and political influence throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe. Critics have argued that BRI has put developing countries into “debt traps.”

  “They can force its use, and imagine what kind of stranglehold they will have over the world if they hold all of our capital that way,” Bass said.

  Fundamentally, it’s the nature of the CCP that makes the digital yuan a threat, according to Bass.

  “The Chinese Communist Party is the largest existential threat to the rules-based order that’s ever existed,” he said.

  The regime “is so good at exploiting every crack, every nook, every cranny of opportunity and openness that our society affords them.”

  “I think that we should ban the [Chinese digital] currency and not allow any of it to be handled in the United States. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but if you just think all the way through this, you can’t have a little bit of cancer. You either have cancer, or you don’t have cancer. And I believe we can’t allow U.S. corporations or individuals to transact in the [Chinese] CBDC.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 22:40

• "Stunning Numbers" – Record Number Of Americans Died From Drug Overdoses During Pandemic, Driven By Fentanyl
  “Stunning Numbers” – Record Number Of Americans Died From Drug Overdoses During Pandemic, Driven By Fentanyl

  The CDC released data on drug overdose deaths Wednesday, and the organization found that the total for 2020 soared 30% to a record 93,331 in the virus pandemic year of 2020 than the prior year. 

  About 93,331 Americans died from drug overdoses last year, per the CDC data. That’s compared with 72,000 from 2019, the previous record high, the CDC reports. 

  

  “That is a stunning number even for those of us who have tracked this issue,” Brendan Saloner, associate professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Wall Street Journal. “Our public health tools have not kept pace with the urgency of the crisis.”

  Soaring overdose and COVID deaths helped drag down the average US life expectancy to 77.8 years in 2020, down from 78.8 years in 2019 to levels not seen since 2006. 

  

  Even before the pandemic, the country struggled with its worst drug crisis ever as Mexican cartels continued to push synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, over the southern borders and into American metro areas. 

  Compound the opioid crisis with lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions, and drug addictions spiraled out of control as millions of people were left in despair. 

  The main driver of overdoses was synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl. Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, said 57,550 people died of overdoses from synthetics, a jump of more than 54% over 2019. 

  “Definitely, fentanyl is the driving factor,” Anderson said. Overdose deaths from opioids overall rose almost 37%, according to the CDC data.

  Here’s how the number of drug deaths changed across the country. Every state except for South Dakota and New Hamshire saw drug deaths surge. 

  

  CDC data showed 2020 drug overdose deaths translated to an average of 250 deaths each day, or approximately 11 every hour.

  Deaths from drug overdoses and COVID has formed a twin public health crisis. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 22:20

• Is The FBI Trying To Create A New Generation Of "Hitler Youth"?
  Is The FBI Trying To Create A New Generation Of “Hitler Youth”?

  Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

  Check out this Tweet.

  Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence. Help prevent homegrown violent extremism. Visit https://t.co/bql36iSbig to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the #FBI. #NatSec pic.twitter.com/ZwJp5h5bWD

  — FBI (@FBI) July 11, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Welcome to the new Reich, I guess? Let’s take a look at the parallels.

  

  Who are these “Hitler Youth” of whom I write?

  If you snoozed through this history class in high school, during World War II, Adolf Hitler wanted to begin indoctrinating children into Nazi ideology at an early age. So, two groups were created: Hitler Youth for boys and for girls, The League of German Girls.

  The US Holocaust Museum website raises these key points about the groups.

  1. Over the course of the 1930s, the Nazi state abolished all other youth groups in Germany.

  2. In 1939, more than 82% of eligible youth (age 10-18) belonged to the Hitler Youth or its female equivalent, the League of German Girls.

  3. While girls prepared for their futures as wives and mothers, boys participated in military training. In the last desperate months of the war, boys in their early teens were drawn into serving in the German civil defense and in the defensive militia called the Volkssturm (Home Guard).

  A combination of peer pressure and coercion caused the groups to grow rapidly. Hitler Youth was modeled after its counterpart for grown-ups, the so-called Brown Shirts. By 1939, a new law required every German between the ages of 10 and 18 to join the group so they could Nazi-fy even more kids.

  Beginning in 1933, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls had an important role to play in the new Nazi regime. Through these organizations, the Nazi regime planned to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology. This was part of the process of Nazifying German society. The aim of this process was to dismantle existing social structures and traditions. The Nazi youth groups were about imposing conformity. Youth throughout Germany wore the same uniforms, sang the same Nazi songs, and participated in similar activities.

  One way the groups did this was to use the Hitler Youth movement to dominate the lives of Germany’s youth. Belonging to the organization was a significant time commitment. Hitler Youth members had to attend regular meetings and events. These interfered with other priorities, such as church and school.

  This time commitment and regular exposure to Nazi ideology weakened the influence of parents, teachers, religious figures, and other voices of authority. (source)

  You’ll probably be unsurprised to hear that the young people were encouraged to snitch on family members, churches, and teachers that were not supportive of Nazi ideology.

  Huh.

  Meanwhile, ratting out your family members is praised on social media.

  After the events at the Capitol on January 6th, people proudly announced they had snitched on family members and coworkers who they recognized from videos and photos of the event.

  Teen Vogue praised Helena Duke, 18, for outing her own mother on Twitter during the investigations. Helena told the interviewer how awesome the response to her viral tweet was.

  Overall, it has been really heartwarming, the support I’ve gotten from people all over the nation opening up their homes and telling me they’re welcoming me into their families. Obviously, there has been backlash from Trump supporters, but it’s been very minimal. The number of people who have been able to relate to this situation is insane. It’s just crazy to think so many of them are like, ‘You’ve inspired me’…because I’m just an 18-year-old girl. (source)

  It’s certainly heartwarming to open your own mother up to potential criminal charges on Twitter. Way to go, Helena!

  It’s also financially rewarding.

  She’s not alone. Jackson Reffitt is another example of a teen who snitched on a family member. He contacted the FBI about his father before the event on January 6th but it’s unclear what the FBI did with that information.

  Jackson Reffitt told investigators that his father returned home on January 8 and said he stormed the Capitol, then threatened his son and daughter not to turn him in.

  Jackson Reffitt said his father told them, “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor, and you know what happens to traitors … traitors get shot.”

  Guy Reffitt’s wife told investigators that he was a member of the Three Percenters, a far-right extremist group.

  Jackson Reffitt told The Times he wasn’t staying at his family’s home but didn’t say where he was staying out of fear for his safety. He said his family learned from his CNN interview over the weekend that he had reported his father weeks before his arrest.

  He also started a GoFundMe to help with his college fees. It had raised over $76,000 as of Sunday night. (source)

  If Guy Reffitt threatened to shoot his kids, that’s obviously not cool and does not qualify him for father of the year. But Jackson has been rewarded with more than $150K at the time I wrote this article, which should pay for not only college, but therapy, too. Outing your own family apparently pays really freaking well. So it seems that now, snitches don’t get stitches, they get hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  

  And who did Hitler Youth grow up to be?

  So let’s go back in history again. What was the future of the Hitler Youth? Historically, the boys grew up to be “Brown Shirts” and the girls married them and raised Nazi babies, indoctrinated from the cradle.

  Who were the Brown Shirts?

  The SA — Sturmabteilung, meaning ‘assault division’ — also known as the Brownshirts or Storm Troopers, was a violent paramilitary group attached to the Nazi Party in pre-World War Two Germany.

  The SA was instrumental in the Nazi’s rise to power yet played a diminished role during the Second World War. The Brownshirts are infamous for their operation outside of the law and their violent intimidation of Germany’s leftists and Jewish population…

  …Hitler formed the SA in Munich in 1921, drawing membership from violent anti-leftist and anti-democratic former soldiers (including the Freikorps) in order to lend muscle to the young Nazi Party, using them like a private army to intimidate opponents. According to the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, the SA was ‘a group composed in large part of ruffians and bullies’…

  …Speaking politics in public was potentially a dangerous matter at the time. Recognisable by their brown uniforms, similar to those of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the SA functioned as a ‘security’ force at Nazi rallies and meetings, using threats and outright violence to secure votes and overcome Hitler’s political enemies. They also marched in Nazi rallies and intimidated political opponents by breaking up their meetings. (source)

  Gee…that sounds sorta familiar. Kind of like Antifa. Who incidentally, calls the rest of us Nazis, has violent and destructive rallies, and strives to intimidate those with other opinions.

  But what do I know? I’m just a humble libertarian blogger.

  We are watching history repeat itself.

  We all know that saying, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Well, it seems that some (cough – current administration – cough) know history and they’re taking notes so they can repeat it. Am I saying this is comparable to the Holocaust? Of course not. Not yet. But we’re on a very slippery slope right now and picking up speed to a place rife with suspicion, fear, and hatred. It’s like Selco said about the Balkans – as a lead-up to the war, people were manipulated, turned against one another, and bombarded with hate and fear.

  It’s a dangerous time to be opinionated. You risk losing your income, your family (if they’ve been indoctrinated), and potentially your freedom. Holding an opposite political opinion is now considered domestic extremism. We’re encouraged to snitch on each other about darn near everything. We are threatened, blacklisted, and canceled.

  Our country was born out of a revolution and a system of checks and balances. We’re witnessing what happens when those checks and balances are no longer working.

  * * *

  As you may know, The Organic Prepper website has been defunded for being a “disinformation website.” Help us to keep bringing you the information you come here for by helping to sponsor this website via Patreon.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 22:00

• "Everything Will Go To Zero" – Macquarie Strategist Envisions Era Of Tech-Driven Deflation
  “Everything Will Go To Zero” – Macquarie Strategist Envisions Era Of Tech-Driven Deflation

  With the latest CPI numbers stoking interest in the “transitory” vs. “not-so-transitory” inflation debate, it’s perhaps fitting that the latest MacroVoices interview featured Macquarie global equities strategist Viktor Shvets, who explained why he believes the world is entering a new era where the deflationary pressures produced by technology-induced improvements in productivity will create a “race to zero” that will see prices continue to fall.

  However, Shvets believes that over the next 10 to 20 years, inflation and deflation will act more like opposite sides of a pendulum that occasionally swings back and forth.

  On the inflationary side, one new development is the dominance of fiscal policy over monetary policy in terms of their impact on the market. An innovation inspired by COVID-19 that Shvetz expects will increasingly become the norm in the US. As the younger generation embraces “socialism”, the US government will likely increasingly pay for medicine and even a universal basic income for those who don’t work (and perhaps even for those who do).

  Just this week, the Biden Administration introduced new handouts for families with young children.

  And the third element is a deglobalization and localization that’s going to continue to strengthen. So what you have in the next 10 to 20 years, two very powerful forces are going to struggle. One is very strong, long term disinflationary force, which ultimately is going to win. And the other one is more inflation created from various things we’re going to do over the next 10 to 20 years. Now, the interesting question, Erik is who is going to decide whether inflation or disinflation wins at any given point in time? Now, my personal view for quite some time has been that private sector will never walk again on this system.

  While Shvetz doesn’t believe in systematic inflation, he believes in systematic disinflation.

  The reason is that technology has turbocharged the spirit of competition. And the same deflationary forces that gave us free music, free equity trades and free digital news will soon get to work on other aspects of the economy, until prices are falling on nearly all goods and services.

  So if one agrees with me, that cost of capital must fall forever, then it’s like pouring a kerosene on a bonfire of technological age. And what technology does incredibly well is reducing marginal pricing power of both labor and capital, and corporates, and brands. And so what happens over time, those reduction in marginal pricing power converges into average pricing power, which also declines. And eventually, almost everything becomes free. There is no prices, just like information today is almost entirely free. Just like publications today, almost entirely free, just like trading on the New York Stock Exchange quite, not quite, but almost entirely free. Just like a lot of music is almost entirely free. So we already have massively reduced marginal pricing power in a lot of industries. We’ve already reduced marginal pricing power of labor.

  Shvetz even cited research from McKinsey and others to justify his “everything goes to zero” thesis about long-term price deflation.

  That’s why McKinsey in their review, was estimating that the impact of information age could be 3000 times the impact of industrial age. In other words, much broader and much faster, 300 times broader, 10 times faster. And so when I say everything goes to zero, eventually, the productivity growth rates will be so high, that there will be no need to value any of that stuff. And the economists are not going to function the same way as I’ve done over the last two or 300 years.

  Moving on to a discussion of contemporary markets, Townsend asked Shvetz for his view on interest rates. Is the only rational direction for Treasury yields higher? To this, Shvetz offered a detail answer grounded in history. As government debt burdens have soared, the only way forward for central banks is to follow the BoJ and artificially repress yields as central banks buy up the entire market.

  Well, it reminds me what people were saying about Japan. Remember in 1990s and early 2000. The view was that if God forbid Japan ever ignites inflation, they immediately go bankrupt because the government will be spending 50, 60, 70% of their budget just servicing the debt. Now, how much do you think Japanese Government today is spending on servicing debt 4%. Not 50, not 40, not 80, 4%. And the debt burden is much, much larger than what it used to be. Now a lot of people say, well, you know, Japan is unique.

  Okay, let’s look at Eurozone. How unique is Eurozone? Look at the UK? How unique is the United Kingdom? And if you think of the US. One of the things that is becoming very clear, is that what happened in Japan since early 90s. What happened in Eurozone since global financial crisis over the last five or six years started to happen in the US as well. And a basic sort of signal that the US is sending now, just like the other economies do, it’s not about supply of money. It’s about demand for money. It’s not about supply of credit.

  It’s about demand for credit. And increasingly, the more we leverage, the more we financialize, the more we erode marginal demand for credit. Now, what that implies is that interest rates not only they cannot go up, but they will not go up. And by the way, if they do, remember, we always have perpetuals, which have no value at all, because they’re never redeemable.

  On the horizon, we have MMT or modern monetary theory. We already have BoJ. Remember the has been monetizing more debt that the Government of Japan has been issuing. That’s why they’re sitting on 50 to 53% of JGB market. Eventually, you don’t need the JGB market at some point in time.

  Echoing a point made by Jeffrey Gundlach, Shvetz points to the fact that on top of its burgeoning debt, the US also has hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities.

  Readers can listen to the entire interview below courtesy of MacroVoices:

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 21:40

• The Increasing Aggressiveness Of Petty Tyrants
  The Increasing Aggressiveness Of Petty Tyrants

  Authored by Mark Hendrickson via The Epoch Times,

  Somewhere along the way, we seem to have come to the point here in the United States where it’s all politics all of the time. That’s not literally true, of course, but it seems as if political tensions and conflicts obtrude on daily life with increasing frequency. It’s hard to get away from it.

  Having written in the past about Americans’ traditional love for the simple joy of being left alone, today we’re overrun with zealots who aggressively push their agenda every chance they get. They relish getting into our faces and going out of their way to exceed the normal boundaries of the offices and positions they occupy.

  Who’s to blame? That’s largely a matter of one’s political perspective.

  Conservatives like myself see in progressives an overwhelming sense of self-righteousness that breeds a sense that they’re justified, even entitled, to try to compel the rest of us to think like they do and support the same policy objectives. From sweeping messianic goals like saving the world from an (imaginary) imminent climate catastrophe down through every lesser goal of progressive utopia and conformity, the left’s actions are nothing, if not heavy-handed.

  Progressives, on the other hand, view Americans who don’t share their world view and aren’t on board with their agenda as some combination of ignorant, unenlightened, retrograde, immoral, selfish creeps who need to be bludgeoned into cooperation since they so pathetically lack the good sense to conform to progressive orthodoxy.

  Following are some of the ways in which progressives are going overboard to steamroll their opponents. Let’s start with several cases in which progressive office-holders are so eager to assert their rightness and the other side’s wrongness that they egregiously exceed the proper limits of their official powers.

  Exhibit A

  The California state legislature has acted to refuse reimbursement for travel to states with whose policies California legislators disagree.

  The primary objection of the California politicos appears to be differences of policy on LGBTQ issues—for example, North Carolina is in their doghouse for holding to a traditional policy whereby individuals born male are expected to use bathrooms and locker rooms designated for males, and the same for females. I understand the need to accommodate individuals who may identify their gender differently than the traditional way, but I don’t think that North Carolinians who want to preserve modesty are creeps. Nor do I think it right to judge and condemn the state of North Carolina for trying to find a modus operandi that doesn’t disrespect and discomfit a large number of their citizens.

  Just as the California legislators would want others to respect their jurisdiction, so they should respect their counterparts in other states as they seek for policies that work for them and the people they represent.

  Just for curiosity: Does the California legislature also refuse to reimburse those who travel to communist China? There you have a government that may or may not accommodate LGBTQ concerns, but is well known for suppressing self-determination in Hong Kong, placing Uyghurs in concentration camps, and harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience. In addition, I would suspect that there are more cases of Chinese businesses stealing intellectual property from Californians than there are of, say, Floridians doing the same. With its peculiarly selective travel bans, the California legislature seems to be straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

  Exhibit B

  A few U.S. senators, most particularly Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), have openly mocked the constitutional separation of powers by trying to intimidate Supreme Court justices into rubber-stamping progressive policy goals. Whitehouse and his cronies have made bald threats to pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices if the current court doesn’t issue liberal rulings.

  In a similar vein, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) went so far as to openly threaten Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, using such intemperate language as, “You will pay the price,” and “You won’t know what hit you …” This is thug talk, gangster stuff, not a dignified, reasoned discussion about the proper role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional order.

  The fact that such tactics don’t embarrass Democrats is revealing and worrisome. Ask yourself: If Senate progressives are this thuggish now, how unrestrained will they be if they attain clear-cut ideological majorities in all three branches of the federal government?

  Exhibit C

  Two months ago, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, in her zeal to redirect the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels to “renewable energy,” exceeded her authority as governor in a spectacularly flagrant way: She ignored the rule of law and attempted to usurp the prerogative of the federal government when she unilaterally ordered Enbridge, Inc. (a Canadian company) to summarily cease transporting fossil fuels under the Great Lakes, even though Enbridge has been doing so safely for decades under the terms of a formal treaty between Canada and the United States.

  The over-zealous governor is the poster child for members of the self-righteousness political class who add insult to the injury of their over-reaching by living their own personal lives as if they are above the laws they impose on “the little people” under their jurisdiction.

  Whitmer has shown such contempt for representative government repeatedly. Three examples: She ignored her own COVID-19 guidelines on a trip to Florida, took a family trip to northern Michigan after publicly saying that people who don’t live there should not travel there for a holiday, and did not wear a mask at a large restaurant gathering despite her own edict to that effect. You would think that progressives would disavow Whitmer’s double standard, but apparently, they’re so sure that they’re close to achieving permanent power that they aren’t bothering to try to improve the optics.

  The aggressiveness of progressives—their willingness to arrogate power to themselves and run roughshod over the half of Americans who disagree with them—is, of course, not confined to those holding political office. Whether it’s high-tech censoring dissident viewpoints; teachers’ unions making explicit their intention to cram critical race theory down our children’s throats and support the communist-oriented Howard Zinn slant on American history; woke activists trying to end the careers of people who worked with or for President Donald Trump; or cowardly mobs lawlessly defacing, desecrating, and destroying statues, these and numerous other incidents indicate that many on the left have no interest in dialog, no tolerance for the perspectives and values of others, no respect for democratic processes, and no desire to keep our civil discourse cordial and free. Their actions demonstrate that they want power to tell us what to do and think, and that many would rather grind our faces in it than reason with us.

  I hope cooler heads will prevail. We really don’t want to go down the road of fanaticism where people are flirting with such awful ideas as putting Republicans’ children in “enlightenment camps” (a former PBS attorney) or sending the rich to the guillotine (as one of Bernie Sanders’ groupies has fulminated).

  Those of you in the progressive camp who approve, whether tacitly or openly, of the aggressive tactics mentioned in this article should consider two points:

  • First, by repeatedly ratcheting up the temperature, you run the risk of things getting out of control and making daily life miserable, not just for partisans on both sides, but for the many Americans who just want to get on with their lives.

  • Second, if you manage to achieve the political hegemony that you crave so intensely, don’t assume that those at the top will do what you want them to do and that they care about you.

  Those are the two most common (and lethal) mistakes made by those who support radical movements. You assume that the leaders share your values, but you’ll find out, much to your dismay, that the daily reality is a far cry from the promised utopia.

  

  A prediction: If the petty tyrants in our midst don’t rein in their aggressive tactics, pressures will build until there’s a violent reaction. That’s exactly the outcome that the hardcore sociopathic revolutionaries out there want. Don’t let them dupe you. It won’t be worth it.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 21:20

• Paging Greta: China To Release 10 Million Tonnes Of Highly Polluting Coal From Reserves
  Paging Greta: China To Release 10 Million Tonnes Of Highly Polluting Coal From Reserves

  In a time when Western superpowers are furiously pushing for a multi-trillion spending bonanza under the cover of global warming as a virtue-signaling justification, and holding lengthy G20 boondoggles in Venice (which miraculously still isn’t under 30 feet of water) to demonstrate just how serious they are, China – the world’s biggest polluter – is doing its thing.

  On Thursday, the state-planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said that China will release more than 10 million tonnes of coal from its state reserves, with the potential for further releases in line with market demand. The biggest release of highly-polluting coal from China’s state reserves this year is aimed at steadying surging prices on the back of strong industrial activity the SCMP reported, although the move is unlikely to lead to a significant increase in imports, analysts said.

  Coal has been released from Chinese state reserves four times so far this year, amounting to 5 million tonnes in total, although these figures are tiny in comparison to China’s raw coal production which was estimated to be around 320 million tonnes in June, according to S&P Global Platts Analytics. It’s also why a recent study found that almost all of the world’s 25 most polluted cities are in China.

  

  The nation now has about 40 million tonnes of coal in its reserve bases.

  Power loads in several eastern and southern regions, including the business hub of Shanghai, hit historic highs this week as hot weather boosted use of air-conditioning and analysts expect that average coal inventories at six coal-fired power plants in eastern China have fallen to less than 15 days worth of consumption.

  “The NDRC has announced plans to try and reduce domestic coal prices, so the release of additional volumes could be in response to this and to potentially ease the rise in domestic coal prices,” said Matthew Boyle, head of coal and Asia power at S&P Global Platts Analytics.

  “Chinese domestic coal production for the January to June 2021 period is up 6.9 per cent year on year and 9.9 per cent higher on 2019 production.”

  Just spitballing here, but it sure doesn’t look like all the hot air spewed by the Blackrocks and Paris Treaties of the world have had any impact on China’s actions.

  The latest move by NDRC follows record coal imports in June, which rose 35% from a month earlier, although China’s total coal imports in the first half of 2021 are still down year on year. This could partly be attributed to China’s unofficial import restrictions which have been in place on various Australian products, including coal, since March 2020 amid souring relations between Beijing and Canberra.

  China’s thermal coal imports used for energy generation, for which Australia has traditionally been a significant supplier, hit 115 million tonnes between January to June, down around 21 million tonnes year on year, according to S&P Global Platts Analytics.

  Dennis Ip, the regional head of power, utilities, renewables and environment research at Daiwa Capital Markets, said the NDRC’s release of its coal reserves will partially relieve the shortage issue in the summer peak season, given that the inventory at China’s main Qinhuangdao coal transshipment port remains low in July.

  “We expect China to continue increasing coal imports from Mongolia, Russia and Indonesia instead of Australia, as China has yet to lift the ban on Australia coal,” said Ip.

  Going forward, Platts Analytics believes China is likely to rely on domestic coal supply rather than boosting seaborne coal imports, forecasting China’s thermal coal imports will fall by 68 million tonnes to around 164 million tonnes in 2021. In April, the NDRC urged power plants, mines and major transport hubs to boost coal reserves, while it also pledged to build stockpiles to more than 120 million tonnes in 2021.

  Translation: brace for a tsunami of pollution out of China, only this time Beijing can’t blame it on bitcoin mining, which at best accounts for a a tiny fraction of total Chinese greenhouse gas emissions, and now that China has effectively kicked out its bitcoin miners, there is virtually nothing left.

  Meanwhile, even as Beijing has banished domestic bitcoin miners, China’s June electricity consumption “mysteriously” rose 9.8% from a year earlier to 703.3 billion kilowatt hours as first-half consumption jumped by 16.2%. A research institute affiliated to China’s State Grid estimated electricity consumption in July will be up about 12% from the same month last year.

  We are confident that the patron saint of climate crusaders everywhere, Greta Thunberg, will very soon take her clean air fight straight to Beijing. After all, anything less and some may suggest that she is nothing more than a virtue-signaling fraud.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 21:00

• 41 Percent Of Baltimore High School Students Earn Below 1.0 GPA: Analysis
  41 Percent Of Baltimore High School Students Earn Below 1.0 GPA: Analysis

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  

  An analysis found that a significant number of Baltimore high school students earned below a “D” grade point average during the first three quarters of the 2020–2021 school year.

  WBFF’s Project Baltimore’s analysis found that during that time period, 41 percent earned a 1.0-grade point average (GPA) or below. That means more than 8,400 students out of Baltimore City Schools’ 20,500 total population are getting grades below a “D” overall.

  The analysis found that 21 percent of city high school students obtained a 3.0 or better GPA—or a “B” average.

  The Epoch Times has reached out to the City of Baltimore and Baltimore City Schools for comment.

  The school district appeared to blame the COVID-19 pandemic on the reason for the poor student performance.

  “Consistent with the experience of many school districts across the country, the COVID-19 pandemic created significant disruptions to student learning. As early as the summer of 2020, City Schools identified large numbers of students with decreases in their grade point averages and classroom performance when compared to past performances,” Baltimore City Schools said in a statement to Fox News and other outlets.

  The statement added that “city Schools is providing students with a variety of opportunities to acquire the unfinished learning they lost” and “each student’s progress will be assessed, and an action plan will be developed to complete any unfinished learning,” which will “guide families and teachers in helping students get back on track.”

  Across the United States, a number of public schools struggled to implement online learning for students during COVID-19-related lockdowns. Some districts saw an increased rate of failure and an increase in absences from classes.

  During the previous year, nearby Anne Arundel County in Maryland saw failure rates more than double from 3 percent to 7 percent, according to data obtained by the Baltimore Sun.

  But Jovani Patterson, who ran for City Council president last year, said that the school district absorbs a considerable amount of funding but doesn’t deliver results.

  “We don’t see much change. Our schools outspend 97 percent of other major school districts,” he told the station.

  “They don’t care, man. They come from the same environment,” Patterson said of city officials and what he described as an inability to deliver positive results for students. The Baltimore City Council Leader, Nick Mosby, and other officials are “a product of Baltimore City schools,” he added. “But then when you bring this [analysis] to them, they don’t care. They don’t care at all. You have to raise the standard … Everyone should be speaking out about this.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 20:40

• Nuclear-Powered Crypto-Mining To Begin In Pennsylvania Next Year 
  Nuclear-Powered Crypto-Mining To Begin In Pennsylvania Next Year 

  Amid the heated debate over Bitcoin’s environmental impact in the mining space, nuclear power could be the perfect renewable energy source to power mining operations.

  It’s no secret that bitcoin mining takes a massive amount of electricity. It’s estimated that energy consumption exceeds the power consumption of countries like the Netherlands and the UAE. 

  With the push towards ESG-Friendly bitcoin mining operations, US power company Talen Energy has been given the green light to mine cryptocurrencies using nuclear power from Susquehanna Steam Electric Station based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, according to Datacenter Dynamics.  

  

  A spokesperson for Talen said Cumulus, a subsidiary of Talen Energy, has two separate businesses: Cumulus Data, focused on hyperscale data center; and Cumulus Coin, focused on digital currency mining.

  “As the demand for energy increases among data center and cryptocurrency processing clients, so does the call for decarbonizing these energy sources. Talen Energy is constructing a hyperscale data center campus adjacent to its Susquehanna nuclear generation facility,” read a company presentation. “It will provide low-cost, reliable, carbon-free power to the data center clients on campus. This allows clients to benefit from carbon-free, 24/7 power being supplied directly to the campus, without the intermittency that renewable energy can experience, or requiring fossil fuels.”

  Here’s the layout of the nuclear-powered cryptomining facility adjacent to the power plant. The mining facility could be open as early as the first half of 2022. 

  

  Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been at the forefront of pushing mining operations into using “renewable energy” instead of fossil fuels. The issue behind crypto space is that computational power available to mine requires an enormous amount of energy. 

  Days ago, a historic hydroelectric plant near Albany, New York, decided to begin cryptomining than selling its power to the grid because it could make more money. 

  El Salvador has pitched miners of the world to flood the Central American country to embrace “cheap 100% clean, 100% renewable, 0 emissions” energy from a state-owned geothermal electric company that is powered by a volcano.  

  The “greening” of Bitcoin also comes amid China’s crackdown on miners, resulting in the hash rate —the computational power available to mine the cryptocurrency, reflecting the efficiency of the bitcoin blockchain network, plunging since mid-May. 

  

  Nuclear-powered cryptomining could be the top “ESG-friendly” energy source that the crypto community and tech billionaires have been searching for. This could be a positive for uranium stocks. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 20:20

• 60 Dead, Dozens Missing In Western Germany Flooding
  60 Dead, Dozens Missing In Western Germany Flooding

  Update (2003ET): The death toll rose to more than 60 people, and dozens were unaccounted for as severe floods ripped through western Germany, according to AP News. 

  During a visit to Washington, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “I grieve for those who have lost their lives in this disaster.” She said her thoughts were with the families who lost loved ones.

  Merkel also said the worse is yet to come as water levels recede and the true extent of the tragedy unfolds in the coming days. 

  Unbelievable footage from earlier today. 

  NEW 🚨 About 60 dead, dozens missing, thousands out of power after devastating floods in Germany

  pic.twitter.com/Th0grxZ2Aj

  — Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  * * * 

  What will be blamed on climate change and pressure lawmakers in the EU to enforce more carbon-reducing measures is a terrible flooding incident in western Europe. 

  BBC News reports at least 33 people have died, and more than 70 are unaccounted for after torrential rains sparked flash floods in western states of Germany, including Rhineland-Palatinate and North-Rhine Westphalia. 

  “It’s a disaster! There are dead, missing and many who are still in danger,” said Malu Dreyer, premier of the Rhineland-Palatinate. “All emergency services are on duty around the clock and risk their own lives,” she added.

  Reuters confirms at least 70 people were missing across the region of Ahrweiler. 

  

  Video footage from western Germany is shocking. Entire towns, vehicles, and businesses have been submerged.

  Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, a town in the German Bundesland of Rhineland-Palatinate, is completely underwater. 

  

  Drone footage shows the extent of the damage in western Germany. 

  Drone footage shows the extent of damage in western Germany after heavy rain triggered severe floods.

  Dozens of people are still missing.

  Latest on this story here: https://t.co/tDlDebAN8h pic.twitter.com/dyW5i5TKne

  — Sky News (@SkyNews) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Before And After 

  

  More insane footage. 

  🔴At least 19 people have now died after freak storms triggered flash floods which have swept away homes and devastated parts of western Germany and Belgium pic.twitter.com/p0LFJvlB7w

  — The Telegraph (@Telegraph) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  #BREAKING Flood in Germany#洪水 #flut #Deutschland #Flood #Germany pic.twitter.com/VmaGGhpGGF

  — Chaudhary Parvez (@ChaudharyParvez) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  “There are people dead, there are people missing, there are many who are still in danger,” the governor of Rhineland-Palatinate state, Malu Dreyer, told the regional parliament. “We have never seen such a disaster. It’s really devastating.”

  During German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s trip to Washington on Thursday, she told reporters the news of the flooding is absolutely horrible. “My sympathy goes to the relatives and of the dead and missing,” she said. 

  EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pledged full support to help those affected by this freak weather incident. 

  “My thoughts are with the families of the victims of the devastating floods in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and those who have lost their homes,” she tweeted. “The EU is ready to help.”

  No official figures have been released on the estimated damage, with floodwaters only starting to recede. It could take days, if not weeks, to survey the destruction. 

  What caused the wild weather was a low-pressure system that stalled out and dumped unprecedented amounts of rain in the region, overflowing streams and rivers. 

  

  Rainfall is expected to subside late Thursday, though the threat of localized storms and water levels on the Rhine could continue to rise. 

  Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted that “we’re at the very beginning of a climate and ecological emergency,” adding that volatile weather shouldn’t be “the new normal.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 20:03

• "China Senses Weakness": Pence Urges Biden To Take Tougher Stance On CCP
  “China Senses Weakness”: Pence Urges Biden To Take Tougher Stance On CCP

  Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times,

  Former Vice President Mike Pence in a foreign policy speech on Wednesday called on the Biden administration to toughen its stance on China, saying that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “senses weakness in the new administration.”

  

  Speaking at the Heritage Foundation headquarters in Washington, D.C., Pence urged that President Joe Biden delist Chinese firms that fail meet U.S. accounting standards, end all public and private funding of scientific research in China, and demand transparency from Beijing on the origins of the CCP virus, among other actions to address China’s abuses of the international rules-based order.

  Millions of Americans are “awake to the fact that the Chinese Communist Party aspires not merely to join the community of economically developed nations, but to sit atop a new global order created in its own image,” the former vice president said.

  “A world in which freedom is constrained, but Beijing’s power is not.”

  Biden must take a harder line amid “the emerging cold war with China,” Pence said of the threat posed by the CCP.

  “Our elected leaders must build on the progress of the Trump-Pence administration, and use the economic and military power of the United States to check the ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party in ways that put the American people and American values first,” he continued. “Only a proud, confident and united America can meet the challenge of China.”

  His remarks come as the theory that the virus was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has gained wider coverage as a likely possibility in the legacy media as a growing number of scientists and officials discuss the evidence supporting the hypothesis.

  President Joe Biden on May 26 ordered the intelligence community to produce a report in 90 days on the origins of the virus, saying that intelligence agencies are looking at different theories, including the possibility of a laboratory accident in China.

  Among other demands, Pence called on the Biden administration to ban Beijing-backed Confucius Institutes on American college campuses, and to demand that the 2022 Olympics be moved from Beijing unless the CCP “comes clean on the coronavirus” and ends its persecution of Uyghurs.

  The former vice president’s remarks come just weeks after a survey conducted by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center found that negative views of China among the world’s most advanced economies hover at near-record highs amid concerns about Beijing’s human rights record.

  A Pew report released on June 30 detailing the results of the survey of 17 advanced economies in Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region shows that a large majority—eight in 10 respondents—hold unfavorable views of the Chinese regime and believe it “does not respect the personal freedoms of its people.”

  Beijing is facing increasing scrutiny over its human rights abuses, including its suppression of religious and ethnic minorities and the implementation of its draconian national security law in Hong Kong in July 2020, which has criminalized any speech or political action seen as against the ruling regime as acts of subversion and secession with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

  In China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, authorities have been accused of committing genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, including the detention of at least 1 million people in secretive “political reeducation” camps.

  “Now more than ever, our leaders must get serious about the immediate and deadly threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party,” James Carafano, Heritage vice president for national security and foreign policy, said in a statement following Pence’s speech.

  “Vice President Pence not only clearly articulated the threat we face, but numerous concrete policy steps the Biden administration and Congress can, and should, take in defense of American interests and values,” he said.

  “We cannot afford to go back to ‘business as usual’ on China. It’s time to continue what the Trump administration started and secure our future against the Chinese Communist Party’s global advances.”

  The Epoch Times has contacted the White House for comment.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 20:00

• Taiwan Semiconductor Sets Sights Expansion Into Japan After Record Q2 Sales
  Taiwan Semiconductor Sets Sights Expansion Into Japan After Record Q2 Sales

  It isn’t just the U.S. where Taiwan Semiconductor is looking to expand its footprint. Not only has TSMC made headlines for proposing to expand production into the United States, as we have documented numerous times, but now it is making headlines for how it has become the center of the semiconductor world – and how that can leave the world vulnerable. 

  Now, the semi giant, in the midst of a global semi shortage, is looking to deploy new infrastructure in Japan for the first time in the company’s history, according to Nikkei. The plans are not included in TSMC’s already-disclosed three year, $100 billion capex budget for expansion.

  The announcement comes after the company posted record quarterly sales and forecasted higher revenue for the current quarter, according to Reuters. Its Q2 profit rose 11% and revenue was up 28% in U.S. dollar terms. The company announced its Q3 revenue would be up 21-23%. 

  TSMC Chief Executive Officer C.C. Wei said that the company was in the midst of researching whether or not a plant in Japan would make sense for the company. They are reported to be looking to build in the “western prefecture of Kumamoto to address growing demand from Sony”.

  TSMC Chairman Mark Liu said: “We are in the due diligence process now to have a specialty technology fab in Japan. It is still early to disclose the decision, because it will be based on our customer needs, operating efficiency evaluation and cost economics.” 

  Expansion into the U.S. and China also remain on the table for the company. Liu continued: “As the need for semiconductor infrastructure security has increased in recent years, we are expanding our global manufacturing footprint to sustain and enhance our competitive advantages, and to better serve our customers in the new geopolitical environment.”

  He concluded: “We will continue to compress our schedule [for the project] as much as we can.”

  

  Recall, we noted in late June that TSMC was going to be hiking prices by up to 20% next year. 

  Earlier this year we reported that semi prices were expected to rise through all of 2021, but recent reports have suggested that production was picking up again. In fact, car chip vendors are now able to “ramp up output” thanks to more foundry house support coming online, Digitimes Asia reported late last month.

  But that isn’t stopping TSMC from hiking prices, as was telegraphed earlier this year. For example, back in April, suppliers like Japan’s top silicone producer, Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. Ltd. marked up prices between 10% and 20%, according to Caixin, who reported that growing input costs and supply disruptions could be tide that continues to push up prices. Shin-Etsu blamed their price hikes on the rising cost of silicon metal, which they said was a result of demand out of China

  Names like Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), United Microelectronics Corp., and Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. had all announced intentions to raise prices in similar fashion. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. has also said prices are coming in the form of suspending wafer price reductions beginning December 31 this year. 

  

  One Jiangsu diode manufacturer said it’s suppliers had raised prices five times since the second half of 2020. The hikes represented a total markup of between 30% and 40%, including a new 10% hike that came into effect last week. The same firm’s inventory was at “half their normal level”, Caixin reported.

  One semiconductor salesman said: “The whole industry is scrambling for (chips), and it’s hard for us to make a purchase.”

  We called TSMC the “one chipmaker the entire world is depending on” in a piece we published in June that highlighted the world’s reliance on their production.

  TSMC’s chips are in “billion of products”, including iPhones, computers and cars, the Wall Street Journal writes in a new profile of the company. The company has slowly become the world’s 11th most valuable company, with a market cap of about $550 billion. The company reported $17.6 billion in profits last year on revenues of about $45.5 billion. TSMC makes “around 92% of the world’s most sophisticated chips,” the report says. 

  

  This has led to the U.S., Europe and China looking to cut their reliance on chips out of the Taiwanese company. But that’s a tough task given its contribution globally. The U.S., for example, only accounts for 12% of the world’s chip manufacturing, down from 37% in 1990. 

  Analysts aren’t confident of there being a more diversified semiconductor supply chain “anytime soon”. They attribute this to TSMC’s “hard driving culture” and “deep pockets”. The industry has become so complex that once one producer falls behind, it becomes tough to catch up. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 19:40

• Intel To Buy Chip Fabricator GlobalFoundaries For $30 Billion In Biggest Deal Yet: WSJ
  Intel To Buy Chip Fabricator GlobalFoundaries For $30 Billion In Biggest Deal Yet: WSJ

  Thursday was another rough day for the semiconductor space as most of the biggest US-traded chipmakers traded in the red as the global chip shortage overshadowed what ended up being a solid earnings report from TSMC (which also affirmed plans to expand its production capacity in the US and Japan).

  But even bigger news concerning the troubled semis space broke Thursday evening when WSJ reported that Intel has agreed to the biggest acquisition in its half-a-century existence.

  

  According to the American business broadsheet of record, Intel has agreed to buy chip fabricator GlobalFoundaries for $30 billion. Most importantly, the deal marks the company’s biggest move yet into the foundry segment, a segment currently dominated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing – or TSMC – the world’s most important chipmaker. Put another way, the deal is the biggest volley yet in new Intel chief Pat Gelsinger’s “war” on TSMC. As we noted above, news of the deal is breaking shortly after Taiwan Semi announced its plans to expand production in the US, which is Intel’s “turf” (Intel is also investing $20 billion into expanding its production facilities in the American West).

  Wowzers:

  Intel is exploring a deal to buy GlobalFoundries, according to people familiar with the matter, in a move that would turbocharge the semiconductor giant’s plans to make more chips for other tech companies and rate as its largest acquisition ever. https://t.co/WaGqo3hgEX

  — Mike Bird (@Birdyword) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  As for GlobalFoundaries, those who aren’t semiconductor experts can be forgiven for having never heard of the company. It’s presently wholly owned by Mubadala Investment Co (the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund made infamous by its association with 1MDB, the Malaysian sovereign political slush fund that was pillaged by members of the former PM’s inner circle after being seeded with money raised by Goldman Sachs. The company was looking to go public, but instead of going public, or merging with a SPAC, Intel is going to buy it for $30MM).

  Per WSJ, GlobalFoundaries itself doesn’t appear to be in direct talks with Intel – the deal is being negotiated by Mubadala, which clearly sees an exit opportunity in the fact that Intel and its biggest Western rivals are now going toe-to-toe with TSMC.

  For all we know, one of these rivals could come through with a higher bid, stealing the deal from Intel, or sparking a bidding war.

  WSJ describes GlobalFoundaries as “GlobalFoundries is one of the largest specialist chip-production companies. It was created when Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices in 2008 decided to spin off its chip-production operations.”

  Interestingly, Intel rival AMD “remains a big customer for GlobalFoundries—agreeing to a multiyear, roughly $1.6 billion chip-component supply deal this year—and that could complicate a takeover by Intel. GlobalFoundries is relocating its corporate headquarters to Malta, N.Y. from Santa Clara, Calif.”

  Tech analyst Patrick Moorhead tweeted following news of the deal that if it’s consumated, it would transform Intel into a “full-stack provider” with chips for critical technologies like 5G, IoT and much more. However, he expects the regulatory hurdles to be “immense” (keep in mind, President Biden is pushing sweeping antitrust policy changes by executive fiat).

  On Intel acquiring GlobalFoundries: I can see why it would want to as it would make Intel a full stack provider with specialty tech for 5G, IoT and automotive. But the regulatory hurdles would be immense.

  — Patrick Moorhead at #MSInspire (@PatrickMoorhead) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  One of the contributing factors behind the current global semiconductor shortage is that many chip designers like Nvidia and Qualcomm now prefer to outsource the fabrication of their chips to companies like TSMC and GlobalFoundaries. Just last month, GlobalFoundaries announced plans to build a new production site in Singapore for $4 billion.

   

   

   

   

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 19:18

• Chinese Communist Party Officials Share Viral Video Urging Nuclear Strikes On Japan
  Chinese Communist Party Officials Share Viral Video Urging Nuclear Strikes On Japan

  Relations between China and Japan have seen a rapid deterioration over the past months as Tokyo has firmly declared itself in Washington’s corner on its willingness to defend Taiwan in the future event of a Chinese invasion of the island. 

  This week a social media video has been widely shared in China after it was originally posted to the official social media account of a local municipal authority run by Communist officials after being created by a Chinese military channel with over two million followers. The now viral video bluntly calls for “continuously” striking Japan with nuclear weapons should it continue supporting Taiwan’s independence aspirations. The original upload has since been taken down from Xigua – the Chinese social media site which has a similar appearance to YouTube – after garnering international media attention. Watch the reposted video with subtitles below…

  “If Japan intervenes in military affairs to reunify Taiwan, I must recommend the ‘exceptional theory of nuclear strikes on Japan,'” the video’s title reads.

  The narrator then declares Japan “has not learned its lesson from history” which means China must “continuously using nuclear bombs until Japan announces its unconditional surrender for the second time” – in reference to WWII.

  It was posted Sunday by the city council of Baoji in northwestern Shaanxi province. The “exceptional theory” is the controversial view held by many Chinese officials that China’s ‘self-defense only’ use of atomic bombs doesn’t apply in the case of Japan, thus an “exception” can be made.

  “Our country is undergoing major changes unlike any in the last century… In order to ensure the peaceful rise of our country, it is necessary to take measures,” the narration continues.

  It urges citizens and government leaders to “combine the new and old hatred” for Japan, including from Japan’s World War II invasion of China and the Nanjing Massacre – which it says viewers should think of in relation to Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso’s earlier this month surprising statements saying that any future Chinese invasion of Taiwan would likely be interpreted in Tokyo as a “threat to Japan’s survival” – allowing the government to deploy its Self-Defense Forces for collective self-defense.

  China irked by Japan deputy PM’s comments on ‘protecting’ Taiwan

  China lodged a diplomatic protest with Japan after Japanese deputy prime minister Taro Aso said Tokyo and Washington should combine to protect Taiwan from Chinese military if it is attacked. https://t.co/0AwrqrhnMX

  — Amrita Bhinder 🇮🇳 (@amritabhinder) July 10, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  “If a major incident happened [in Taiwan], it would not be strange at all if it touches on a situation threatening survival,” Aso said on July 5. “If that is the case, Japan and the US must defend Taiwan together.” The number two highest Japanese official further noted “the situation over Taiwan is becoming extremely intense“.

  This came after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s visit to the White House in April, wherein he reiterated “objections to China’s unlawful maritime claims and activities in the South China Sea” and outraged China by signing onto a joint statement which included the following line:

  “The United States restated its unwavering support for Japan’s defense under the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, using its full range of capabilities, including nuclear.”

  

  The Chinese Embassy in the US had condemned the words as “completely beyond the scope” of healthy bilateral relations, saying Japan will only “harm” itself in such declarations with the US.

  Often Beijing’s most bellicose threats to external enemies are issued through state media channels, in order to be made indirectly. Given how quickly this latest threatening social media video went viral, and its origins on a popular Chinese military channel, it’s likely it had “official” approval for release somewhere within the top echelons of the CCP.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 19:00

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• Watch 1 Billion Years Of Tectonic Plate Movement In 40 Seconds
  Watch 1 Billion Years Of Tectonic Plate Movement In 40 Seconds

  According to plate tectonic theory, the Earth’s surface is made up of slabs of rock that are slowly shifting right under our feet.

  Because of this constant movement, today’s Earth looks a lot different from what it did millions of years ago. In today’s animation, Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang looks at the Earth’s tectonic plate movement from 1 ga (geological time for 1 billion years ago) to the present-day, via EarthByte on YouTube.

  Editor’s note: The video starts at time 1,000 ma (1,000 million years ago), and ticks down at the rate of about 25 million years every second.

  The Emergence of Plate Tectonic Theory

  Plate tectonics is a relatively new theory—in fact, according to National Geographic, it hadn’t become popular until the 1960s. However, the concept of continental movement was brewing long before it became widely accepted.

  In 1912, German scientist Alfred Wegener proposed a theory he called continental drift. According to Wegener’s theory, Earth’s continents once formed a single, giant landmass, which he called Pangaea.

  Over millions of years, Pangaea slowly broke apart, eventually forming the continents as they are today. Wegener believed this continental drift explained why the borders of South America and Africa looked like matching puzzle pieces. He also pointed to similar rock formations and fossils on these two continents as proof to back his theory.

  Initially, the scientific community wasn’t on board with the theory of continental drift. But as more data emerged over the years, including research on seafloor spreading, the theory started to gain traction.

  The Supercontinent Cycle

  Nowadays, it’s believed that Pangea was just one of several supercontinents to mass together (and break apart) over the course of geological history.

  The exact number of supercontinents is largely debated, but according to the Encylopedia of Geology, here are five (including Pangea) that are widely recognized:

  • Kenorland: 2.7-2.5 billion years ago

  • Nuna/Columbia: 1.6-1.4 billion years ago

  • Rodinia: 950–800 million years ago

  • Pannotia: 620-580 million years ago

  • Pangea: 325-175 million years ago

  According to the theory, this cycle of breaking apart and coming together happens because of subduction, which occurs when tectonic plates converge with one another.

  The supercontinent cycle also ties into ocean formation. The below example of the Wilson Cycle specifically keys in on how the Atlantic Ocean, and its predecessor, the Iapetus Ocean, were formed as supercontinents drifted apart:

  

  Source: Hannes Grobe

  The Importance of Plate Tectonics

  Plate tectonics has been a game-changer for geologists. The theory has helped to explain tons of unanswered geological questions, assisting scientists in understanding how volcanoes, mountains, and ocean ridges are formed.

  It’s also valuable for the oil and gas industry since it explains how sedimentary basins were created, allowing geologists and engineers to target and locate vast oil reserves.

  Since the theory of plate tectonics is relatively new, there’s still a lot to be discovered in this field of research. However, in March 2021, a report was published in Earth-Science Reviews that, for the first time, visualized a continuous plate model that shows how Earth’s plates have shifted over the last billion years.

  The video above visualizes this particular report and accurately depicts the Earth’s tectonic plates’ movement or the observed shift in Earth’s tectonic plates over the years.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 02:45

• Lithuania Concludes Its Subject To "Hybrid Aggression", Deploys Military To Protect Its Border
  Lithuania Concludes Its Subject To “Hybrid Aggression”, Deploys Military To Protect Its Border

  Via SouthFront.org,

  On July 13th, the Lithuanian parliament adopted a resolution calling the recent spike in irregular migration via Belarus “hybrid aggression”.

  

  The document states that the organised movement of migrants is aimed at destabilising the situation in Lithuania.

  According to the ruling conservative Homeland Union (TS-LKD), the resolution was initiated by the ruling majority in the parliament in cooperation with leaders of the majority of opposition groups and was backed by 56 lawmakers, with two votes against and 24 abstentions.

  The adopted resolution states that “countries hostile towards Lithuania are carrying out hybrid aggression against the Republic of Lithuania” by organizing irregular migration.

  It also expressed concern that “this hybrid aggression can be further developed and exploited and can even be used as a basis for threats of new nature in the context of the large-scale military exercise Zapad”, due to be held in Russia and Belarus in the autumn.

  As a result, the Lithuanian government calls on the border to be reinforced and the Lithuanian military assist the border guard in protecting against this sort of “hybrid aggression”.

  This comes alongside the construction of a “physical barrier” (read here border fence or wall) as soon as possible.

  The document also calls for measures to ensure that the organizers of migration, including natural and legal persons in Belarus, are held accountable and placed under national and EU sanctions.

  The resolution also proposed treating foreign nationals who cross the Lithuanian border without ID documents – excluding women with children, pregnant women, people with disabilities and those under 16 – as possible active participants of the ongoing hybrid attack.

  Therefore, they should be subject to different detention and accommodations conditions.

  A total of 1,676 foreigners have been detained near Lithuania’s border with Belarus so far this year, up more than 20 times from last year.

  Additionally, the resolution proposed launching an information campaign in the migrants’ countries of origin and also ensuring their return.

  If this doesn’t work, the resolution calls for the launch of consultations with NATO member countries.

  The resolution simply made official something that Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė said on July 7th.

  According to her, Lithuania is currently experiencing an unprecedented increase in irregular migration. Lithuanian officials believe that Belarusian authorities are involved in migrant smuggling.

  “We see the whole process as a hybrid aggression against not Lithuania, but the entire European Union,” she said. “It is [a response to] a principled stance of the entire EU, including Lithuania, regarding the results of rigged elections [in Belarus], repressions against the civil society and human rights activists.”

  Šimonytė noted that “institutions of the Belarusian regime participate in the organisation of flows of illegal migrants both actively and passively”.

  “Border crossing is being facilitated deliberately and the purpose of this, in our view, is to harm our country, to destabilize the situation, among other things,” she said.

  Lithuania is mobilizing the military to assist the border guards and handle the situation, Šimonytė said.

  “Also, we will start installing an additional physical barrier between Lithuania and Belarus, which would at the same time act as a sign and a deterrent for those organizing the flows of illegal migrants,” the prime minister said.

  As can be seen, the resolution was simply an official document to testify that the actions had already been undertaken.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 07/15/2021 – 02:00

• The Right To Be Let Alone: What To Do When COVID Strike Force Teams Come Knocking
  The Right To Be Let Alone: What To Do When COVID Strike Force Teams Come Knocking

  Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

  “Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.”

  – Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis

  A federal COVID-19 vaccination strike force may soon be knocking on your door, especially if you live in a community with low vaccination rates. Will you let them in?

  

  More to the point, are you required to open the door?

  The Biden Administration has announced that it plans to send federal “surge response teams” on a “targeted community door-to-door outreach“ to communities with low vaccination rates in order to promote the safety and accessibility of the COVID-19 vaccines.

  That’s all fine and good as far as government propaganda goes, but nothing is ever as simple or as straightforward as the government claims, especially not when armed, roving bands of militarized agents deployed by the Nanny State show up at your door with an agenda that is at odds with what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis referred to as the constitutional “right to be let alone.”

  

  Any attempt by the government to encroach upon the citizenry’s privacy rights or establish a system by which the populace can be targeted, tracked and singled out must be met with extreme caution. These door-to-door “visits” by COVID-19 surge response teams certainly qualify as a government program whose purpose, while seemingly benign, raises significant constitutional concerns.

  First, there is the visit itself.

  While government agents can approach, speak to and even question citizens without violating the Fourth Amendment, Americans have a right not to answer questions or even speak with a government agent.

  Courts have upheld these “knock and talk” visits as lawful, reasoning that even though the curtilage of the home is protected by the Fourth Amendment, there is an implied license to approach a residence, knock on the door/ring the bell, and seek to contact occupants. However, the encounter is wholly voluntary and a person is under no obligation to speak with a government agent in this situation. 

  Indeed, you don’t even need to answer or open the door in response to knocking/ringing by a government agent, and if you do answer the knock, you can stop speaking at any time. You also have the right to demand that government agents leave the property once the purpose of the visit is established. Government officials would not be enforcing any law or warrant in this context, and so they don’t have the authority of law to remain on the property after a homeowner or resident specifically revokes the implied license to come onto the property.

  When the government’s actions go beyond merely approaching the door and knocking, it risks violating the Fourth Amendment, which requires a warrant and probable cause of possible wrongdoing in order to search one’s property. A government agent would violate the Fourth Amendment if he snooped around the premises, peering into window and going to other areas in search of residents. 

  It should be pointed out that some judges (including Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch) believe that placing “No Trespassing” signs or taking other steps to impede access to the door is sufficient to negate any implied permission for government agents or others to approach your home, but this view does not have general acceptance.

  While in theory one can refuse to speak with police or other government officials during a “knock and talk” encounter, as the courts have asserted as a justification for dismissing complaints about this police investigative tactic, the reality is far different. Indeed, it is unreasonable to suggest that individuals caught unaware by these tactics will not feel pressured in the heat of the moment to comply with a request to speak with government agents who display official credentials and are often heavily armed, let alone allow them to search one’s property. Even when such consent is denied, police have been known to simply handcuff the homeowner and conduct a search over his objections.

  Second, there is the danger inherent in these knock-and-talk encounters.

  Although courts have embraced the fiction that “knock and talks” are “voluntary” encounters that are no different from other door-to-door canvassing, these constitutionally dubious tactics are highly intimidating confrontations meant to pressure individuals into allowing police access to one’s home, which then paves the way for a warrantless search of one’s home and property.

  The act of going to homes and taking steps to speak with occupants is akin to the “knock and talk” tactic used by police, which can be fraught with danger for homeowners and government agents alike. Indeed, “knock-and-talk” policing has become a thinly veiled, warrantless exercise by which citizens are coerced and intimidated into “talking” with heavily armed police who “knock” on their doors in the middle of the night.

  “Knock-and-shoot” policing might be more accurate, however.

  “Knock and talks” not only constitute severe violations of the privacy and security of homeowners, but the combination of aggression and surprise employed by police is also a recipe for a violent confrontation that rarely ends well for those on the receiving end of these tactics.

  For example, although 26-year-old Andrew Scott had committed no crime and never fired a single bullet or threatened police, he was gunned down by police who knocked aggressively on the wrong door at 1:30 am, failed to identify themselves as police, and then repeatedly shot and killed Scott when he answered the door while holding a gun in self-defense. The police were investigating a speeding incident by engaging in a middle-of-the-night “knock and talk” in Scott’s apartment complex.

  Carl Dykes was shot in the face by a county deputy who pounded on Dykes’ door in the middle of the night without identifying himself. Because of reports that inmates had escaped from a local jail, Dykes brought a shotgun with him when he answered the door.

  As these and other incidents make clear, while Americans have a constitutional right to question the legality of a police action or resist an unlawful police order, doing so can often get one arrested, shot or killed.

  Third, there is the question of how the government plans to use the information it obtains during these knock-and-talk visits.

  Because the stated purpose of the program is to promote vaccination, homeowners and others who reside at the residence will certainly be asked if they are vaccinated. Again, you have a right not to answer this or any other question. Indeed, an argument could be made that even asking this question is improper if the purpose of the program is merely to ensure that Americans “have the information they need on how both safe and accessible the vaccine is.”

  Under the Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. 552a, an agency should only collect and maintain information about an individual as is “relevant and necessary to accomplish a purpose of the agency.” In this situation, the government agent could accomplish the purpose of assuring persons have information about the vaccine simply by providing that information (either in writing or orally) and would not need to know the vaccination status of the residents. To the extent the agents do request, collect and store information about residents’ vaccination status, this could be a Privacy Act violation.

  Of course, there is always the danger that this program could be used for other, more nefarious, purposes not related to vaccination encouragement. As with knock-and-talk policing, government agents might misuse their appearance of authority to gain entrance to a residence and obtain other information about it and those who live there. Once the door is opened by a resident, anything the agents can see from their vantage point can be reported to law enforcement authorities.

  Moreover, while presumably the targeting will be of areas with demonstrated low vaccination rates, there is no guarantee that this program would not be used as cover for conducting surveillance on areas deemed to be “high crime” areas as a way of obtaining intelligence for law enforcement purposes.

  We’ve been down this road before, with the government sending its spies to gather intel on American citizens by questioning them directly, or by asking their neighbors to snitch on them.

  Remember the egregiously invasive and intrusive American Community Survey?

  Unlike the traditional census, which collects data every ten years, the American Community Survey (ACS) is sent to about 3 million homes per year at a reported cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, while the traditional census is limited to ascertaining the number of persons living in each dwelling, their ages and ethnicities, the ownership of the dwelling and telephone numbers, the ACS is much more intrusive, asking questions relating to respondents’ bathing habits, home utility costs, fertility, marital history, work commute, mortgage, and health insurance, among other highly personal and private matters.

  Individuals who receive the ACS must complete it or be subject to monetary penalties. Although no reports have surfaced of individuals actually being penalized for refusing to answer the survey, the potential fines that can be levied for refusing to participate in the ACS are staggering. For every question not answered, there is a $100 fine. And for every intentionally false response to a question, the fine is $500. Therefore, if a person representing a two-person household refused to fill out any questions or simply answered nonsensically, the total fines could range from upwards of $10,000 and $50,000 for noncompliance.

  At 28 pages (with an additional 16-page instruction packet), the ACS contains some of the most detailed and intrusive questions ever put forth in a census questionnaire. These concern matters that the government simply has no business knowing, including questions relating to respondents’ bathing habits, home utility costs, fertility, marital history, work commute, mortgage, and health insurance, among others. For instance, the ACS asks how many persons live in your home, along with their names and detailed information about them such as their relationship to you, marital status, race and their physical, mental and emotional problems, etc. The survey also asks how many bedrooms and bathrooms you have in your house, along with the fuel used to heat your home, the cost of electricity, what type of mortgage you have and monthly mortgage payments, property taxes and so on.

  However, that’s not all.

  The survey also demands to know how many days you were sick last year, how many automobiles you own and the number of miles driven, whether you have trouble getting up the stairs, and what time you leave for work every morning, along with highly detailed inquiries about your financial affairs. And the survey demands that you violate the privacy of others by supplying the names and addresses of your friends, relatives and employer. The questionnaire also demands that you give other information on the people in your home, such as their educational levels, how many years of school were completed, what languages they speak and when they last worked at a job, among other things.

  While some of the ACS’ questions may seem fairly routine, the real danger is in not knowing why the information is needed, how it will be used by the government or with whom it will be shared.

  Finally, you have the right to say “no.”

  Whether police are knocking on your door at 2 am or 2:30 pm, as long as you’re being “asked” to talk to a police officer who is armed to the teeth and inclined to kill at the least provocation, you don’t really have much room to resist, not if you value your life.

  Mind you, these knock-and-talk searches are little more than police fishing expeditions carried out without a warrant.

  The goal is intimidation and coercion.

  Unfortunately, with police departments increasingly shifting towards pre-crime policing and relying on dubious threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state, we’re going to see more of these warrantless knock-and-talk police tactics by which police attempt to circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement and prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.

  Here’s the bottom line.

  These agents are coming to your home with one purpose in mind: to collect information on you.

  It’s a form of intimidation, of course. You shouldn’t answer any questions you’re uncomfortable answering about your vaccine history or anything else. The more information you give them, the more it can be used against you. Just ask them politely but firmly to leave.

  In this case, as in so many interactions with government agents, the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments (and your cell phone recording the encounter) are your best protection.

  Under the First Amendment, you don’t have to speak (to government officials or anyone else). The Fourth Amendment protects you against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. And under the Fifth Amendment, you have a right to remain silent and not say anything which might be used against you.

  You can also post a “No Trespassing” sign on your property to firmly announce that you are exercising your right to be left alone. If you see government officials wandering around your property and peering through windows, in my opinion, you have a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Government officials can ring the doorbell, but once you put them on notice that it’s time for them to leave, they can’t stay on your property.

  It’s important to be as clear as possible and inform them that you will call the police if they don’t leave. You may also wish to record your encounter with the government agent. If they still don’t leave, immediately call the local police and report a trespasser on your property.

  Remember, you have rights.

  The government didn’t want us to know about—let alone assert—those rights during this whole COVID-19 business.

  After all, for years now, the powers-that-be—those politicians and bureaucrats who think like tyrants and act like petty dictators regardless of what party they belong to—have attempted to brainwash us into believing that we have no right to think for ourselves, make decisions about our health, protect our homes and families and businesses, act in our best interests, demand accountability and transparency from government, or generally operate as if we are in control of our own lives.

  But we have every right, and you know why?

  Because as the Declaration of Independence states, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights—to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness—that no government can take away from us.

  Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped the government from constantly trying to usurp our freedoms at every turn. Indeed, the nature of government is such that it invariably oversteps its limits, abuses its authority, and flexes its totalitarian muscles.

  Take this COVID-19 crisis, for example.

  What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including our own) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents.

  The government has made no secret of its plans.

  Just follow the money trail, and you’ll get a sense of what’s in store: more militarized police, more SWAT team raids, more surveillance, more lockdowns, more strong-armed tactics aimed at suppressing dissent and forcing us to comply with the government’s dictates.

  It’s chilling to think about, but it’s not surprising.

  In many ways, this COVID-19 state of emergency has invested government officials (and those who view their lives as more valuable than ours) with a sanctimonious, self-righteous, arrogant, Big Brother Knows Best approach to top-down governing, and the fall-out can be seen far and wide.

  It’s an ugly, self-serving mindset that views the needs, lives and rights of “we the people” as insignificant when compared to those in power.

  That’s how someone who should know better such as Alan Dershowitz, a former Harvard law professor, can suggest that a free people—born in freedom, endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, and living in a country birthed out of a revolutionary struggle for individual liberty—have no rights to economic freedom, to bodily integrity, or to refuse to comply with a government order with which they disagree.

  According to Dershowitz, who has become little more than a legal apologist for the power elite, “You have no right not to be vaccinated, you have no right not to wear a mask, you have no right to open up your business… And if you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor’s office and plunge a needle into your arm.”

  Dershowitz is wrong: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, while the courts may increasingly defer to the government’s brand of Nanny State authoritarianism, we still have rights.

  The government may try to abridge those rights, it may refuse to recognize them, it may even attempt to declare martial law and nullify them, but it cannot litigate, legislate or forcefully eradicate them out of existence.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 23:50

• FBI Foils Iranian Intelligence Plot To Kidnap Dissident On American Soil
  FBI Foils Iranian Intelligence Plot To Kidnap Dissident On American Soil

  During the same week it’s being widely reported that the US and Iran are engaging in prisoner swap negotiations related to the stalled nuclear deal talks in Vienna, it’s been revealed Wednesday that the feds have charged four alleged Iranian intelligence agents for attempting to kidnap a dissident on US soil. 

  The Associated Press reports that “An Iranian intelligence officer and three alleged members of an Iranian intelligence network have been charged in Manhattan with plotting to kidnap a prominent Iranian opposition activist and writer in exile and take her back to Tehran, authorities said Tuesday.”

  

  The indictment doesn’t reveal the victims’ names based on the sensitivity of the case, but Brooklyn-based journalist and activist Masih Alinejad says she was among those targeted in the plot. The 44-year old Iranian-American appears regularly on the US-funded satellite TV channel Voice of America Persian. There were reportedly other targets living in Canada and America.

  Her activism further includes organizing events against the mandatory wearing of headscarves and other mandated religious practices in the Islamic Republic. She said at first she felt “scared” when she learned of the plot, but later posted the following statement to social media: “I am grateful to FBI for foiling the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry’s plot to kidnap me. This plot was orchestrated under Rouhani. This is the regime that kidnapped & executed Ruhollah Zam. They’ve also kidnapped and jailed Jamshid Sharmahd and many others.”

  I am grateful to FBI for foiling the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry’s plot to kidnap me. This plot was orchestrated under Rouhani.

  This is the regime that kidnapped & executed Ruhollah Zam. They’ve also kidnapped and jailed Jamshid Sharmahd and many others pic.twitter.com/HUefdEbiil

  — Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) July 14, 2021

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  An official with New York’s FBI office has been cited as saying it sounded like “some far-fetched movie plot” – the details of which are laid out in The Wall Street Journal as follows: 

  In an interview, Ms. Alinejad, who lives in Brooklyn, said federal agents informed her of the alleged kidnapping scheme last year and told her it was the first known attempt by Iranian officials to carry out a kidnapping plot on American soil.

  On Tuesday, federal prosecutors announced the kidnapping conspiracy charges against an Iranian intelligence official, Alireza Farahani, and three Iranian intelligence assets, all of whom remain at large in Iran. It couldn’t be determined if the men have U.S. attorneys.

  Another individual has been arrested in California for reportedly providing financial support to the scheme. Essentially the goal was to get Alinejad and other targets to travel to Iran where they would have been apprehended as soon as they entered the country.

  The WSJ details further that “The Iranian government tried to lure Ms. Alinejad to Iran through her relatives, prosecutors said.”  But her family refused and that’s when the “intelligence network paid investigators to surveil and record Ms. Alinejad and her family in Brooklyn.”

  You’re going to find out just how performative the last 4 years are based on WH press briefing questions tomorrow on this topic. https://t.co/ezTBsJfLXU

  — Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 14, 2021

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  “They also researched ways to sneak Ms. Alinejad out of the U.S., including a plot to abduct her to Venezuela before bringing her to Iran, according to the indictment,” the report says.

  The timing of this major incident coming to light is key, given Vienna nuclear negotiations are said to be stalled till August. Crucially the new Iranian president, hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi, will take office August 3rd – meaning the previously stated White House desire to see a deal wrapped up before then looks out of reach.

  This latest unprecedented and brazen plot allegedly overseen by Iranian intelligence will put immense pressure on the Biden administration to halt negotiations – something already being used of Iran hawks in Congress to argue against the JCPOA on both sides of the aisle. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 23:30

• Biden's Afghan Exit: Be Prepared To Live With the Taliban Or The Warlords
  Biden’s Afghan Exit: Be Prepared To Live With the Taliban Or The Warlords

  Authored by Brian Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

  The US and the rest of the world have to be prepared to live with the winner. They had better start planning how they are going to do that.

  Fourth of July marked U.S. Independence Day and it was ironic that at the beginning of the holiday weekend, on July 2, American troops slunk out of the massive Bagram air base in Afghanistan which they had occupied for twenty years. Concurrently, President Biden had a media conference at which he was asked “Are you worried that the Afghan government might fall? I mean, we are hearing about how the Taliban is taking more and more districts.” The President’s reply was barely coherent which is disturbing on several counts, not the least being the indication that he has no idea what the future holds for Afghanistan.

  

  His rambling response was: “Look, we were in that war for 20 years. Twenty years. And I think — I met with the Afghan government here in the White House, in the Oval. I think they have the capacity to be able to sustain the government. There are going to have to be, down the road, more negotiations, I suspect. But I am — I am concerned that they deal with the internal issues that they have to be able to generate the kind of support they need nationwide to maintain the government.” He was then asked another question about Afghanistan but cut the reporter short, saying “I want to talk about happy things, man.”

  Happy things? The man is living in fantasyland. Not only has his country suffered the highest number of coronavirus deaths in the world, but a Washington Post analysis showed that “through the first five months of 2021, gunfire killed more than 8,100 people in the United States, about 54 lives lost per day” — which is even more deaths than in Afghanistan in the same period, which the New York Times calculated as 2077 (1461 soldiers and police; 616 civilians). Biden should be sitting down with his best and brightest advisers and talking about serious things — such as future US policy concerning Afghanistan.

  On July 5 Stars and Stripes reported that U.S. forces “left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night [of 2 July] without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left…” It is very difficult to believe that any nation would take such action, but Afghanistan’s designated commander of Bagram, General Mir Asadullah Kohistani, said that “we heard some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram . . . and finally by seven o’clock in the morning we understood it was confirmed that they had already left.”

  This bizarre behavior illustrated US disloyalty to the Kabul government and served to further erode the morale of the tottering security forces which have been taking an increasingly severe beating in recent weeks. The flight of over 1,000 Afghan troops to neighbouring Tajikistan on July 5 was a humiliation that focused world attention on the approaching catastrophe.

  Video: Chaos reigns at Pakistan-Afghanistan border as Taliban ‘retakes’ key crossing after 20 Years:

  In an interview broadcast on ABC News on July 4 the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Scott Miller, said the Taliban militants are “gaining strength” and that “we should be concerned… The loss of terrain is concerning.” This was probably the ultimate understatement in the past week of crisis although Miller had the grace to admit that “I don’t like leaving friends in need… You look at the security situation and it’s not good. The Taliban is on the move.” And there is nothing that he or the entire U.S.-Nato military alliance can do about it. They are leaving a country in a state of mayhem, and abandoning friends in need.

  In October 2005 I wrote that “The insurgency in Afghanistan will continue until foreign troops leave, whenever that might be. After a while, the government in Kabul will collapse, and there will be anarchy until a brutal, ruthless, drug-rich warlord achieves power. He will rule the country as it has always been ruled by Afghans: by threats, religious ferocity, deceit, bribery, and outright savagery, when the latter can be practiced without retribution. And the latest foreign occupation will become just another memory.”

  In 2005-2006 the Taliban began to recover, attracting more recruits and carrying out ever-increasing acts of violence around the country. Concurrently the warlords firmed up their positions in their own regions and continued to expand their militias. Foreign troops and aircraft surged in, and Afghanistan’s armed forces were being trained to take over security duties. But the war went on, and the U.S.-Nato military alliance led the so-called International Security Assistance Force with the mission “aimed to create the conditions whereby the Afghan government could exercise its authority throughout the country and build the capacity of the Afghan national security forces.” According to Nato this “was completed in December 2014 when the Afghans assumed full responsibility for the security of their country.”

  But the security of Afghanistan continued to decline, and now all the foreigners are scurrying out of the country, leaving it in a state in which, according to the US commanding general, the Taliban is “gaining strength” and “the loss of terrain is concerning.”

  In Herat Province in the west of the country, abutting Iran, the Taliban captured two major border crossing points on July 8 while President Biden was making another statement about Afghanistan. Following his (again painfully disjointed) remarks he was asked “why you don’t trust the Taliban?” and answered “it’s a silly question. Do I trust the Taliban? No. But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more — more competent in terms of conducting war.” This is patent nonsense, as was his reply to the observation that “your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.” He said “that is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion” which is directly contrary to the Wall Street Journal report that “a new U.S. intelligence assessment says that the Afghan government could fall within six months of the American military departing“.

  Taliban apparently took over this gym somewhere in #Afghanistan……I’m just leaving this video here without any other comment. 🙈

  pic.twitter.com/UcvdIvmqD9

  — FJ (@Natsecjeff) July 14, 2021

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  It doesn’t need the massive intelligence capability of the United States to be able to predict that the Afghan government will soon collapse and that even greater chaos will envelope the country. Biden declared he believes “the only way there’s going to be — this is now Joe Biden, not the intelligence community — the only way there’s ultimately going to be peace and security in Afghanistan is that they work out a modus vivendi with the Taliban and they make a judgment as to how they can make peace.”

  Getting on with the Taliban is not easy, although there was a glimmer of hope in their meeting with some Kabul government representatives in Iran on July 7. They jointly stated that “war is not the solution to the Afghanistan problem”, but being told by Biden that he doesn’t trust them is not going to make them eager to engage in any settlement that he might wish to broker. After the present government collapses, the civil war in the country will continue, this time between the Taliban and the warlords, and it’s anyone’s guess who will come out on top.

  Whatever happens, the US and the rest of the world are going to have to be prepared to live with the winner. They had better start planning how they are going to do that.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 23:10

• Stanford Researchers Create AI-Powered Immune System 'Clock' That Predicts How Well You'll Age
  Stanford Researchers Create AI-Powered Immune System ‘Clock’ That Predicts How Well You’ll Age

  Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Buck Institute for Research have developed a method for predicting how strong your immune system is, how soon you’ll become frail, and whether a person has undiscovered cardiovascular problems that could lead to serious illness down the road.

  

  “[N]ot all humans age biologically at the same rate. You see this in the clinic — some older people are extremely disease-prone, while others are the picture of health,” said senior author David Furman, PhD, who runs Stanford’s 1000 Immunomes Project.

  Published July 12 in Nature Aging, the 26-author collaboration found that bloodbourne inflammation markers hold the key to how one will age.

  This divergence, Furman said, traces in large part to differing rates at which people’s immune systems decline. The immune system — a carefully coordinated collection of cells, substances and strategies with which evolution has equipped us to deal with threats such as injuries or invasions by microbial pathogens — excels at mounting a quick, intense, localized, short-term, resist-and-repair response called acute inflammation. This “good inflammation” typically does its job, then wanes within days. (An example is that red, swollen finger you see when you have a splinter, and the rapid healing that follows.)

  As we grow older, a low-grade, constant, bodywide “bad inflammation” begins to kick in. This systemic and chronic inflammation causes organ damage and promotes vulnerability to a who’s who of diseases spanning virtually every organ system in the body and including cancer, heart attacks, strokes, neurodegeneration and autoimmunity.

  To date, there have been no metrics for accurately assessing individuals’ inflammatory status in a way that could predict these clinical problems and point to ways of addressing them or staving them off, Furman said. But now, he said, the study has produced a single-number quantitative measure that appears to do just that. –Stanford Medicine

  For the study, blood samples were taken from 1,001 healthy people ranging in age from 8-96, between 2009 and 2016. The samples were “subjected to a barrage of analytical procedures determining levels of immune-signaling proteins called cytokines, the activation status of numerous immune-cell types in responses to various stimuli, and the overall activity levels of thousands of genes in each of those cells,” according to the report.

  Using artificial intelligence, the data was fed into a composite analysis referred to by researchers as an ‘inflammatory clock,’ which finds that the strongest predictors of inflammatory age are contained within 50 immune-signaling proteins called cytokines. When run through the ‘complex algorithm,’ the markers were sufficient to generate a single-number inflammatory score that reflects a person’s immunological response – including the likelihood of suffering from a variety of aging-related diseases.

  In particular, researchers tracked 30 participants in Furman’s 1000 Immunomes Project participants aged 65 or older whose blood was drawn in 2010. They measured how quickly participants were able to get up from a chair and walk a fixed distance, as well as their ability to live independently via questionnaire (“Can you walk by yourself? Do you need help getting dressed?”). In doing so, they found that ‘inflammatory age’ was a better predictor than chronological age at predicting frailty seven years later.

  Furman also studied an exceptionally long-lived population in Bologna, Italy – comparing the inflammatory ages of 28 centenarians and one sub-centenarian to 18 subjects with ages ranging between 50-79 years, and found that the aged Italians had inflammatory ages averaging 40 years less than their calendar age. One 105-year-old participant had an inflammatory age of just 25, according to Furman.

  To further assess inflammatory age’s effect on mortality, Furman’s team turned to the Framingham Study, which has been tracking health outcomes in thousands of individuals since 1948. The Framingham study lacked sufficient data on bloodborne-protein levels, but the genes whose activity levels largely dictate the production of the inflammatory clock’s cytokines are well known. The researchers measured those cytokine-encoding genes’ activity levels in Framingham subjects’ cells. This proxy for cytokine levels significantly correlated with all-cause mortality among the Framingham participants. –Stanford Medicine

  Keep in mind, many scientists believe COVID-19 should be treated as an acute inflammatory disease, in which critical patients often experience a ‘cytokine storm.’

  More via Stanford Medicine:

  A Key Substance:

  The scientists observed that blood levels of one substance, CXCL9, contributed more powerfully than any other clock component to the inflammatory-age score. They found that levels of CXCL9, a cytokine secreted by certain immune cells to attract other immune cells to a site of an infection, begin to rise precipitously after age 60, on average.

  Among a new cohort of 97 25- to 90-year-old individuals selected from the 1000 Immunomes Project for their apparently excellent health, with no signs of any disease, the investigators looked for subtle signs of cardiovascular deterioration. Using a sensitive test of arterial stiffness, which conveys heightened risk for strokes, heart attacks and kidney failure, they tied high inflammatory-age scores — and high CXCL9 levels — to unexpected arterial stiffness and another portent of untoward cardiac consequences: excessive thickness of the wall of the heart’s main pumping station, the left ventricle.

  CXCL9 has been implicated in cardiovascular disease. A series of experiments in laboratory dishware showed that CXCL9 is secreted not only by immune cells but by endothelial cells — the main components of blood-vessel walls. The researchers showed that advanced age both correlates with a significant increase in endothelial cells’ CXCL9 levels and diminishes endothelial cells’ ability to form microvascular networks, to dilate and to contract.

  But in laboratory experiments conducted on tissue from mice and on human cells, reducing CXCL9 levels restored youthful endothelial-cell function, suggesting that CXCL9 directly contributes to those cells’ dysfunction and that inhibiting it could prove effective in reducing susceptible individuals’ risk of cardiovascular disease.

  “Our inflammatory aging clock’s ability to detect subclinical accelerated cardiovascular aging hints at its potential clinical impact,” Furman said. “All disorders are treated best when they’re treated early.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 22:50

• Goldman Sees Oil Price Spiking On UAE/OPEC+ Deal
  Goldman Sees Oil Price Spiking On UAE/OPEC+ Deal

  Oil suffered its biggest drop in 2.5 months today after the EIA reported that in the latest week, gasoline demand in the US unexpectedly tumbled by 760,000 barrels a day from the record 10 million barrels a day a week, to 9.28 million barrels a day to get back to levels in late June.

  

  While algos focused on the sharp drop, what they ignored was that the number was largely meaningless, since the reporting week included July 5, a day off for Americans. Additionally, the EIA’s estimate, known as product supplied, is derived from other data rather than being a direct measurement of consumption. Since that method often leads to erratic numbers, some observers prefer to use the 4-week rolling average. That measure was 9.485 million barrels a day, which was about equal to the same week in 2019

  None of that mattered, however, as CTAs quickly joined in the selling frenzy and completely erasing the earlier jump on the far more important news of an OPEC+ deal.

  Just how important was the Reuters report that the UAE and Saudi Arabia are close to reaching a production agreement, one which sees both the higher baseline requested by the UAE (of 3.65 mb/d starting in April 2022) as well as an extension of the output agreement requested by Saudi (through December 2022). Important enough that in a note released late on Wednesday, Goldman said that the deal would remove the low-probability tail risks of potential price war, and “represents $2 to $4/bbl upside risk to our $80/bbl summer and $75/bbl 2022 Brent price forecasts.”

  In the note from Goldman commodity analysts Damien Courvalin and Jeff Currie, the two also write that the expected agreement “as the first of likely four potential bullish supply catalysts over the coming month” that would more than offset higher North American production. Additionally, although some OPEC+ details remain uncertain, like August and September quotas or baselines of other countries, “these are of limited magnitude and importance to the global oil market outlook, which the bank continues to see as supportive of higher oil prices”

  Piling on the bullish cash, Courvalin writes that an OPEC+ deal that offers a higher baseline for the UAE, as well as an extension of output agreement through December 2022 – such as the one being contemplated –  would be bullish relative to Goldman’s base case

  And speaking of Goldman’s forecasts, the bank had assumed a 500kb/d ramp-up starting in August as well as a gradually rising UAE baseline from 3.17m b/d to 3.3m b/d in August to 3.65m b/d by the end of 1Q 2022. As a result, such a deal would imply downside risk to its OPEC+ production forecast of 400k-600k b/d on average for 3Q 2021-1Q 2022, depending on whether the lack of August production hike is compensated for in September. Needless to say, that too is bullish for the price of oil… and yet one look at the collapse in oil prices today and one would be left shocked at just how dumb the algos have become.

  Finally, it’s not just the UAE/OPEC+ deal that makes Goldman’s commodities team hopeful – the bank’s other three potential bullish supply catalysts are listed as:-

  • Upcoming shale earnings season, which may reaffirm greater incentive toward returning cash to shareholders over production growth
  • That progress on the U.S. reaching an agreement with Iran has stalled, setting back the potential ramp up of exports
  • Bank’s view that consensus expectations for global production outside of North America and core-OPEC remain too optimistic

  Below we excerpt from the full note:

  The UAE and Saudi Arabia appear close to reaching a production agreement, with Reuters reporting progress towards a deal that would allow for both the higher baseline requested by the UAE (of 3.65 mb/d starting in April 2022) as well as an extension of the output agreement requested by Saudi (through December 2022). We assume that the such a deal – if confirmed – would likely come alongside a gradual 0.4 mb/d monthly ramp-up in production through December 2021, as all OPEC+ members had already supported this decision.

  Such an agreement would help bridge the (modest) divide between both countries and help remove the (low probability) OPEC+ tail risks of a potential price war or insufficient production growth, as we expected. While some details remain uncertain, like the August and September quotas or the baseline of other countries, these are of limited magnitude and importance to the global oil market outlook, which we continue to see as supportive of higher oil prices.

  Importantly, such an OPEC+ agreement would be bullish relative to our base-case, as we had assumed (1) a 0.5 mb/d ramp-up starting in August as well as (2) a gradually rising UAE baseline from 3.17 mb/d to 3.3 mb/d in August to 3.65 mb/d by the end of 1Q22 (given its clear inequity). As a result, a deal as described above would imply downside risk to our OPEC+ production forecast of 0.4 to 0.6 mb/d on average for 3Q21-1Q22 (depending on whether the lack of August production hike is compensated for in September).

  

  All else equal, this would represent $2 to $4/bbl upside risk to our $80/bbl summer and $75/bbl 2022 Brent price forecasts.

  1. While the lack of definitive OPEC+ production agreement (and the potential modest downside demand risk from the Delta COVID variant) leave our forecasts unchanged, we see such an OPEC+ agreement as the first of likely four potential bullish supply catalysts over the coming month that would more than offset higher recent realized North American production.
  2. Second is the upcoming US shale earnings season, which has the potential to further illustrate the higher US marginal costs and greater incentive towards returning cash to shareholders than production growth. This is presaged by the lack of horizontal oil rig count increase in recent months, with such discipline increasingly imposed on HY producers by the ratings agencies and potentially binding for IG producers if they announce higher dividend payouts.
  3. Third, progress on the US reaching an agreement with Iran has stalled, with the likely delay of the seventh round of negotiations till at least August creating risks that the potential ramp-up in Iran exports is later than our October base-case (and altogether less likely). The next OPEC+ agreement is further likely to state an offset provision for a potential ramp-up in Iran exports, further limiting the bearish impact of a potential return to the JCPOA agreement. For reference, a lack of Iran supply deal would increase our 2022 price forecast by $10/bbl.
  4. Fourth, we believe consensus expectations (as proxied by the IEA) for global production outside of North America and core-OPEC remain too optimistic. We expect (1) non-OPEC+ exc. North America production to only increase by 0.6 mb/d from May to August 2021, 0.8 mb/d less than the IEA, and further (2) expect 60% of OPEC+ members accounting for 20% of production to fall below their production quotas as low drilling activity reduces productive capacity by early 2022. Such an outcome would lay bare the need in 2022 for both a decline in OPEC’s spare capacity to below its 10-year range as well as a sharp rebound in shale production growth, both bullish outcomes relative to market forwards.

  As a result, we believe that risks to our bullish oil price forecasts are skewed to the upside, with the catalyst for such a move higher shifting from the demand to the supply side. While our bullish view this year had been driven by our well above consensus demand growth forecast, this is no longer the case with (1) the sharp rebound in global oil demand that has taken place since May, from 95 to 98 mb/d currently and near our 99 mb/d end of summer forecast, mostly played out, with (2) the IEA expecting similar peak summer demand, and with (3) the EM vaccine led demand uplift set to only play out gradually through 1Q22.

  A shift in market focus to the supply will make increasingly evident that the industry’s costs have reset sharply higher, due to (1) poor accumulated returns of the past 5 years, (2) the inflationary impact of internalizing carbon emissions and (3) the rising uncertainty and pessimism on long-term oil demand. As a result, we initiate a new trade recommendation to be long Dec-22 Brent forwards, currently trading at $67.06/bbl. This entry point is below our Dec-22 spot forecast of $75/bbl due to backwardation and further offers a proxy trade for a re-setting higher of the oil market’s marginal costs.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 22:30

• China GDP Growth Disappoints As Credit Impulse Crashes
  China GDP Growth Disappoints As Credit Impulse Crashes

  Following Q1’s record-breaking surge in China’s YoY GDP (thanks to base-effect malarkey and a massive credit impulse), tonight’s Q2 GDP was expected to slow drastically (especially given the crackdown on investment/real estate deleveraging and the collapse in the credit impulse)…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  The question is how much? Consensus estimates called for an 8.0% YoY GDP rise, but whisper numbers were notably lower with Bloomberg Economics’ Shu noting that various early indicators are consistent in pointing to some weakening in consumption in June.

  “On balance, these indicators suggest production growth – after base effects are taken into account – may have slowed, but only a touch.”

  The official services PMI fell to 52.3 in June from 54.3 in May, while its Caixin counterpart showed a much steeper slide from a strong reading to just slightly above 50 – the line between expansion and contraction.

  The headline GDP growth figure printed a very slightly disappointing +7.9% YoY

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  On A QoQ basis, Q1 GDP growth was downwardly revised from +0.6% to +0.4% which helped push Q2’s QoQ GDP 1.3% higher (better than the +1.0% QoQ expected).

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Other data was mixed, with Industrial Production and Property Investment disappointing as all major data items showed slowing growth…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  June Retail Sales rose 23.0% YTD YoY (better than the +22.8% expected) but slower than the +25.7% in May.

  June Industrial Production rose 15.9% YTD YoY (slightly weaker than the +16.0% expected) and slower than the +17.8% in May.

  June Fixed Asset Investment YTD YoY rose 12.6%, down from the 15.4% rise in May (but better than the +12.0% expectation).

  June Property Investment YTD YoY rose just 15.0% (worse than the +16.0% expected) and well down from the +18.3% in May.

  June Surveyed Jobless Rate was unchanged at 5.0%.

  This will likely be a little confusing to traders.

  Given China’s headline data wasn’t terrible, with retail sales even beating estimates, why does the economy needs more central bank support?

  Bloomberg’s Chief China Markets Correspondent, Sofia Horta e Costa, points out that “it may be that’s there’s a problem with China’s financial plumbing where banks aren’t lending or credit demand is weak. This is tricky to read.”

  Can we say the RRR cut and calls for lower interest rates are not at all about the economy, but about the banking system? The sector is struggling under the impact of a negative credit impulse, the deleveraging campaign and increasing corporate defaults.

  There is one side note: The country’s energy companies are starting to see demand declining after months of robust increase underpinning the recovery.

  Apparent oil demand fell for a second straight month, down 1.7% from a year earlier.

  No major reactions in markets to any of the data for now as Yuan is leaking lower against the dollar and Chinese bank stocks are rallying.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 22:17

• Russia Warns Pentagon: Don't Deploy Troops In Central Asia Near Afghanistan 
  Russia Warns Pentagon: Don’t Deploy Troops In Central Asia Near Afghanistan 

  Amid the continuing full US troop draw down from Afghanistan, which last week President Biden said would be ‘complete’ by August 31st, the Pentagon has been debating how to maintain a foothold in Central Asia as it increasingly looks like Kabul will come under Taliban threat within a mere months. 

  Last month in an interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan, Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan slammed the door shut on allowing the CIA or US special forces to conduct cross-border counterterrorism missions against a resurgent Al-Qaeda, ISIS or the Taliban. Given Washington’s scrambling to establish other outposts in countries neighboring Afghanistan, Russia is now warning against such an expanded Central Asian US military presence. 

  On Tuesday Russia’s foreign ministry put the US on notice, warning that the possibility of a US “permanent military presence” in countries neighboring Afghanistan is “unacceptable”. 

  

  The comments by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov further stated: 

  “We told the Americans in a direct and straightforward way that it would change a lot of things not only in our perceptions of what’s going on in that important region, but also in our relations with the United States.”

  Crucially Moscow also warned Central Asian countries, especially its allies, against hosting US troops connected to events in Afghanistan.

  “We cautioned them against such steps, and we also have had a frank talk on the subject with our Central Asian allies, neighbors and friends and also other countries in the region that would be directly affected,” Ryabkov said further.

  Currently Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have Russian military bases, while Kyrgyzstan closed a US base in 2014 that had been used as a launching pad for counter-terror missions in Afghanistan.

  

  According to Military Times, at the start of this week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had “emphasized that Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are all members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and any presence of foreign troops on their territories must be endorsed by the security pact. He added that none of those countries have raised the issue.”

  Taliban offensives across much of the country as the US exits is already creating a crisis that’s spilling over to nearby countries, particularly Tajikistan, which lately saw over 1,000 Afghan national troops and many more civilian refugees flee across its border. 

  Russia for its part considers Tajikistan its own sphere of influence and says it’s poised to activate a base there specifically for Afghan security-related missions, given its concern over foreign jihadists coming out of Afghanistan and entering Russian border regions. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 22:00

• Taibbi: Spying And Smearing Is "Un-American," Not Tucker Carlson
  Taibbi: Spying And Smearing Is “Un-American,” Not Tucker Carlson

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

  On Monday, June 28th, Fox host Tucker Carlson dropped a bomb mid-show, announcing he’d been approached by a “whistleblower” who told him he was being spied on by the NSA.

  “The National Security Agency is monitoring our electronic communications,” he said, “and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.”

  

  The reaction was swift, mocking, and ferocious. “Carlson is sounding more and more like InfoWars host and notorious conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones,” chirped CNN media analyst Brian Stelter. Vox ripped Carlson as a “serial fabulist” whose claims were “evidence-free.” The Washington Post quipped that “in a testament to just how far the credibility of Tucker Carlson Tonight has cratered,” even groups like Pen America and the Reporters Committee on the Freedom of the Press were no-commenting the story, while CNN learned from its always-reliable “people familiar with the matter” that even Carlson’s bosses at Fox didn’t believe him.

  None of this was surprising. A lot of media people despise Carlson. He may be Exhibit A in the n+2 epithet phenomenon that became standard math in the Trump era, i.e. if you thought he was an “asshole” in 2015 you jumped after Charlottesville straight past racist to white supremacist, and stayed there. He’s spoken of in newsrooms in hushed tones, like a mythical monster. The paranoid rumor that he’s running for president (he’s not) comes almost entirely from a handful of editors and producers who’ve convinced themselves it’s true, half out of anxiety and half subconscious desperation to find a click-generating replacement for Donald Trump.

  The NSA story took a turn on the morning of July 7th last week, when Carlson went on Maria Bartiromo’s program. He said that it would shortly come out that the NSA “leaked the contents of my email to journalists,” claiming he knew this because one of them called him for comment. On cue, hours later, a piece came out in Axios, “Scoop: Tucker Carlson sought Putin interview at time of spying claim.”

  In a flash, the gloating and non-denial denials that littered early coverage of this story (like the NSA’s meaningless insistence that Carlson was not a “target” of surveillance) dried up. They were instantly replaced by new, more tortured rhetoric, exemplified by an amazingly loathsome interview conducted by former Bush official Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC. The Wallace panel included rodentine former Robert Mueller team member Andrew Weissman, and another of the networks’ seemingly limitless pool of interchangeable ex-FBI stooge-commentators, Frank Figliuzzi.

  Weissman denounced Carlson for sowing “distrust” in the intel community, which he said was “so anti-American.” Wallace, who we recall was MSNBC’s idea of a “crossover” voice to attract a younger demographic, agreed that Carlson had contributed to a “growing chorus of distrust in our country’s intelligence agencies.” Figliuzzi said the playbook of Carlson and the GOP was to “erode the public’s trust in their institutions.” Each made an identical point in the same words minus tiny, nervous variations, as if they were all trying to read the same statement off a moving teleprompter.

  The scene was perfectly representative of what the erstwhile “liberal” press has become: collections of current and former enforcement types, masquerading as journalists, engaged in patriotic denunciations of critics and rote recitals of quasi-official statements.

  Not that it matters to Carlson’s critics, but odds favor the NSA scandal being true. An extraordinarily rich recent history of illegal, politically-directed leaks has gone mostly uncovered, in another glaring recent press failure that itself is part of this story.

  It’s admitted. Go back to December, 2015, and you’ll find a Wall Street Journal story by Adam Entous and Danny Yadron quoting senior government officials copping to the fact that the Obama White House reviewed intercepts of conversations between “U.S lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”

  The White House in that case was anxious to know what congressional opponents to Obama’s Iran deal were thinking, and peeked in the electronic cookie jar to get an advance preview at such “incidentally” collected info. This prompted what one official called an “Oh, shit” moment, when they realized that what they’d done might result in “the executive branch being accused of spying.”

  After Obama left office, illegal leaks of classified intercepts became commonplace. Many, including the famed January, 2017 leak of conversations between Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, were key elements of major, news-cycle-dominating bombshells. Others, like “Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin,” or news that former National Security Adviser Susan Rice unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials in foreign intercepts, were openly violative of the prohibition against disclosing the existence of such surveillance, let alone the contents.

  These leaks tended to go to the same small coterie of reporters at outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN, and not one prompted blowback. This was a major forgotten element of the Reality Winner story. Winner, a relatively low-level contractor acting on her own, was caught, charged, and jailed with extraordinary speed after leaking an NSA document about Russian interference to the Intercept. But these dozens of similar violations by senior intelligence officials, mainly in leaks about Trump, went not just unpunished but un-investigated. As Winner’s lawyer, Titus Nichols, told me years ago, his client’s case was “about low-hanging fruit.”

  The key issue in those cases was not even so much that someone in government might have been improperly accessing foreign surveillance intercepts — revelations to that effect have been a regular occurrence since the Bush years, with the FBI a serial violator — but that such intercepts were being leaked for public effect, with the enthusiastic cooperation of reporters, often in stories involving American citizens. They got away with it in the Trump years, because it was Trump, but the arrogance to think they can keep getting away with it by power-smearing everyone who objects is mind-blowing.

  During Trump’s first run for president, I nearly lost my mind trying to explain to fellow reporters that he was succeeding in part because of us, that the prestige media’s ham-handed, hysterical, anti-intellectual approach to covering the Trump phenomenon was itself massively fueling it, making a case for establishment corruption and incompetence more eloquently than he could.

  Something similar now is happening with the collapse of traditional media and the rise of Carlson, the current #1 voice on cable, who is rapidly stealing the audience MSNBC somehow believed it could corral with spokesgoons like Wallace. It seems impossible that Carlson’s haters don’t realize how easy they’ve made it for him, turning themselves into such caricatures of illiberalism that they’re practically handing him the top spot.

  The inspiration for his current show seemingly came when Carlson watched his former colleagues among the GOP Brahmins make a show of reacting with horror to Trump’s arrival. These were people who had no problem wantonly bombing poor and mostly nonwhite countries all over the world, made a joke of the rule of law (and America’s reputation abroad) with policies like torture, rendition, and mass surveillance, and shamelessly whored themselves out to Wall Street even after the 2008 crash. Yet they pretended to severe moral anguish before Trump even took office.

  Carlson grasped that the sudden piety of the Kristols and Max Boots and David Frenches was rooted in the same terror the Democratic Party nomenklatura felt at the possibility of a Bernie Sanders presidency in 2020, i.e. fear of a line-jumping outsider tearing away their hard-fought consultancies and sinecures.

  “He was threatening their rice bowl,” Carlson says. “That’s all it was. I was like, ‘Fuck these people.’”

  This is an excerpt from today’s subscriber-only post. To read the entire article and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 21:40

• Indonesia Regulator Allows Ivermectin Use For Covid Treatment
  Indonesia Regulator Allows Ivermectin Use For Covid Treatment

  Merely mentioning the name of the vaccine-busting drug Ivermectin in the US is enough to get you carted off for “questioning” to the nearest illegal CIA blacksite, have the NSA leak all your private information to MSNBC, WaPo and the NYT and quietly shipped off to Guantanamo for permanent re-education under the daily auspices of Critical Race Theory. But not in the “banana republic” of Indonesia, where on Thursday, Ivermectin was officially approved for covid treatment in a vicious blow to the “buy my vaccine” pharmaceutical lobby around the world.

  According to Bloomberg, Indonesia’s food and drug regulator, known as BPOM, has issued a letter approving the distribution of Ivermectin, Remdesivir, Favipiravir, Oseltamivir, immunoglobulin, Tocilizumab, Azithromycin and Dexametason to be used in treatment of Covid-19, according to a statement from the agency. The latter, Bloomberg adds, was issued as guidance for distributors of the drugs.

  The startling development – if only to the anti-Ivermectin oligarchs in “developed” Western nations – takes place two weeks after eight hospitals in Indonesia began conducting clinical trials on Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic medicine that has appeared to be a potential Covid-19 medication and which is greatly hated by the establishment due to its low price and its ability to eradicate the covid plague which the establishment desperately needs to perpetuate a state of constant near-panic not to mention enabling trillions in fiscal and monetary stimulus, following a permit issued by the national agency of drug and food control.

  BPOM’s head Penny K. Lukito said at a press conference on Monday (June 28) that global data and guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO) show that Ivermectin, previously used for deworming, can also be used for Covid-19 treatment. However, while the BOMP said on June 28 that data are still being collected and the results are not conclusive, it appears that two weeks later it has found enough conclusive data to formally approve Ivermectin for covid treatment.

  Indonesia is scrambling to contain the covid pandemic, having overnight surpassed India’s daily Covid-19 case numbers, and becoming Asia’s new virus epicenter as the spread of the highly-contagious delta variant drives up infections in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

  The country has seen its daily case count cross 40,000 for three straight days — including a record high of 54,517 on Wednesday — up from less than 10,000 a month ago. Officials are concerned that the more transmissible new variant is now spreading outside of the country’s main island, Java, and could exhaust hospital workers and supplies of oxygen and medication.

  

  That said, Indonesia’s current numbers are still far from India’s peak of 400,000 daily cases in May, and its total outbreak of 2.7 million is barely a tenth of the Asian giant’s 30.9 million. India, with a population roughly five times the size of Indonesia’s 270 million people, saw daily infections drop below 39,000 on Wednesday as its devastating outbreak wanes. The Southeast Asian country reported about 900 deaths daily on average in the past seven days – compared to just 181 a month ago – while India reported an average of 1,027 daily fatalities.

  As Bloomberg observes, the outbreak in Indonesia underscores the consequences of an unequal global distribution of vaccines that has seen richer countries gobble up more of the supply, leaving poorer places exposed to outbreaks of variants like delta. World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called the growing divide a “catastrophic moral failure.”

  He is of course referring to the inability of pharma giants like Pfizer to deliver millions of doses to poor countries like Indonesia which won’t pay it tens of billions of dollars. Well, poor countries like Indonesia are taking matters into their own hands, and we wonder what China Ted will say now that the Asian nation has found a way out of the vaccine squeeze: one involving the use of the single most hated compound by rich pharma barons everywhere.

  Upon learning the news, social media had some amusing, if painfully accurate, reactions.

  BREAKING NEWS: Indonesian Regulator assassinated. Mass riots and chaos grip the country as the people beg for vaccines to stop covid. https://t.co/Y9rPIBBj7F

  — Captain Calypso (@RealCalypsoJohn) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  I bet #Indonesia will be one of the first countries to wipe out Covid19. Well done to their government.

  — Bobby The Yemenite (@AlphaQ1st) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  we know it pic.twitter.com/Jj5KPpZj7Y

  — rickbalboa 🥊🇧🇷🇵🇹 (@rickbalboa2) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  This is disinformation.

  I’m here to let everyone know Ivermectin is racist and white propaganda.#BlackLivesMatterUK

  — Greg – PhD (@gulagcitizen) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Indonesia about to get banned

  — GastonTheGinger (@gastirapa) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 21:28

• No Victory Lap For Governors Who Locked Down America
  No Victory Lap For Governors Who Locked Down America

  Authored by James Bovard,

  There are no fact-checkers for victory laps. Last week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo summarized his experience with the Covid-19 crisis: “Speaking for myself, it was a tremendous personal benefit.”

  Cuomo made that declaration in a speech concluding his one-year chairmanship of the National Governors Association.

  Because Cuomo’s spiel sought to rewrite history to exonerate politicians who ravaged Americans’ rights and liberties, it requires a rebuttal.

  

  Cuomo declared that “we maximized the moment as governors. Governors have a new credibility. Governors have a new status.” Cuomo epitomized the rush to “absolute power” that occurred in governor’s mansions across the nation. After he fueled pandemic fears, the New York Times proclaimed, “Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now.” A New Yorker profile, titled “Andrew Cuomo, King of New York,” explained that Cuomo and his aides saw the battle over Covid policy as “between people who believe government can be a force for good and those who think otherwise.” Cuomo denounced anyone who disobeyed his edicts, including condemning sheriffs as “dictators” for refusing to enforce his mask mandate inside people’s homes.

  

  Cuomo justified placing almost 20 million people under house arrest: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” Though his repressive policies failed to prevent New York from having among the nation’s highest Covid death rates, he became a superhero thanks largely to media scoring that ignored almost all of the harms he inflicted. Cuomo won an Emmy Award for his “masterful use of television” during the pandemic. Media valorization helped make Cuomo’s self-tribute book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, a bestseller.

  Cuomo had plenty of power-mad accomplices in the governors’ association.  

  • Oregon Governor Kate Brown banned residents from leaving their homes except for essential work, buying food, and other narrow exemptions and also banned all recreational travel.

  • Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer imposed some of the most severe restrictions, prohibiting anyone from leaving their home to visit family or friends.

  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti even banned people from walking or bicycling outside.

  The CDC eventually admitted that there was almost no risk of Covid contagion from outdoors activity not amidst a throng of people.

  But that did not stop politicians from claiming that “science and data” justified locking people in their homes.

  Some governors have acted as if their shutdown orders gave them unlimited sway to decree when normal life could resume.

  California Gov. Gavin Newsom decreed that Covid restrictions would be perpetuated in California counties based on voter turnout, alcohol availability, and other non-health factors.

  California assemblyman Kevin Kiley groused,

  “An entire county can be kept shut down because certain areas are judged to be lacking in ‘equity,’ even if the whole county has relatively few cases of Covid.”

  The end of Covid restrictions turned into hostage release negotiations with domineering rulers clinging to all their new prerogatives.

  Cuomo was proud that, when he visits a school, he is no longer asked “‘What does a governor do?” because “people know what governors do and how important governors are.” Governors can wreck kids’ futures by shutting down schools and placing children under indefinite home detention, costing millions of children almost an entire year of learning. In some areas, private schools remained open and took precautions that kept children safe in the classroom. As Washington Examiner editor Tim Carney noted, students in Catholic schools in Montgomery County, Maryland continued attending school and were kept safer than public school students: “Kids learning remotely got Covid at 3 times the rate as kids learning in person.” Unreliable “distance learning” produced a more than 500 percent increase in the number of black and Hispanic students failing classes in Montgomery County government schools.

  A Journal of the American Medical Association analysis concluded that shutting down the schools would reduce the current crop of students’ collective years of life by more than five million, based on “lower income, reduced educational attainment, and worse health outcomes.” School shutdowns blighted the lives of millions of children in part because the Centers for Disease Control proclaimed that six feet of “social distancing” was necessary to avoid contagion – an arbitrary standard pulled out of thin air that was denounced by former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb.

  The lockdowns that governors imposed also pointlessly ravaged many Americans’ mental health. The Centers for Disease Control last month reported a 51% increase in emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts by teenage girls in early 2021. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found a 300% increase in the percentage of adults reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder and/or depressive disorder (41% of adults in January 2021). The CDC also reported a record number of drug overdose deaths last year, due in part to the lockdowns and other government-imposed disruptions.

  Cuomo boasted that the Covid-19 responses “were probably the most consequential decisions that governors had made in generations. They were literally about life and death. You make the wrong decision, people could die.” Thousands of New Yorkers died because of Cuomo’s mistakes and cover-ups. New York state initially reported barely half of the total of more than 12,000 New York nursing home patients who died of Covid – one out of eight nursing home residents in the state that occurred after Cuomo ordered nursing homes to admit Covid patients. Early in the pandemic, Cuomo pushed to include a legislative provision written by the Greater New York Hospital Association to give a waiver of liability to nursing homes and hospitals whose patients died of Covid. A report earlier this year by the New York Attorney General warned, “The immunity laws could be wrongly used to protect any individual or entity from liability, even if those decisions were not made in good faith or motivated by financial incentives.” As the Guardian noted, “Cuomo’s political machine received more than $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association, its executives and its lobbying firms.”

  Any politician who recited the magic words “science and data” became entitled to outlaw any activity he chose. Cuomo and other governors acted as if they had discovered a “good intentions” exemption to all limits on their power. Federal judge William Stickman IV condemned Pennsylvania’s Covid restrictions: “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But Cuomo and other governors presumed that proclaiming emergencies nullified the constitutional rights of any citizen under their sway. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Cuomo’s restrictions on limited religious gatherings because they were “far more restrictive than any Covid-related regulations that have previously come before the Court… and far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.”

  Cuomo’s spiel to the governors included Washington’s most revered banality: “We spoke truth to power.” But Cuomo’s own appointees suppressed the data on nursing home deaths while he was negotiating a $5 million advance for his book on pandemic leadership lessons. Last August, the Justice Department announced an investigation into state nursing home policies that boosted Covid death tolls in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Cuomo is probably confident that Biden’s Justice Department will throttle any such investigation that could tarnish Democratic governors. But will other investigations or Freedom of Information Act disclosures eventually obliterate the bragging rights of the Covid lockdowners?

  Governors’ response to Covid was supposedly a glorious triumph because not every nursing home patient died, not every small business was bankrupted, and not every teenager attempted suicide from isolation and despair. Despite the severe repression of everyday life, more than 620,000 Americans reportedly died of Covid and more than 114 million were infected. According to the CDC more than ten million jobs were lost thanks to lockdowns, a major reason why life expectancy in the United States last year had its sharpest plunge since World War Two. CNN reported last month that “New York’s economy is America’s worst,” with economic activity at only 83% of pre-pandemic levels.

  In reality, Cuomo’s speech relied on what Hegel called “the truth which lies in power.” As long as politicians are exalted, the actual details of their decrees are irrelevant: they have been coronated as saviors. Cuomo assured his fellow Covid-profiteering governors that “this will happen again.” This is why Americans must recognize the catastrophic failure of political iron fists during the Covid-19 pandemic.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 21:00

• New Study Finds Millennials, Gen Z Are Terrible Tippers
  New Study Finds Millennials, Gen Z Are Terrible Tippers

  Despite the fact that service workers have endured some of the worst consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tips they have received haven’t swelled with the increased risks attached to their jobs. But before millennials blame greedy baby boomers or some other generational villain, a recent study from CreditCards.com found that millennials and members of Gen Z are the least likely to top baristas, uber drivers, servers and bartenders.

  

  According to the survey, the number of food service customers who say they always tip fell slightly in the new 2021 tipping survey compared with a pre-pandemic survey on tipping behaviors. Meanwhile, the percentage of sit-down restaurant diners who say they always tip is down two percentage points, from 77% in 2019. And the percentage of food delivery customers who always tip fell four percentage points to 59%, despite skyrocketing demand for food delivery services during the pandemic.

  Ted Rossman, industry analyst at CreditCards.com, said he expected the pandemic to have a bigger impact on Americans’ tipping habits.

  “Delivery people and food industry workers literally risked their lives to do their jobs over the past 16 months,” Rossman said. “It has been an incredibly difficult time to work in the service industry.”

  And despite shifting social mores surrounding tipping, the survey found that older generations were more likely to tip.

  

  The survey found that the likelihood a customer would leave a tip decreased in all tipping scenarios presented if the tipper was younger rather than older. Here’s a rundown of service users who say they tip without fail.

  • Servers or waitstaff at a sit-down restaurant – 88% of boomers, 80% of Gen Xers, 58% of millennials and 56% of Gen Zers say they always tip.
  • Food delivery drivers – 75% of boomers, 65% of Gen Xers, 44% of millennials and 40% of Gen Zers say they always tip.
  • Hair stylists and barbers – 76% of boomers, 69% of Gen Xers, 49% of millennials and 35% of Gen Zers say they always tip.
  • Taxi and rideshare drivers – 66% of boomers, 48% of Gen Xers, 34% of millennials and 32% of Gen Zers say they always tip.
  • Hotel housekeepers – 37% of boomers, 28% of Gen Xers, 20% of millennials and 18% of Gen Zers say they always tip.

  However, there’s a caveat for restaurants that serve a mostly younger clientele: when millennial do tip, they tend to be slightly more generous than other generations. For example, at sit-down restaurants, millennials leave on average a 21% tip vs. the 20% left by the boomers.

  For those who are curious about modern tipping etiquette, here’s a rundown of tips from experts.

  • Do: Learn tipping norms. It can be tough to remember when and how much you’re supposed to tip. Look up guidelines for common scenarios (see our tipping chart below for a start) and start tipping accordingly, Lynn recommended.
  • Do: Carry cash. If you carry only your debit or credit cards, you’re likely to find yourself in an awkward tipping situation, Gottsman said. “If you’re not carrying cash, you’re not prepared,” she said.
  • Do: When in doubt, ask. Not sure if you should tip or if the service provider is allowed to accept a gratuity? It’s an awkward situation that can be alleviated by being open and honest, financial psychologist Brad Klontz said. “You can say, ‘Hey, is it OK if I give you a tip?’” he added.
  • Don’t: Stiff for bad service. Keep in mind that tipping is built into the compensation structure for some service workers, Klontz pointed out. “For some people, it’s not bonus money,” he said. “This is part of what they’re relying on to feed their family.”
  • Don’t: Buy into a “guilt tip.” Did an electronic message pop up asking if you want to leave a tip while you’re buying a bouquet of flowers or a bottle of wine at a store? No tip is necessary for a cashier ringing up a purchase, Gottsman said. “We have to get comfortable hitting the ‘no tip’ button at a cash register,” she said.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 20:40

• Are Teachers' Unions Evil?
  Are Teachers’ Unions Evil?

  Authored by Philip Carl Salzman via The Epoch Times,

  America has faced great challenges during the past year and a half: the CCP virus, deep political division, and the aggression of communist China. How have our teachers’ unions responded to these challenges?

  

  During the pandemic, front-line workers, such as doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers, dealt directly with sick and contagious patients, while other front-line workers, such as grocery store clerks and truck drivers, kept the material necessities of life available for all citizens.

  Many other workers retreated to home to work at a distance, while yet others lost their jobs and had to make do without an income.

  Not the teachers. Public school teachers’ unions refused to return to class even when religious and private school teachers were back in class. The evidence quickly showed that distance learning was an abject failure. Public school unions didn’t care what harm was being done to the children that they were supposed to serve. These unions decided to serve the preferences of their dues-paying teachers, who preferred to stay at home and get paid for doing so. No one could accuse public school teachers of rushing to the front lines.

  While the teachers refused to go to class, they nonetheless demanded vast sums of additional money for schools and for their own benefits. It was not exactly blackmail, but it was shameless. However, the unions didn’t stop there. They meddled in domestic politics.

  The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) demanded as a condition of returning to the classroom that Los Angeles defund the police. According to a Freedom Foundation report about a teacher suing the UTLA:

  “Defunding the police was one of several informal conditions UTLA claimed the school district would have to meet before its members would agree to resume in-school instruction. And like the union’s demand that charter schools be abolished, it had nothing whatsoever to do with making teachers safe during the COVID pandemic. … The union wasn’t asking for better wages, benefits or working conditions. Instead, it had prioritized the radical liberal agenda of its leaders above the legitimate workplace concerns of its members—and was willing to hold the parents hostage until it got what it wanted.”

  Not satisfied with making demands on domestic political policy, the teachers’ unions now wish to determine foreign policy.

  The United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) have adopted an anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction policy within a broader “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” Perhaps the UESF would like to join Hamas in lobbing thousands of rockets at Israeli citizens. The UESF, as so many on the far left and far right, single out for condemnation the sole Jewish state in the world; apparently, they don’t care about the slaughter of Syrians, Iranians, Afghans, and Uyghurs that cannot be blamed on Jews. This is reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter movement that cares only about the dozen blacks killed by police but not the thousands killed by other blacks. Very selective “morality.”

  In response to the clear and hostile division of the two halves of the country, teachers’ unions have explicitly rejected being a unifying force, choosing to adopt the extremist critical race theory approach in their teaching. Their plan for children is to force them into racial divisions, berating the despised white race as “oppressors,” and enabling blacks and other minorities to write themselves off as “victims” with no hopes, because—you know—“systemic racism.” Second and third-graders are segregated into races and must confess their “privilege” or “victimhood.” This is not just anti-American; it’s child abuse.

  Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), claims, along with various Democrat media figures, that critical race theory is not being taught in schools—“Let’s be clear: critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools”—but, she warns, the AFT has a ready defense fund to use against anyone who tries to stop teachers teaching critical race theory.

  The National Education Association has dedicated itself not only to teaching critical race theory in all 50 states, but also to crushing any opposition to critical race theory. Note what’s happening here. As the New York Post headline has it, “Embracing critical theory, teacher’s union says they—not parents—control what kids learn.” The teachers’ unions have gone to war against parents, and usurped parental authority over the education of children.

  While American teachers are obsessed with race and gender, students’ achievement in reading, math, and science is mediocre. While Chinese students rated best in the world with a combined score of 1,731, U.S. students ranked 26 in the world with a combined score of 1,489, according to the World Population Review. Teachers don’t seem to care that America’s greatest adversary is outstripping the United States in education. They might not be paid by China to undermine their own country, but they might as well be as far as the results are concerned.

  The transfer of raising children from the family to the state and its agencies, in this case the teachers’ unions, is a dream of Marxism, a fulfillment of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which in practice means the dictatorship of the Communist Party. Teachers’ unions, with their advocacy of racism and their rejection of parents’ rights, are playing a major role in “divide and conquer,” the conquest of America by Democrat socialism.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 20:20

• Biden Copies Trump By Scrapping Economic Dialogue With China
  Biden Copies Trump By Scrapping Economic Dialogue With China

  Unfortunately for Hunter Biden’s former CCP business partners, President Biden and his advisors have clearly identified China as a ‘weak spot’ for the Democratic President, and are thus determined to burnish Biden’s “tough on China” credentials, mostly by co-opting policies introduced by his predecessor, President Trump.

  One day after the White House warned American businesses operating in Hong Kong that it’s not safe anymore, Bloomberg reports that the White House and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have no plans to restart regular US-China bilateral talks on the economy, a policy that was in place during the Bush and Obama Administrations, but was dropped by President Trump.

  

  Despite having already spoken repeatedly with President Xi by phone, while his top diplomats including Secretary of State Anthony Blinken have met with their Chinese counterparts, it appears the White House is planning to roll back its cooperation with Beijing.

  Bloomberg reported that “the disinterest in reopening channels active under President Barack Obama adds to evidence of President Joe Biden’s toughening stance on China.” They added that Biden appears to “extend and even deepen Trump’s more confrontational approach.”

  Earlier this week, Yellen on Monday called out China for imperiling “rules-based international order” constructed after World War II, along with Russia and Belarus. Recently, China refused to attend a G-20 meeting between Yellen and the other top global finance chiefs, forcing them to participate remotely.

  She added that China was guilty of “unfair economic practices, malign behavior and human rights abuses.” The US has been cranking up the pressure on Chinese firms, slapping sanctions on more firms that the US believes are involved with China’s “genocide” in Xinjiang.

  In other news, the Information reported that two more Chinese firms are scrapping plans to list in the US. The two firms, Kujiale and Lalamove are searching for alternatives, and will likely list in Hong Kong (the venue of choice for all of the Chinese firms, including ByteDance).

  Trump abandoned these bilateral talks with China in 2018 after holding a meeting at the Treasury Department in 2017. Neither the US nor China released a statement about that meeting.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 20:00

• Federal Court Rules It Unconstitutional To Ban 18-To-20-Year-Olds From Buying Guns
  Federal Court Rules It Unconstitutional To Ban 18-To-20-Year-Olds From Buying Guns

  Authored by Matt Agorist via TheFreeThoughtProject.com,

  At the age of 18, an American citizen can join the military get issued an M-16 and have their legs blown off by an IED in Iraq – “for freedom.” However, if that 18-year-old wants to buy a handgun in the same country that sends them off to have their legs blown off, they are banned from doing so – because “freedom.” All that could soon be changing now, however, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has ruled that laws preventing 18-20-year-olds from buying guns are unconstitutional.

  

  In a split decision, the three-judge panel ruled on Tuesday that the minimum age requirement of 21 to buy a gun in the land of the free restricts the rights of law-abiding citizens by drawing an arbitrary and unjustified line.

  In the case, according to court documents, the plaintiffs sought an injunction and a declaratory judgment pointing out that several federal laws and regulations that prevent federally licensed gun dealers from selling handguns to any 18-, 19-, or 20-year-old violate the Second Amendment. According to the plaintiffs:

  We first find that 18-year-olds possess Second Amendment rights. They enjoy almost every other constitutional right, and they were required at the time of the Founding to serve in the militia and furnish their own weapons. We then ask, as our precedent requires, whether the government has met its burden to justify its infringement of those rights under the appropriate level of scrutiny. To justify this restriction, Congress used disproportionate crime rates to craft over inclusive laws that restrict the rights of overwhelmingly law-abiding citizens. And in doing so, Congress focused on purchases from licensed dealers without establishing those dealers as the source of the guns 18- to 20-year-olds use to commit crimes.

  The court agreed.

  “Despite the weighty interest in reducing crime and violence, we refuse to relegate either the Second Amendment or 18-to-20-year-olds to a second-class status,” wrote Judge Julius N. Richardson.

  The court found that 18-year-olds possess a Second Amendment right to gun ownership and noted that they were “required at the time of the Founding to serve in the militia and furnish their own weapons,” wrote Richardson.

  Indeed, they were. Not only is it unconstitutional to prevent 18-year-olds from buying a handgun to defend themselves, but it is extremely hypocritical. The idea of sending an 18-year-old off to war for a country, giving him or her a gun to defend themselves in battle but refusing to allow that same person to defend themselves at home is sheer nonsense.

  What’s more, that same 18-year-old can vote on laws which affect the second amendment but cannot practice that right at all.

  Not everyone agrees, however, and the dissenting judge thinks that the right to self defense is the sole doing of the gun lobby.

  “The majority’s decision to grant the gun lobby a victory in a fight it lost on Capitol Hill more than fifty years ago is not compelled by law. Nor is it consistent with the proper role of the federal judiciary in our democratic system,” Judge James A. Wynn Jr. Courts wrote.

  According to the Washington Post, Wynn rejected as “simply surreal” concerns about relegating the Second Amendment to second-class status.

  “No, the Second Amendment is exceptional not because it is uniquely oppressed or imperiled, but rather because it is singularly capable of causing harm,” wrote Wynn.

  Wynn is backed by gun control advocates who point out that 18-to-20-year-olds commit gun homicides at a rate four times higher than adults 21 and older do. It is rather irresponsible, however, that they would use these statistics to advocate gun control given that 18-to-20-year-olds cannot legally buy a handgun — therefore proving that the law doesn’t work.

  Like all gun control measures, laws that prevent 18-to-20-year-olds from buying guns only stop law abiding citizens from defending themselves and do nothing to prevent criminals from obtaining weapons.

  This is a fact that the court pointed out as well, noting that allowing law abiding 18-to-20-year-olds to purchase guns in a legal market will enhance public safety.

  Attorney Elliott Harding, who represented the plaintiffs in case pointed out that the ruling bolsters safety by allowing young people to purchase handguns in a more regulated market with background checks.

  While this is a win for gun rights, it is likely only temporary as the DOJ has already promised to knock it down.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 19:40

• Natural Infection May Offer Better Protection Against Delta Variant, Israeli Health Ministry Says
  Natural Infection May Offer Better Protection Against Delta Variant, Israeli Health Ministry Says

  In recent weeks, Israeli media has become a factory for stories that cut against the ‘official’ ‘scientific’ narrative about the COVID-19 vaccines. Most visibly, Israel has made a deal with Pfizer to start doling out “booster” shots for the most vulnerable Israelis, despite the FDA’s insistence that there’s “no evidence” that a booster shot is necessary.

  

  Now, the Israeli Health Ministry has discovered that the number of patients who had been infected prior to becoming infected again during the latest Delta-driven wave of the pandemic were less likely to be reinfected than patients who have only been vaccinated. The finding directly contradicts research spouted by American experts like Dr. Fauci, along with Pfizer and Moderna, who have previously insisted that  the antibodies created by their jabs are more powerful than antibodies produced by natural infection (which is one reason even the previously infected have been asked to get vaccinated).

  According to Israel National News, more than 7.7K new cases of the virus have been detected during the most recent wave (beginning back in May). However, just 72 of the confirmed cases were reported in people who were known to have been previously infected – that is, less than 1% of the new cases.

  Roughly 40% of new cases – involving more than 3K patients – were infected despite being fully vaccinated.

  By this count, Israelis who had been vaccinated were 6.72x more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with more than 3K of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave. The disparity has confounded Health Ministry experts, with some saying the data proves the higher level of immunity provided by natural infection versus vaccination. However, others remain unconvinced.

  Israel’s Health Ministry previously estimated that the efficacy of Pfizer’s COVID jab was only 64% against the Delta variant, which helped prompt Pfizer and its partner BioNTech to develop a new jab designed to protect against variants including Delta and Beta (the variant first discovered in South Africa).

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 19:20

• Georgia County Ballot Images Prompt Speculation Of "Provable Fraud"
  Georgia County Ballot Images Prompt Speculation Of “Provable Fraud”

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  A group seeking to ensure that elections are run fairly said this week that an in-depth analysis of mail-in ballot images it obtained through a court order shows that the hand-count audit in Fulton County, Georgia, last year “was riddled with massive errors and provable fraud.”

  

  The analysis turned up at least 36 batches of mail-in ballots, containing 4,255 votes, that were added redundantly to the audit results, Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia (VoterGA), charged. Nearly 3,400 were for Democrat Joe Biden.

  The team examining the ballots also found seven audit tally sheets (pdf) they believe were falsified to contain fabricated vote totals. In one example, the group said, a batch containing 59 ballot images for Biden and 42 for former President Donald Trump was reported as 100 for Biden and 0 for Trump.

  The analysis revealed that 923 (60 percent) of the 1,539 mail-in ballot batch files contained votes that were incorrectly reported in the county’s official 2020 election result compared to the audit totals, according to VoterGA.

  “We believe that there is massive audit errors,” Garland Favorito, founder of the group, told a press conference in Georgia on July 13.

  The group received the images as part of a court case after it petitioned in late 2020 to get clearance to inspect all mail-in ballots cast in the county in the 2020 election, alleging that fraud took place. The petition cited witnesses to the alleged fraud, including Favorito and other poll watchers and workers.

  Henry County Judge Brian Amero, who is overseeing the case, ordered in March that scanned ballot images be made available to the petitioners. Amero late last month let part of the election lawsuit proceed.

  Asked about the new claims, a Fulton County spokeswoman told The Epoch Times via email:

  “This is related to a matter that is the subject of pending litigation. Therefore we do not wish to respond.”

  A spokesman for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, referred comment to Fulton County.

  Favorito said elected officials have known about the discrepancies “for a long, long time,” and he accused them of having “covered it up.”

  Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), who is challenging Raffensperger in the Republican secretary of state primary, in a video called on him to resign.

  “In Fulton County, there is now undeniable proof of voter irregularity if not outright voter fraud,” he said, pointing to the evidence presented by VoterGA.

  Raffensperger has claimed that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election, which saw Biden beat Trump in Georgia by less than 12,000 votes out of over 4.9 million cast.

  Trump said in a statement on July 14:

  “The news coming out of Georgia is beyond incredible. The hand recount in Fulton County was a total fraud! They stuffed the ballot box—and got caught. We will lose our Country if this is allowed to stand.”

  Biden, in remarks delivered on July 13, noted that election results were recounted three times in Georgia.

  “It’s clear. For those who challenge the results and question the integrity of the election: No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny and such high standards,” he said.

  And here is Tucker tonight

  It’s starting to make sense…

  pic.twitter.com/0jKydkGubf

  — Cernovich (@Cernovich) July 15, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 19:00

• Democrats Unveil Bill To Decriminalize (And Tax) Marijuana
  Democrats Unveil Bill To Decriminalize (And Tax) Marijuana

  Sen. Chuck Schumer is taking a quick break from whipping up support along his moderate flank for the Dems’ $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” package to draft legislation on Wednesday to help decriminalize marijuana at the federal level in an attempt to raise more tax revenue to offset the trillions of dollars of additional spending the Democrats are planning over the next decade.

  While the revenues raised from taxing marijuana likely would only amount to a drop in the bucket, Schumer, Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Ron Wyden have unveiled draft legislation calling for federal decriminalization.

  

  Marijuana is already effectively legal now across much of the US after New Jersey, Connecticut, New York and a handful of other states recently embraced legalization.

  The bill, called the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act, would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act (where it remains a “Schedule 1” and impose a federal tax on marijuana products).

  According to Axios, revenue from marijuana taxes would be used to fund “grant programs for communities most impacted by marijuana prosecutions”. It would also transfer regulation of marijuana to the FDA from the DEA. The bill still faces “steep” odds in the Senate, where moderate Dems remain wary of ending federal prohibition.

  States would mostly be allowed to set their own laws and taxes regarding cannabis sale and consumption. It would also require federal districts to expunge all nonviolent marijuana-related arrests and convictions within one year.

  Speaking from the Senate Floor Wednesday, Schumer declared the legislation a major step forward.

  “For decades, young men and women – disproportionately young Black and Hispanic men and women, have been arrested and jailed for even carrying a small amount of marijuana in their pocket.”

  “This is monumental,” he added. “At long last, we are taking steps in the Senate to right the wrongs of the failed war on drugs.”

  At one point, the bill’s backers said that the higher prices created by taxes would “disincentivize” young people from buying the increasingly potent marijuana available both at legal dispensaries and on the street. As for trying to construe legalizing (and price-inflating) marijuana as a kind of deterrent against abuse by teenagers, well…we imagine readers can reason through that on their own.

  The timing of the announcement isn’t much of a surprise. Earlier this week, the CEO and chairman of Tilray, a major publicly traded pot stock, said during an interview with CNBC that he expected Congress to move ahead with full legalization within the next two years. He pointed to surveys purporting to show more than 90%+ public support for marijuana.

  And as the Democrats have demonstrated with their spending ambitions, they need to raise revenue from wherever they can get it.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 18:40

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• Where Poverty Risk Is Rising Fastest In Europe
  Where Poverty Risk Is Rising Fastest In Europe

  New initial estimates by Eurostat have revealed the potential effect the pandemic year 2020 had on the most economically at-risk in the European Union.

  

  The losses in employment income were largely due to the unprecedented rise in the number of workers absent from work or working reduced hours. However, the usual government transfers and taxes as well as temporary policies helped to offset the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on disposable household income.

  As Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below, increases in working age adults at-risk-of-poverty were measured in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria, Greece, Bulgaria and Sweden.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Elsewhere, the situation remained more or less static, while Estonia record a decrease.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 02:45

• US Deploys F-16s To Bulgaria For Yet Another Black Sea Exercise
  US Deploys F-16s To Bulgaria For Yet Another Black Sea Exercise

  Authored by Rick Rozoff via AntiWar.com,

  Eight US F-16 multirole combat aircraft arrived at the Graf Ignatievo Air Base in Bulgaria on July 9 for this year’s iteration of the Thracian Star military exercise. The joint American-Bulgarian air force exercise is being conducted to, according to US Air Forces in Europe and Air Force Africa, “enhance the ability to rapidly deploy to remote locations and provide credible force to assure stability for the region.”

  The region is the Black Sea, where what the US and NATO consider “temporarily-occupied territory,” Crimea, and the Russian Black Sea Fleet are located. Not far beyond are the South Caucasus, the Donbass and the Middle East (for example, Syria and Iran).

  

  The F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft arrived from the Aviano Air Base, Italy, which was employed for NATO’s bombing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo, and airmen from the 435th Combat Training Squadron and the 4th Combat Training Squadron deployed from Ramstein, Germany where both US Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa and NATO Allied Air Command have their headquarters. The latter two share a commander, as do NATO as a whole (Supreme Allied Commander Europe) and US European Command and US Naval Forces in Europe and Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO.

  As with other US-led air combat drills, Thracian Star 21 will provide the American Air Force the opportunity of engaging in mock combat encounters with Russian-designed aircraft. Bulgaria is providing Sukhoi SU-25 ground attack aircraft and Mi-24 helicopters for the purpose; in the past it has also supplied MiG-29 jet fighters, but will not do so this year because the crash of one last month which killed a Bulgarian pilot. But the host nation will provide anti-aircraft missile units. Maneuvers will occur in the air space of Bulgaria, Greece and Romania. Another description of the exercise states it will “include offensive counter air and defensive counter air, protection of high value assets, and close air support in a contested environment.”

  In the past the exercise has included as many as 32 F-16s.

  The Graf Ignatievo Air Base also hosts the regular Thracian Viper air force exercises. Last year’s version was described by its director of operations as “important because it gives us the opportunity to strengthen our relationship with Bulgaria and NATO.”

  .@PentagonPresSec: In Bulgaria, Exercise Thracian Star 21 kicked off today. pic.twitter.com/Fx3aenNPAT

  — Department of Defense 🇺🇸 (@DeptofDefense) July 12, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The current exercise follows on the heels of several other U.S. activities and actions in the region:

  • The US and 31 allies and partners completed the two-week Sea Breeze war games in the Black Sea on July 10.
  • The Pentagon led the Swift Response airborne exercise in Bulgaria and Romania (as well as Estonia) in May with over 7,000 troops from 11 nations as part of the mammoth DEFENDER Europe 21 exercises.
  • Five American warships, including four guided-missile/interceptor-missile destroyers and cruisers, have been deployed to the Black Sea this year independent of the series of U.S./NATO exercises held there.
  • In June US B52 strategic bombers flew over the Black Sea escorted by Turkish F-16s.
  • The US announced it is funding a $152-million construction project in Romania to transform the air base in Câmpia Turzii into a “new major hub for NATO aircraft in the Black Sea region.“
  • In May the U.S. participated in the Trojan Footprint special operations forces exercise in Black Sea nations Bulgaria, Georgia and Romania as well as in Montenegro and North Macedonia.

  Bulgaria and Romania were inducted into NATO at its summit in Turkey in 2004. The following year the US signed an agreement with Romania to secure the use of five military bases, including the Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base, Babadag Training Range, Cincu Training Range and Smârdan Training Range.

  Earlier this year the US announced it was going to base both surveillance and combat drones (MQ-9 Reapers) at the Romanian Air Force Base 71 at Câmpia Turzii.

  The Mihail Kogălniceanu base was used for the US’s attack against Iraq even before Romania joined NATO, and since for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. It serves as the home of NATO Enhanced Air Policing in the Black Sea region and hosts the U.S. Army Europe’s Black Sea Area Support Group.

  In 2006 the U.S. signed a complementary military agreement with Bulgaria for the deployment of American troops and equipment to the Bezmer Air Base, Graf Ignatievo Air Base, Novo Selo Range and Aitos Logistics Center in Bulgaria.

  The Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base and the Graf Ignatievo Air Base are among the most important American military bases outside the US. They have been expanded and upgraded since Washington gained access to them 15-16 years ago. They were the first military bases the Pentagon gained access to in former Warsaw Pact nations. They have not been the last.

  The Deveselu airbase in Romania, closed in 2003 but reopened by the U.S. in 2015, now contains U.S.-NATO Standard Missile-3 Block IB interceptor missiles.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 02:00

• Escobar: New 'Great Game' Gets Back To Basics
  Escobar: New ‘Great Game’ Gets Back To Basics

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

  Russia-China-Iran alliance is taking Afghanistan’s bull by the horns…

  

  The Great Game: This lithograph by British Lieutenant James Rattray shows Shah Shuja in 1839 after his enthronement as Emir of Afghanistan in the Bala Hissar (fort) of Kabul. Rattray wrote: ‘A year later the sanctity of the scene was bloodily violated: Shah Shuja was murdered.’ Photo: Wikipedia

  Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is on a Central Asian loop all through the week. He’s visiting Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The last two are full members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, founded 20 years ago.

  The SCO heavyweights are of course China and Russia. They are joined by four Central Asian “stans” (all but Turkmenistan), India and Pakistan. Crucially, Afghanistan and Iran are observers, alongside Belarus and Mongolia.

  And that leads us to what’s happening this Wednesday in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. The SCO will hold a 3 in 1: meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers, the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group, and a conference titled “Central and South Asia: Regional Connectivity, Challenges and Opportunities.”

  At the same table, then, we will have Wang Yi, his very close strategic partner Sergey Lavrov and, most importantly, Afghan Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar. They’ll be debating trials and tribulations after the hegemon’s withdrawal and the miserable collapse of the myth of NATO “stabilizing” Afghanistan.

  Let’s game a possible scenario: Wang Yi and Lavrov tell Atmar, in no uncertain terms, that there’s got to be a national reconciliation deal with the Taliban, brokered by Russia-China, with no American interference, including the end of the opium-heroin ratline.

  

  Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi chats with guests after the opening ceremony of the Lanting Forum in Beijing on June 25. Photo: AFP / Jade Gao

  Russia-China extract from the Taliban a firm promise that jihadism won’t be allowed to fester. The endgame: loads of productive investment, Afghanistan is incorporated to Belt and Road and – later on – to the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

  The SCO’s joint statement on Wednesday will be particularly enlightening, perhaps detailing how the organization plans to coordinate a de facto Afghan peace process farther down the road.

  In this scenario, the SCO now has the chance to implement what it has been actively discussing for years: that only an Asian solution to the Afghan drama applies.

  Sun Zhuangzhi, executive director of the Chinese Research Center of the SCO, sums it all up: the organization is capable of coming up with a plan mixing political stability, economic and security development and a road map for infrastructure development projects.

  The Taliban agree. Spokesman Suhail Shaheen has stressed, “China is a friendly country that we welcome for reconstruction and developing Afghanistan.”

  On the Silk Road again

  After economic connectivity, another SCO motto encouraged by Beijing since the early 2000s is the necessity to fight the “three evils”: terrorism, separatism and extremism. All SCO members are very much aware of jihadi metastases threatening Central Asia – from ISIS-Khorasan to shady Uighur factions currently fighting in Idlib in Syria, as well as the (fading) Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).

  The Taliban is a way more complex case. It’s still branded as a terrorist organization by Moscow. Yet on the new, fast-evolving chessboard, both Moscow and Beijing know the importance of engaging the Taliban in high-stakes diplomacy.

  

  Taliban fighters have taken large swathes of Afghanistan in the past two weeks. Photo: AFP / Aref Karimi

  Wang Yi has already impressed upon Islamabad – Pakistan is a SCO member – the need to set up a trilateral mechanism, with Beijing and Kabul, to advance a feasible political solution to Afghanistan while managing the security front.

  Here, from China’s point of view, it’s all about the multi-layered China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), to which Beijing plans to incorporate Kabul. Here is a detailed CPEC progress update.

  Building blocks include the deal struck between China Telecom and Afghan Telecom already in 2017 to build a Kashgar-Faizabad fiber optic cable system and then expand it toward a China-Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan-Afghanistan Silk Road system.

  Directly connected is the deal signed in February among Islamabad, Kabul and Tashkent to build a railway that in fact may establish Afghanistan as a key crossroads between Central and South Asia. Call it the SCO corridor.

  All of the above was solidified by a crucial trilateral meeting last month among China-Pakistan-Afghanistan Foreign Ministers. Team Ghani in Kabul renewed its interest in being connected to Belt and Road – which translates in practice into an expanded CPEC. The Taliban said exactly the same thing last week.

  Wang Yi knows very well that jihadism is bound to target CPEC. Not Afghanistan’s Taliban, though. And not the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), as quite a few CPEC projects (fiber optics, for instance) will improve infrastructure in Peshawar and environs.

  Afghanistan in trade connectivity with CPEC and a key node of the New Silk Roads could not make more sense – even historically, as Afghanistan was always embedded in the ancient Silk Roads. Crossroads Afghanistan is the missing link in the connectivity equation between China and Central Asia. The devil, of course, will be in the details.

  The Iranian equation

  Then, to the West, there’s the Iranian equation. The recently solidified Iran-China strategic partnership may eventually lead to closer integration, with CPEC expanded to Afghanistan. The Taliban are keenly aware of it. As part of their current diplomatic offensive, they have been to Tehran and made all the right noises towards a political solution.

  Their joint statement with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif privileges negotiations with Kabul. The Taliban commit to refrain from attacking civilians, schools, mosques, hospitals and NGOs.

  Tehran – an observer at the SCO and on the way to becoming a full member – is actively talking to all Afghan actors. No fewer than four delegations were visiting last week. The head of Kabul’s team was former Afghan Vice President Yunus Qanooni (a former warlord, as well), while the Taliban were led by Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, who commands their political office in Doha. This all implies serious business.

  There are already 780,000 registered Afghan refugees in Iran, living in refugee villages along the border and not allowed to settle in major cities. But there are also at least 2.5 million illegals. No wonder Tehran needs to pay attention. Zarif once again is in total synch with Lavrov – and with Wang Yi, for that matter: a non-stop war of attrition between the Kabul government and the Taliban could lead only to “unfavorable” consequences.

  The question, for Tehran, revolves around the ideal framework for negotiations. That would point to the SCO. After all, Iran has not participated in the snail-paced Doha mechanism for over two years now.

  

  Aerial view of Mashhad. Photo: Wikipedia

  A debate is raging in Tehran on how to deal practically with the new Afghan equation. As I saw for myself in Mashhad less than three years ago, migration from Afghanistan – this time from skilled workers fleeing the Taliban advance – may actually help the Iranian economy.

  The director general of the West Asia desk at Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Rasoul Mousavi, goes straight to the point: 

  “The Taliban yield” to the Afghan people. “They are not separated from Afghanistan’s traditional society, and they have always been part of it. Moreover, they have military power.”

  On the ground in western Afghanistan, in Herat – linked by a very busy highway corridor across the border to Mashhad – things are more complicated. The Taliban now control most of Herat province, apart from two districts.

  Legendary local warlord Ismail Khan, now in his mid-70s, and carrying an overloaded history of fighting the Taliban, has deployed militias to guard the city, the airport and its outskirts.

  Yet the Taliban have already vowed, in diplomatic talks with China, Russia and Iran, that they are not planning to “invade” anyone – be it Iran or the Central Asian “stans.” Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen has been adamant that cross-border trade in different latitudes, from Islam Quilla (in Iran) to Torghundi (in Turkmenistan) and across northern Tajikistan will “remain open and functional.”

  That non-withdrawal withdrawal

  In a fast-evolving situation, the Taliban now control at least half of Afghanistan’s 400 districts and are “contesting” dozens of others. They are policing some key highways (you can’t go on the road from Kabul to Kandahar, for instance, and avoid Taliban checkpoints). They do not hold any major city, yet. At least 15 of 34 regional capitals – including strategic Mazar-i-Sharif – are encircled.

  Afghan news media, always very lively, have started to ask some tough questions. Such as: ISIS/Daesh did not exist in Iraq before the 2003 US invasion and occupation. So how come ISIS-Khorasan emerged right under NATO’s noses?

  Within the SCO, as diplomats told me, there’s ample suspicion that the US deep state agenda is to fuel the flames of imminent civil war in Afghanistan and then extend it to the Central Asian “stans,” complete with shady jihadi commandos mixed with Uighurs also destabilizing Xinjiang.

  This being the case, the non-withdrawal withdrawal – what with all those remaining 18,000 Pentagon contractors/mercenaries, plus special forces and CIA black op types – would be a cover, allowing Washington a new narrative spin: the Kabul government has invited us to fight a “terrorist” re-emergence and prevent a spiral towards civil war.

  The protracted endgame would read like win-win hybrid war for the deep state and its NATO arm.

  Well, not so fast. The Taliban have warned all the “stans” in no uncertain terms about hosting US military bases. And even Hamid Karzai is on the record: enough with American interference.

  All these scenarios will be discussed in detail this Wednesday in Dushanbe. As well as the bright part: the – now very feasible – future incorporation of Afghanistan to the New Silk Roads.

  Back to the basics: Afghanistan returns, in style, to the heart of the 21st Century New Great Game.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 07/14/2021 – 00:05

• Super Mario 64 Video Game Sells For "World Record" $1.5 Million At Auction
  Super Mario 64 Video Game Sells For “World Record” $1.5 Million At Auction

  It was only last week when auction house Heritage Auctions sold The Legend of Zelda for the old Nintendo Entertainment System for a “world record” sum of $870,000. Days later, the record has been beaten with the sale of a $1.56 million sealed copy of the video game Super Mario 64.

  

  We said: “the high demand for old-school consoles and cartridges is driving up prices, and it’s only a matter of time before a video game is sold for a million-plus.” 

  But didn’t believe the world record would be shattered in a matter of days… 

  Heritage Auctions said video game collectible firm Wata graded the Super Mario 64 cartridge at a 9.8 A++ rating, a rating that means it’s in a near-perfect state or “like new.” 

  According to the auction house, there were “fewer than five” copies in this state. Here are other Super Mario 64 cartridges with lower ratings, selling between $38,400 to $2,400. 

  

  However, Kelsey Lewin, a director at California’s Video Game History Foundation, tweeted: “despite a lack of population reports, there are many known sealed Super Mario 64 first prints”.

  It’s only a matter of time before a video game cartridge sells for more than $2 million. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 23:45

• Six Facts The Left Doesn't Want You To Know About Global Warming
  Six Facts The Left Doesn’t Want You To Know About Global Warming

  Authored by David Simon via RealClearMarkets.com,

  President Biden implores us that climate change is an “existential threat” to humanity.

  Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry preaches to us that “[t]he climate crisis as a whole is a national security threat because it is disruptive to the daily lives of human beings all over the world.” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warns us that in 2030, “the world is going to end … if we don’t address climate change.”

  

  Hold on to your wallet.

  The Left’s global warming Chicken Littles insist that the sky is falling but don’t want you to know six key facts.

  First, in his new book “Unsettled,” Obama Administration Department of Energy chief scientist Steven Koonin shows that the models relied upon by the Left to predict future global warming are so poor that they cannot even reproduce the temperature changes in the 20th century.

  If these models cannot reproduce past temperatures already known when the models were developed, how can they possibly reliably predict temperatures decades into the future?

  Second, Koonin’s book also documents that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s own analysis indicates that any negative economic impact that global warming eventually may have will be so modest that it warrants no action.

  Third, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the UN IPPC do not claim that a link has been established between global warming and natural disasters.

  In 2020, the NOAA stated: “it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity,” and “changes in tropical cyclone activity … are not yet detectable.”

  The UN IPPC, the Wall Street Journal reported, “says that it too lacks evidence to show that warming is making storms and flooding worse.”

  Fourth, as the earth’s temperature has risen, natural disasters have become far less deadly.

  Since 1920, the planet’s temperature has risen by 1.29 degrees Celsius and world population has quadrupled from less than two billion to over seven and half billion – yet EM-DAT, The International Disaster Database, reports that the number of people killed by natural disasters has declined by over 80 percent, from almost 55,000 per year to less than 10,000 per year.

  Fifth, some of the world’s best scientists believe that global warming will be beneficial rather than harmful.

  In 2017, a group of eminent scientists – such as Richard Lindzen of MIT, William Happer of Princeton, and Judith Curry of Georgia Tech – wrote that “[o]bservations [over the last] 25 years … show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign.”

  Carbon dioxide, they noted, “is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on Earth.”

  Sixth, global warming saves lives. A study published in 2015 by the British medical journal The Lancet found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat.

  This study by 22 scientists from around the world – which examined over 74 million deaths in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1985-2012, “the largest dataset ever collected to assess temperature-health associations”– reported that cold caused 7.29 percent of these deaths, while heat caused only 0.42 percent.

  And small changes in the temperature matter: “moderately hot and cold temperatures” caused 88.85 percent of the temperature-related deaths, while “extreme” temperatures caused only 11.15 percent.

  We must not let the Left bully us into draconian action with unfounded claims of a looming climate catastrophe. Know the facts. Global warming is not a problem.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 23:25

• Democrats Strike Deal On $3.5 Trillion "Human Infrastructure" Package
  Democrats Strike Deal On $3.5 Trillion “Human Infrastructure” Package

  Months after the Biden Administration and its Congressional allies leaked the first details of President Biden’s massive two-part “Build Back Better” infrastructure plan, Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, just announced that Democrats have united behind a $3.5 trillion “infrastructure” spending package, which they can now pass using special budget rules allowing them to circumvent the filibuster.

  

  In a late-night announcement Tuesday, Schumer said the Budget Committee had reached an agreement to allot $3.5 trillion for a spending package that would complete President Biden’s infrastructure plan.

  “The Budget Committee has come to an agreement,” Sen. Schumer told reporters Tuesday night following a closed-door meeting with Democratic lawmakers.

  The deal adds to the $600 billion package of infrastructure measures that Biden has struck with Republicans.

  “You add that to that the $600 billion in a bipartisan plan and you get to $4.1 trillion, which is very, very close to what President Biden has asked us for,” Schumer said. “Every major program that President Biden has asked us for is funded in a robust way.”

  The package will include such “infrastructure” priorities like expanding Medicare, addressing climate change, expanding childcare (after the administration just approved a new $300 handout for couples with children)  and education. The Democrats have famously deemed all this “human infrastructure”, which Republicans have vowed to reject.

  Democrats will meet with Biden Wednesday, the majority leader said following the closed-door meeting.

  “We are very proud of this plan. We know we have a long road to go. We’re going to get this done for the sake of making average Americans’ lives a whole lot better,” Schumer said

  Previously, Schumer has promised to hold votes on both pieces of legislation before the Senate breaks for its August recess, which amounts to a pretty aggressive timeline, especially since some Republicans might rethink their support for the earlier measure now that Democrats are pushing ahead with the bigger multi-trillion-dollar package.

  To be clear, the bipartisan deal struck by Biden authorizes a total of $1.2 trillion in spending over eight years. Meanwhile, the budget resolution necessary to pass the Democratic-only bill will require some more maneuvering.
   
  Senate Democrats want to bring the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the floor as soon as next week, though negotiators have warned that is an ambitious pace. Democrats didn’t say on Tuesday night when specifically they would be ready to take the budget resolution to the floor. To pass both the budget resolution and a subsequent $3 to $5-trillion infrastructure bill through the Senate Democrats will need total unity from all 50 of their members. Democrats declined to say on Tuesday night if they had unified support.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 23:03

• Cry-Babies In Search Of Meaning
  Cry-Babies In Search Of Meaning

  Via GEFIRA,

  It used to be the family, but nowadays young people delay having a family or do not want to have one at all.

  It used to be the struggle for mere survival, but nowadays the affluent state takes good care of anybody, so you do not need to work at all.

  It used to be patriotism, but – again – the word has been tarnished and replaced with the negatively charged nationalism.

  It used to be the strong sense of identity, but then European identities are frowned upon to say the least and European people are made to feel guilty and ashamed of themselves.

  It used to be the care about religious salvation, hence a preoccupation with a virtuous life, but Christianity has died out.

  For all the vacuum that has been created, man needs a purpose, man needs meaning.

  This purpose, this meaning has been duly suggested to the young, and these are:

  [1] environment protection – climate change – sustainable development;

  [2] veneration of non-Europeans – migrations – anti-racism, and

  [3] gender mainstreaming.

  Yes, these goals have been whispered into the ears of the impressionable minds, then reinforced and eventually imposed by the three powerful tools that shape the human mind: education, media and entertainment.

  

  Why do we say that these goals are by no means spontaneous but have been suggested?

  Simply, because they are all recognized, endorsed and backed by governments, mainstream media and main organizations. On the other hand, the things that have disappeared – patriotism, religious salvation, the family – are glossed over, critiqued, ridiculed or banned as topics of acceptable conversation.

  Make a thought experiment like this one: students cut classes and instead join street demonstrations in support of environment protection (Fridays For Future). Do you think the students will be expelled from school? Perhaps they will be disciplined otherwise? No, you don’t think so.

  Now picture to yourself the same students cutting school for the purpose of joining a demonstration against the ever rising numbers of immigrants. The school authorities would be very quick to act. You know they would. The students would be denounced as insensitive, xenophobic racists and what not. How about media coverage? Well, those protesting against environment pollution would receive warm attention. The few comments pointing to the controversies of such actions would only serve the purpose of making the reader, listener or viewer believe that the protesters are evaluated objectively. How about those who would dare to express their indignation at the changing ethnic composition of the society they live in? Do you think they would be spared any harsh criticism? 

  

  fridaysforfuture.org

  The three pillars of today’s white man’s civilization – environment protection, veneration of non-Europeans, and gender mainstreaming – fit the definition of a religion. Reason need not apply. The more things become topsy-turvy, the more they are “rationalized” by university authorities and… protected by law. Dissenting opinion is labelled as hate speech, fake news or conspiracy theories, so now young, impressionable minds are on the hunt for haters, climate change deniers and rednecks. They have the religious fervour of their forefathers. They have something to believe in, they have someone to fight against, they have their set of virtues tro be practised and their list of sins to be avoided. Young impressionable minds, to repeat the epithet, will not devote themselves to engineering, the sciences or economy. These are too demanding, too rational, with no use for fancy language offered by gender studies, race critical theory or sustainable economy. These leave no room for nonsense language of equality or equity, for “building bridges” and tearing “down walls”. These branches of knowledge teaches us that the world is founded on conflict, inequality, on the complementing feelings of likes and dislikes, of love and hate with many shades of the two in between. A world without conflict is unthinkable but try telling it to all those snivelling young women and sissy men who have lost contact with reality and live in the substituted world that is impressed on their minds through the triad of the media, education and entertainment.

  Communists in the Soviet Union and later in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba also came up with new dogmas for young people to follow. Equality or equity – whichever term you prefer – were also among them. Nothing new under the sun. One of the dogmas of the communist bosses was to deprive the peasantry of their plots of land by forcing them to unite in agricultural production communities. No need to say that peasants resisted the idea very strongly. In response, the communists would brainwash young people and then send them to particular villages where their task was to agitate among the dwellers for the idea of giving up on their property. Of course, all this was done in the name of the future happiness of the whole nation and then humankind. Those who resisted were classified as enemies of the people and their lives were made miserable. Not infrequently schools managed to turn children’s minds against the world view of their parents. Young sons and daughters would preach to their fathers and mothers about the advantages of the new socialist economy. Does that not evoke the picture of Greta Thunberg?

  Socialist economy failed on all counts. Individuals who saw that coming right from the start were denounced as wicked or evil as are the individuals who dare to dissent from the three dogmas listed above. They, too, see what is coming. Not that they are exceptionally brilliant minds. All they do is use common sense coupled with but a cursory knowledge of the past and reality.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 22:45

• China's Banned Bitcoin Miners Flee In Search Of Cheap Electricity
  China’s Banned Bitcoin Miners Flee In Search Of Cheap Electricity

  After the Chinese government banned cryptocurrency mining in last month, hundreds of fellow miners gathered in a luxury hotel in Western China to discuss their next steps; specifically – where to find abundant, reliable, and cheap electricity to power their sprawling operations, according to Bloomberg.

  The miners sat in rows of white chairs in a hall at the Gran Melia Chengdu Hotel and listened intently to the executives at Bitmain Technologies Ltd., the world’s largest mining-equipment maker. In between presentations about Texas energy fundamentals and crypto mining in Kazakhstan, the attendees nibbled cupcakes, drank cocktails and discussed the dismal outlook for their local industry.

  Many of the miners at the meeting had massive operations set up in rural areas of the country – such as the Hengduan mountains of Sichuan province, where giant warehouses packed full of mining equipment were powered by cheap electricity, often supplied via hydropower from nearby dams or from thermal plants associated with the country’s ubiquitous coal-powered plants. According to Tyler Page, CEO of Cipher Mining Technologies, electricity makes up around 80% of a miner’s operating cost.

  

  And now, Chinese mining operations have run ‘dry’ – dragging the already-plummeting global Bitcoin hashrate to new lows.

  

  As The Economist notes: “across Sichuan, the fans have stopped whirring. In May, a government committee tasked with promoting financial stability vowed to put a stop to bitcoin mining. Within weeks the authorities in four main mining regions—Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, Xinjiang and Yunnan—ordered the closure of local projects. Residents of Inner Mongolia were urged to call a hotline to report anyone flouting the ban. In parts of Sichuan, miners were ordered to clear out computers and demolish buildings housing them overnight. Power suppliers pulled the plug on most of them.”

  Where to go?

  At the gathering of miners  – put on by Bitmain Technologies, the world’s largest mining-equipment manufacturer, employees offered to serve as matchmakers – “hooking miners up with data centers in the U.S., Central Asia, and Europe, according to the report. They also cautioned that a headlong rush into new markets would undoubtedly lead to higher costs for all of them.

  “Hold Together for Warmth, Say No to Vicious Competition,” read one slide at the event.

  Just hours after the conference, the urgency of the situation came into full view. Alex, a Chinese miner who didn’t want his last name published for fear of government retribution, was out singing karaoke with some of his fellow miners when he called to check in on his machines in the mountains outside Chengdu. His colleague told him that local authorities had just shut off the power to his facility, leaving the mine silent and potentially worthless.

  “All my money is gone,”: he said, cursing as he chugged a beer. “Every day I’m losing money by not running those machines.” -Bloomberg

  One top destination for miners has been nearby Kazakhstan – which has over 22 gigawatts of electric power capacity, primarily derived from coal and gas-fired plants. It’s also right over the border from the Xinjiang region – which once accounted for more than one-third of the world’s bitcoin mining. Electricity costs roughly 3 cents per kilowatt-hour in the former Soviet nation, according to Dmitriy Ivanov, sales director at Almaty-based Enegix LLC. The country is also sufficiently cold enough that the data centers don’t require supplemental air conditioners to keep them from overheating  – which can add as much as 30% to a miner’s power needs.

  Approximately 10,000 mining machines – a combination of Bitmain’s S19Pro and Whatsminer M21S models from China’s MicroBT, are being sent to Kazakhstan via plane from Enegix’s clients. While transporting them via land would be cheaper, trucks can get held up for weeks at the border, making the extra expense for air freight worth the time savings.

  “So many Chinese are reaching out to us and asking for help to relocate the equipment,” said hosting company CEO Didar Bekbauov. “They ask every Kazakh they know to help them with electricity.”

  Power in Kazakhstan is already booked up, however, as the country’s electric grid is near capacity – only having added 3 gigawatts in the last 20 years, leaving little room for miners to connect. Bekbauov says he’s had to turn customers away.

  “Every spare kilowatt is already booked,” he said.

  Going green?

  According to the report, some of the booted Chinese miners are using the opportunity to explore cleaner energy, despite the fact that the vast majority of the world’s electricity comes from burning fossil fuels – leading Tesla’s Elon Musk to suspend payments in bitcoin until the industry can clean up its carbon footprint (while Teslas themselves remain largely coal powered, of course).

  While a reported 76% of miners already use renewable energy, 39% of overall energy used for crypto mining is renewable.

  Spoke with North American Bitcoin miners. They committed to publish current & planned renewable usage & to ask miners WW to do so. Potentially promising.

  — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Crypto miners are coming up against a much bigger drive to decarbonize power to combat climate change. The percentage of energy from renewable sources would need to increase to about two thirds of supply by 2050, up from around 12% in 2020, to keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, according to the International Energy Agency. Countries around the world, including China, the U.S. and the EU will have to ramp up construction of wind farms and solar parks to come close to hitting their targets.

  Renewable energy sources like wind and sunshine may be abundant at times, but demand for them is set to surge as cars, home heating and heavy industries increasingly shift to electricity. The Nordic region, which has long been a popular Bitcoin mining spot because of its ample hydropower, began running out of excess electricity earlier this year as industrial users ramped up production. “There’s a more noble use of renewable power than Bitcoin mining,” said Peter Wall, chief executive officer of London-listed mining company Argo Blockchain Plc. “But the fact is people are going to mine Bitcoin full stop. It’s not going away.”

  Miners also want confidence they won’t wake up one morning to news that their business has been outlawed again. Bit Digital Inc., a Nasdaq-listed mining company, began moving some of the 30,000 machines it operated in China to North America back in October. By the time Beijing cracked down, Bit Digital was able to keep mining with as little disruption as possible. -Bloomberg

  Meanwhile, some miners looking to set up shop in the United States are having to navigate regulatory differences between grids. For example, Cipher Mining Technologies – the US arm of Netherlands-based Bitfury Holding BV, is working to expand in Texas due to it being the only state with a deregulated power grid, as well as Ohio -0 due to the state’s cheap power prices and low-carbon power sources.

  New York, on the other hand – where lawmakers had previously proposed harsh limitations on mining, is far less attractive. 

  Other locations for miners include: Kearny, Nebraska and El Salvador – which announced last month that it would be the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, while the state-run geothermal electric company has been ordered to come up with a plan for volcano-powered Bitcoin mining. Late last month, one Chinese logistics firm has been airlifting mining equipment to Baltimore, Maryland.

  “Every conversation we have starts with the the site’s potential power source,” according to BitOoda’s Chief Strategy Officer, Sam Doctor. “They’re looking for renewables. That’s a really important step in the greening of Bitcoin.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 22:25

• Jamaican Government Wants Billions In Reparations From UK Over Slavery
  Jamaican Government Wants Billions In Reparations From UK Over Slavery

  The Jamaican government is set to demand billions of pounds in reparations over the slave trade, and will send a petition directly to the Queen from the country’s attorney general in order to initiate the request, according to Reuters.

  

  The UK formerly abolished slavery in 1834, after which former slave owners were paid 20 million pounds – a large sum at the time. Jamaica’s petition is based on a private motion from Jamaican lawmaker Mike Henry, who says the country is owed some 7.6 billion pounds (US$10.5 billion), which he calculated to be roughly equivalent to the payout UK slave owners received nearly 200 years ago.

  “We are hoping for reparatory justice in all forms that one would expect if they are to really ensure that we get justice from injustices to repair the damages that our ancestors experienced,” said Culture minister Olivia Grange, adding “Our African ancestors were forcibly removed from their home and suffered unparalleled atrocities in Africa to carry out forced labour to the benefit of the British Empire.”

  “Redress is well overdue,” she added.

  Jamaica was a centre of the slave trade, with the Spanish, then the British, forcibly transporting Africans to work on plantations of sugar cane, bananas and other crops that created fortunes for many of their owners.

  …

  An estimated 600,000 Africans were shipped to toil in Jamaica, according to the National Library of Jamaica.

  Seized from Spain by the English in 1655, Jamaica was a British colony until it became independent in 1962. The West Indian country of almost three million people is part of the Commonwealth and the British monarch remains head of state. –Reuters

  “I am asking for the same amount of money to be paid to the slaves that was paid to the slave owners,” said Henry, the petitioner and a member of the ruling Jamaica Labor Party, adding “I am doing this because I have fought against this all my life, against chattel slavery which has dehumanized human life.”

  The petition, with approval from Jamaica’s National Council on Reparations, will be filed pending advice from the attorney general and three legal teams, Grange said. The attorney general will then send it to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, she added.

  The initiative follows growing acknowledgement in some quarters of the role played by slavery in generating wealth in Britain, with businesses and seats of learning pledging financial contributions in compensation.

  They include insurance market Lloyd’s of London, pub owner Greene King and the University of Glasgow.

  No word on whether Jamaica will hit Kamala Harris up for reparations after her father acknowledged that their family owned slaves.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 22:05

• 67 Wildfires Spread Across 10 States In US West 
  67 Wildfires Spread Across 10 States In US West 

  The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reports 67 large wildfires burn across ten parched Western states on Tuesday, and the largest is in southern Oregon, already threatened to cut power to California. 

  Nearly 918,000 acres have burned in 67 large fires across the United States. New large fires were reported in Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, and Oregon. Type 1 and Type 2 Incident Management Teams are assigned to 24 large fires or complexes. And, more than 14,200 wildland firefighters and support personnel are assigned to incidents. 

  As record temperatures continue across many states, it’s important to remember that we all play a valuable role in wildfire prevention. –NIFC

  The fires erupted as much of the Western half of the US is plagued with a megadrought and back-to-back heat waves. This has created the perfect storm of conditions that are fueling dangerous fires. 

  The largest fire is the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon. As of Tuesday 1200 ET, the fire has burned 202,000 acres and threaten major transmission lines that feed power into northern California.

  California and other surrounding states are plagued with a megadrought, continuing heat waves, water shortages, fears of rolling blackouts, and a fire season that could be one for the record books. 

  The current US wildfire map shows dozens of fires spreading across Western states. 

  

  Twitter account “HRRR Smoke Bot” shows near-surface smoke encompassing the West. 

  Start: Jul 12 4AM PDT
  End: Jul 12 11PM PDT pic.twitter.com/hvncWkNu1z

  — HRRR Smoke Bot (@HRRRSmokeBot) July 12, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  With no relief in sight, the number of wildfires across the West will likely continue to increase. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 21:45

• China Mega Investment Deal With Iran Blows US Out Of The Picture
  China Mega Investment Deal With Iran Blows US Out Of The Picture

  Authored by Martin Jay via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

  A new world in the East is amalgamating as a direct result of American’s delusional views about where it thinks it is in the world…

  

  China has just announced that it will invest 400 bn dollars in Iran over a period of 25 years in exchange for a great deal on Iran’s oil – in the latest move of absolute defiance against the U.S. and its secondary sanctions. Where’s this all heading?

  400 bn dollars is a considerable amount of money to invest in Iran, which, since Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA (otherwise called the ‘Iran Deal’) we can certainly say is a poor country. In exchange, China gets rock bottom prices on oil, while both sides enjoy the double-whammy of sending a vociferous message to Washington: your days are up as a super power who can bully countries with sanctions.

  The deal was really the last thing that Joe Biden needed in barely his six month in office, where he has been weak on Russia and China and arguably pathetic in the Middle East when it comes to delivering on the ‘America is back’ rhetoric. ‘America is back’ to what, we might all wonder, given that Iran is commissioning drone strikes against U.S. forces, Afghanistan is rapidly heading towards a Taliban takeover and the Iran talks in Vienna have more or less ended with a draft of what the Guardian euphemistically calls a ‘roadmap’.

  China’s investment deal with Iran sends a stark, lucid message to Joe Biden that it intends to take advantage of America’s lame ‘soft diplomacy’ geopolitics and move in with real policies, which in practical terms means investment. With GCC countries squabbling amongst themselves about oil productivity, during a six-year high on the price per barrel and an Iran deal more unlikely than ever taking shape, the region more confused than ever about how much of a two-way street America’s hegemony is in the region, the Middle East is tilting ever so slightly towards the East. It’s not just that Assad became the new friend with GCC leaders because he masterly used the Russians as a guarantor of staying in power which is driving Gulf Arab elites to look towards China as a potential new partner, but Arabs put so much more trust in China as a longer-term partner which they can rely on. Stability.

  One of the reasons why a new re-worked Iran Deal is so unlikely to happen is for the same reason. How long could Washington even guarantee a sanctions-free deal? One term of Joe Biden?

  Middle East leaders, as well as those in the MEMA region like Egypt are looking for a solution to an impending Arab Spring 2.0 and they don’t see any point in investing in Biden for help there, which is why they are getting closer to Assad and hedging their bets that when the brown stuff hits the fan, Russia (and perhaps even China) could be behind them to keep them in power.

  For such an arrangement to happen, you have to have deals which go beyond simply rockets and guns – that is assuming that the Biden administration will eventually let a 23 bn dollar deal for F35s to even go through to the UAE, with obvious fears that technology could be shared with the Chinese if Bejiing makes the moves in the region to buddy up with GCC countries.

  But this massive deal with Iran sends a message to Gulf Arab states which Washington might note. The message is that the Chinese are long-term players who are looking for long-term partners and many GCC countries’ elites will look at the deal and wonder why they are not looking at China for more partnerships in construction, energy, telecoms and even defence.

  The news of the China-Iran deal came more or less with the announcement to the UAE blocking an OPEC idea to boost oil production. It gave many western media hacks the opportunity to go big on the UAE-Saudi “rift” angle to their stories. In reality though, these two GCC super states have not been on the same page for quite some time and the lack of a Big Brother (i.e. Uncle Sam) has not helped. In reality, they disagree on Iran, Qatar and even Yemen, so a war of words about 2 million barrels of oil a day is hardly anything to get hot and bothered by.

  But the China deal with Iran should shake them up and make them realise that there is disarray in the Middle East which can’t be blamed entirely on the U.S. taking a step back and playing geopolitics by numbers. Biden’s understanding of the region and its nuances is often overplayed by hacks, simply because he was on a committee in Washington for years which covered the region and he was VP under Obama. He is remarkably ignorant of what it really important and is not at all able to understand the sensibilities of its leaders. For this, we can understand why he falls into traps easily set by Iran (which in reality sees a sanctions-free deal with the U.S. as hardly worth the effort), whose leaders are looking to other Big Brother models to embrace. The China deal shows the region and Washington that the U.S. is no longer the superpower who can expect so much leverage from so little action. The world is changing and the Trump move in 2018 to remove the U.S. from the Iran deal merely enhanced and emboldened a new world in the East which is amalgamating as a direct result of American’s delusional views about where it thinks it is in the world. With Iran selling so-called “illegal” oil already to China (and probably to India at the end of the year), the secondary sanctions which Trump imposed will no longer be worth the paper they’re written on. Invest in Iran.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 21:25

• Afghan Special Forces Frustrated By Taliban Deadly Hit & Run, Ambush Tactics
  Afghan Special Forces Frustrated By Taliban Deadly Hit & Run, Ambush Tactics

  By many accounts from international correspondents on the ground in Afghanistan, Taliban militants are continuing to make rapid gains – particularly through unpredictable hit-and-run tactics – also in places that airstrikes prove difficult to deploy given fighting sometimes erupts in urban areas. 

  Especially on the outskirts of the southern province of Kandahar, a mere few hundred Taliban insurgents have kept exhausted and stretched thin US-trained Afghan commandos guessing through ambush tactics. A detailed Reuters report capturing action as it unfolded on the ground this week begins by describing: 

  The highly trained troops had been called in to flush out insurgents who attacked regular forces and local police hours earlier, only to find that the Taliban had disappeared into the darkness leaving behind a few civilians and wounded soldiers.

  “We received a report that the enemy had infiltrated here and wanted to overthrow the district,” Major Mohammad din Tasir, a member of the special forces unit deployed in the Taliban’s former stronghold of Kandahar, told Reuters after the operation. The report had suggested up to 300 Taliban fighters were present in the area, he said.

  

  The experience of heavily armed Afghan commandos showing up to an area only to find that moments earlier the Taliban presence had “melted away” has led Kabul officials to tout this as proof last week’s claim from Taliban leadership that the terror group controls 85% of the country to be greatly exaggerated and misleading. 

  This experience is being replicated across the country, suggesting the national military is in for a frustrating, possibly losing battle against a disciplined Taliban insurgency set on weakening the national forces’ resolve, also as Kabul is under pressure given Biden and other defense officials’ recent urging Afghan forces to stand up and take control of the country for themselves (ironically something the US could hardly do throughout much of the over two-decade long war and occupation). 

  A similar account published Tuesday by a war correspondent details a harrowing ambush, also in Kandahar:  

  Minutes after returning from a mission on Tuesday before dawn, a convoy of exhausted Afghan commandos were speeding back out of their base to try to extract a wounded policeman trapped by Taliban insurgents on the outskirts of Kandahar.

  As they approached the checkpoint where policeman Ahmad Shah had been holed up alone for 18 hours, some 30-40 special forces soldiers in a line of Humvees came under automatic weapons fire, according to a Reuters reporter travelling with them.

  A gun battle erupted as the convoy forced its way to Shah’s position, and he was hurriedly loaded into one of the vehicles. Then came a series of loud explosions; the first three of eight Humvees were struck by rockets and too badly damaged to continue. In the ensuing confusion, commandos inside the disabled vehicles rushed to switch trucks. Gunfire appeared to be coming from all around; from a cemetery to the left and the heavy cover of Eucalyptus trees to the right.

  The ambush reportedly resulted in no deaths among the commandos, only a police injury, yet it underscores how easily the Taliban can quickly move with ease in a number of contested provinces to quickly hit thinly stretched army units in civilian areas, and then disappear just as fast. 

  Brutal Taliban Massacre: Taliban executes 22 Afghan Commandoes after asking them to surrender in Afghanistan. This is just a glimpse of how Taliban is going to operate in the coming weeks and months. Disturbing visuals. pic.twitter.com/UBAY5VLefV

  — Aditya Raj Kaul (@AdityaRajKaul) July 13, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The episode also highlights another pressing problem: American-trained security forces (that Washington has spent billions if not trillions propping up over many years) including police and army units are abandoning their posts in droves often at the first hint of a Taliban offensive. 

  Reuters cited Shah, the wounded policeman who was pinned down, who explained: “We were 15 people (policemen), and all my comrades surrendered (to the Taliban) except me.” He added: “I told myself that I’m not going to do that, and as long as I have a gun, why I should give up?”

  ‘261 Taliban Killed’ in Past 24 Hours: MoDhttps://t.co/icgihtGN7E pic.twitter.com/ObcrHVQp4e

  — TOLOnews (@TOLOnews) July 13, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Given we’ve not even yet reached Biden’s stated “military mission complete” date of August 31, the proverbial writing is on the wall in terms of the expected Taliban offensive of Kabul, after US intelligence recently warned the collapse of the US-backed Afghan government could come as early as six months.

  However. that estimate itself is looking increasingly optimistic as the Taliban is said to still be making rapid gains.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 21:05

• Maine Bans New Wind Power Projects In State Waters
  Maine Bans New Wind Power Projects In State Waters

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  Maine’s governor has signed a bill that bars any new offshore wind projects in waters under state jurisdiction, about a week after the state legislature approved the legislation.

  

  The bill, which became effective immediately because it was introduced as an emergency measure, says that offshore wind power projects “may provide significant economic and environmental benefits to the State by generating renewable energy” but that siting them in Maine’s waters “may adversely affect resources, including scenic and aesthetic resources, and recreational and economic uses, including commercial fishing.”

  “Maine is uniquely prepared to grow a strong offshore wind industry, create good-paying trades and technology jobs around the state, and reduce our crippling dependence on harmful fossil fuels. This legislation cements in law our belief that these efforts should occur in Federal waters farther off our coast through a research array that can help us establish the best way for Maine to embrace the vast economic and environmental benefits of offshore wind,” Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, said in a statement after signing LD 1619 last week.

  The state Senate and state House both approved the measure on June 30. The measure received the required two-thirds support in each chamber.

  Democrats control both chambers in addition to the governor’s mansion, one of 15 so-called Democrat trifectas in the United States.

  Maine Sen. Mark Lawrence, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, said that the moratorium on developing wind projects in state waters “will protect Maine’s fisheries and coastal waters and maintain Maine’s status as a leader in developing clean energy and fighting climate change.”

  The legislation drew support from the Maine Renewable Energy Association, the Northeast Clean Energy Council, and Maine Audubon.

  Lobstermen who opposed development in state waters also backed the legislation.

  Another recently signed bill, LD 336, also sponsored by Lawrence, pushes the creation of the first floating offshore wind research array in the United States in the Gulf of Maine.

  The gulf is controlled by the federal government. The project has not yet been approved by federal officials.

  The array, which is slated to be built by New England Aqua Ventus, would have a capacity of up to 144 megawatts. Government officials plan to enter a contract of 20 years or more for the array. The project will produce some 160,000 jobs, including planning, construction, and operations and maintenance, the state said in its 10-year economic plan.

  Maine laws call for making the state a hub for floating offshore wind projects, with a focus on the Gulf of Maine.

  The gulf “represents one of our state’s largest untapped clean energy resources,” according to Mills’s office.

  Nearly a quarter of the electricity produced in Maine in 2019 came from wind turbines, according to the Energy Information Administration. Maine ranks sixth in the nation in the share of electricity generated from wind.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 20:45

• Japanese Government Accused Of "Strong Arm Tactics" As Tokyo Rebels Against Alcohol Ban
  Japanese Government Accused Of “Strong Arm Tactics” As Tokyo Rebels Against Alcohol Ban

  Apparently, Japan’s decision to ban people drinking in groups at restaurants and bars has finally pushed the people of Tokyo to their breaking point.

  

  Because after an association of liquor retailers complained to representatives of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party about a demand from a government bureaucrat that distributors stop working with restaurants who continued to serve booze during the pandemic, it looks like the government has abandoned that request.

  The news was broken by the English-language media outlet the Mainichi:

  The All Japan Liquor Merchants Association demanded the LDP revise the request by economic revitalization minister Yasutoshi Nishimura, who is in charge of Japan’s coronavirus response, saying that his remark was “outrageous.”

  The association’s chairperson Kiyotaka Yoshida told Shimomura that liquor retailers were being targeted and added, “There is heavy criticism in the industry (over the request). I want you to tell the central government.” Shimomura apparently responded, “We recognize the current harsh conditions and will make an effort.”

  Though Nishimura on July 9 retracted his request for financial institutions to ensure restaurants follow the ban on serving alcohol, he has not withdrawn his July 8 administrative circular for liquor retailers, which stated, “Please suspend providing alcohol to such eateries.”

  The Mainichi followed up the news with an editorial accusing the Japanese government of “strong arm tactics” in trying to force restaurant and bar owners to comply with all COVID restrictions, including no longer serving alcohol until the current state of emergency ends on Aug. 22.

  Tokyo is now under its fourth COVID-19 state of emergency, scheduled to run until Aug. 22. The capital’s bars and restaurants have been asked to stop serving alcohol until then.

  What has caused a problem is the government plans announced by economic revitalization minister Yasutoshi Nishimura, which included calls on financial institutions to pressure their clients in the hospitality industry not to sell alcohol. This provoked an angry reaction from the restaurant sector, as well as criticism from within the ruling parties. The policy was reeled back in the next day.

  However, the plans also included for government bodies, such as the National Tax Agency (NTA), to demand alcoholic beverage businesses to cease dealing with restaurants serving booze during the state of emergency, and that element was not withdrawn.

  Japan’s pandemic special measures law allows authorities to issue orders to businesses failing to follow infection prevention measure requests, and to fine those that still do not comply.

  However, there is no legal basis for calling on businesses to pressure their clients or for these demands from government agencies like the NTA.

  To sum up: Tokyo residents will need to go through all the trouble of hosting the Olympics while being barred from watching any of the events live (since the government and IOC have agreed to bar spectators at all Olympic events. And they can’t even enjoy a cold Sapporo at their favorite Izakaya.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 20:25

• Can The Dollar Survive Both Cryptocurrencies And China?
  Can The Dollar Survive Both Cryptocurrencies And China?

  Authored by Alexander Herborn and Gunther Schnabl via The Mises Institute,

  In his book Denationalisation of Money, F.A. Hayek argued that governments have never devoted their power to providing proper money over time. They “have refrained from grossly abusing it only when they were under such a discipline as the gold standard imposed.”

  The gold backing of the US dollar as the global reserve currency was lifted in the early 1970s, and paper currencies, so-called fiat currencies, have since become the norm.

  

  Following this decision, the paper currencies have dramatically lost value against gold (figure 1). Since the turn of the millennium, this process has substantially accelerated.

  Figure 1: Gold Price in US Dollars

  

  Source: Reuters.

  For the past twenty to thirty years, the Federal Reserve and other major central banks have been steadily lowering interest rates and purchasing large amounts of government bonds as well as other assets such as corporate bonds and asset-backed securities. This has undermined the confidence in the US dollar and the euro as the world’s leading reserve currencies. A flight into tangible assets has set in, such that stocks, real estate, and precious metals have risen sharply in price. Competitors for the “exorbitant privilege” (Giscard d’Estaing) of the reserve currency have appeared, as those who issue the global reserve currencies benefit from virtually unlimited borrowing opportunities and immense profits from money creation. The competition has three dimensions.

  Firstly, decentralized private digital currencies have emerged in contrast to the public monopolies on creating money. Anyone can create (mine) the pioneer bitcoin, but the supply is credibly limited. The exchange rates to paper (fiat) currencies float. Unlike the fiat moneys, which are based on the traditional banking system, payments are cryptographically legitimized and do not require a central intermediary. Other cryptocurrencies (decentralized or centralized) such as ether, ripple, tether, and dogecoin have been created (“altcoins”), but they are considered only more or (mostly) less equal to bitcoin in terms of credibility. The sharp increase in the value of cryptocurrencies measured in fiat currencies (figure 2) indicates that—despite strong fluctuations—many people trust in their store-of-value function.

  Figure 2: Price of a Bitcoin in US Dollars

  

  Source: Reuters.

  Secondly, a consortium of private companies around the internet giant Facebook intends to join in the competition for the money monopoly. In contrast to many cryptocurrencies, diem (formerly libra) is to be pegged to the US dollar (or the euro). It is therefore referred to as a “stablecoin.” The credibility of this peg is essential for the credibility of stablecoins, akin to bank deposits and money market fund shares. The popularity of Facebook could provoke a rapid spread of diem. The advantage of diem could be that international payments require no intermediaries and are cheaper. Especially for many people in developing countries who do not have a bank account, diem could be attractive. If one day the currently announced fixed exchange rate were to be relaxed in favor of a gradual appreciation path, the incentive to exchange US dollars or euros for diem would be great. Part of the seigniorage of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB), and other central banks could then go into the pockets of Facebook and Co.

  Thirdly, competition for the exorbitant privilege also seems to have emerged among paper currencies. Up to now, all major central banks had expanded their balance sheets in tandem with the Fed, such that competition among fiat currencies was de facto suspended. Yet China, which has long resented the US dollar’s reserve currency status, may now back out of this arrangement. Many trade and financial transactions in East Asia are settled in US dollars, and the currencies of the East Asian countries are still pegged to the greenback. Whenever the Fed expands the money supply through purchases of US government bonds, the central banks in East Asia are compelled to buy US dollars. In this way, they help finance US government spending—e.g., expensive bailouts on the financial markets. Ronald I. McKinnon spoke of a quasi-unlimited credit line for the US, which is increasingly viewed with suspicion in East Asia (“the unloved dollar standard”).

  Figure 3: China’s Holdings of US Government Bonds

  

  Source: US Treasury.

  Since 2014, China has been gradually reducing its holdings of US government bonds (figure 3). Instead of holding US government bonds, investments were made in infrastructure in developing countries and, like Russia, China increased its gold holdings (figure 4). In addition, the balance sheet of the People’s Bank of China has been growing at a much slower pace than that of the Fed. This was especially true during the corona crisis, in which the Fed again greatly expanded its balance sheet to stabilize the US economy. For the past year, an appreciation trend of the renminbi against the US dollar has been observed, such that the incentive to exchange greenbacks for renminbi is growing. Similarly to Germany and Western Europe in the 1970s, China and the neighbors with which it is strongly intertwined economically could break away from the US dollar. Moreover, China has rushed ahead with the development of a digital renminbi whose payment system could undermine US supremacy in international financial transactions.

  Figure 4: Official Gold Holdings of China and Russia

  

  Source: World Gold Council. Note: there is controversy about the real gold holdings.

  However, the major central banks will not stand idly by and watch this competition. The ECB and Fed are working intensively on the development of their own central bank digital currencies (CBDC), which may enable decentralized payments outside of commercial banks. If citizens were skeptical of digital euros and dollars, strict regulation or even a ban on private cryptocurrencies could foster the popularity of central bank digital currencies. Warnings from key central bank officials such as Christine Lagarde and Andrew Bailey that cryptocurrencies are used in shady transactions and carry the risk of total loss do not appear to be a sufficient deterrent. The People’s Bank of China has already banned cryptocurrencies as a means of payment.

  The outcome of this race is uncertain. What is certain is that the credibility of the leading fiat currencies has suffered substantially. Their instability has fueled crises and weakened growth, so the demand for an alternative store of value is high. Who will hold up best against the public currency monopolies of the dollar and euro will likely depend on the quality of the underlying technology (bitcoin versus altcoins) and the influence of the institution behind it (Facebook versus People’s Bank of China). Among the prominent competitors only bitcoin seems to have a built-in stability and thereby a built-in credibility. The upcoming reduction of transactions costs could finally strengthen bitcoins function as medium of exchange.

  But perhaps, in the face of growing competition, the major central banks will return to the virtue of monetary stability. At the end of the high inflation phase of the 1970s, Paul Volcker, as the new Fed chairman, broke the back of inflation with sharp interest rate increases. This also secured the international reserve currency status of the US dollar, which had become challenged by the German mark. Now bitcoin or the Chinese yuan could take over the role that the German mark had in the 1970s. If this were to happen now, it would be evidence of the disciplining effect of currency competition as suggested by Hayek.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 20:05

• Fed President Blames Neverending QE On High Incarceration Rates Of Blacks And Latinos
  Fed President Blames Neverending QE On High Incarceration Rates Of Blacks And Latinos

  Over the past year, Fed watchers have observed a deeply ironic and circular paradox: the Fed, which has been engaged in $120 billion in monthly QE ever since the covid crisis, has vowed it will continue to inject $120 billion in monthly liquidity – in the process making the rich richer, the poor poorer and decimating the middle class while pushing inflation higher – until such time as there is “substantial progress” on the employment front, meaning there will be no taper as long as the unemployment and labor participation rates remain elevated.

  And yet, it is the Fed itself that is enabling this lack of “substantial progress” whatever it actually means, by monetizing the trillions in US deficit which makes it possible for Biden to send out periodic stimmy checks to the population, which eliminates the urgency for millions of Americans to go back to work, and also keeps the unemployment and labor participation rates artificially elevated even as there is a record number of job openings in the US at this moment.

  Of course, the Fed knows this – it knows that most finance professionals (at least those who don’t merely play finance professionals as finance tv anchors) know this – but so far the Fed’s role in enabling this pernicious economic cycle has been kept out of the public view as the outcry would be vicious and would also risk a popular backlash against the central bank, something which the establishment needs to avoid at all costs, or else.

  That’s why the Fed has been especially focused on finding diversions and distractions to its own role in perpetuating this circular scheme, distractions which include global warming, LGBTQ activism and now – minorities in jail.

  In a lamentable excuse for economic analysis, today Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said that it was the high level of incarceration in the US especially among black, hispanics and indigenous people, that constrains the labor market and the economy’s ability to reach its full potential. Not the Fed, not the Fed’s monetization of trillions in stimmy checks. No – it’s criminals in prison that have caused the biggest labor shortage in modern US history.

  “Incarceration is a drag on our ability achieve our maximum-employment goal,” Bostic said Tuesday at the start of the latest iteration of the Fed’s Racism and the Economy series, this one focused on the criminal justice system. And since it is the Fed’s inability to hit its maximum-employment goal that is greenlighting the Fed’s $120 billion monthly injections month after month indefinitely, Bostic effectively blamed the continuation of QE on minorities in prison.

  What is bizarre about this argument is that the U.S. has – and has had long before covid struck – the world’s highest incarceration rate. Somehow this did not prevent unemployment from hitting 3% last January. But now it’s somehow different, and the formerly incarcerated people are less likely to find employment and have much lower lifetime earnings, factors that weigh on the economy at large, Bostic said, blaming minority crime for the Biden’s administration’s catastrophic labor crisis.

  But wait, there’s more: it’s not just that minorities tend to end up in jail – according to Bostic it is the very criminal justice system that is broken and is forcing the Fed to keep injection trillions into the economy stock market.

  “Incarceration and how we execute criminal justice inhibits global competitiveness,” Bostic said. Incarceration and who it targets in the U.S. “can have the effect of exacerbating race-based employment, income and wealth disparities, which can limit economic mobility and resilience and ultimately constrain labor markets and compromise the performance of the overall economy.”

  Bostic added that Black, Latino and indigenous Americans are overrepresented in the prison population and disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system. It was unclear if Bostic substantiated his argument with facts demonstrating that blacks and latinos commit a minority of the crimes in the US.

  The bigger question is why is a Fed president – an unelected career economist – discussing flaws in the US criminal justice system? The answer is simple: to deflect attention from the Fed’s own ruinous boom bubble bust track record, and certainly today’s soaring inflation which is happening in a time when 15 million Americans are collecting some sort of unemployment benefits.

  It wasn’t just Bostic: his colleague, Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, said that the U.S. may need to take a look at what it considers criminal offenses, especially when it comes to non-safety issues. With marijuana now legalized in many places, it may make sense to examine if other things can be decriminalized.

  He said that disproportionate rates of incarceration have contributed to the difference between the White unemployment rate, at 5.2%, and the one for Black Americans, at 9.2%.

  “Once you’ve gone through an experience with our criminal justice system, you’re permanently scarred by the labor market in a way that just can’t be justified from a society standpoint,” Rosengren said.

  In other words, the Fed is gradually making the case that i) unless criminals are released on US streets, and ii) employers are mandated to hire felons, QE may never end.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 19:45

• Border Situation "Worst I've Ever Seen": Rep. Williams
  Border Situation “Worst I’ve Ever Seen”: Rep. Williams

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  The crisis at the U.S.–Mexico border has deteriorated sharply amid concerns the Biden administration will end a key Trump-era provision that enables speedy expulsion of illegal immigrants, Republican lawmakers told The Epoch Times.

  

  The number of illegal immigrant captures at the border has soared in recent months, since President Joe Biden was sworn in. The United States is spending billions of dollars to deal with the repercussions, including hundreds of millions to shelter unaccompanied minors. More smuggling is happening, counties are running out of jail space, and deaths are rising as the hot summer weather kicks in.

  “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen it,” Rep. Roger Williams (R-Texas), who visited the border last month with former President Donald Trump, told The Epoch Times.

  “You’ve got people that that are coming through here illegally, they need to be coming through the ports of entry, not between the ports of entry. We’ve got an administration that is actually inviting them to come. And some, many of them, think that they just touch the soil of the United States, they’re citizens,” added Williams, who oversaw the border while Texas secretary of state between 2004 and 2007.

  Biden administration officials have claimed they’re altering the U.S. approach to immigrants to be “more humane.” They’ve said progress has been made since January, including faster processing of illegal immigrant children who arrive at the border without a responsible adult.

  Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters in El Paso, Texas in June that American officials must help address what she described as the “root causes” of immigration, including a lack of economic opportunity and violence in their home countries.

  “This has been a very important trip. This has been a trip that also is connected with the obvious point: if you want to deal with a problem, you can’t just deal with the problem, you have to deal with what caused it to happen,” Harris told reporters after touring a Customs and Border Protection central processing facility.

  “This is why after taking a leadership role on root causes, one of the first trips I took was to Guatemala and Mexico, to see on the ground there what’s happening in terms of concerns about everything from corruption to food insecurity, to the lack of opportunity for indigenous people, women, seeing the challenges that they have faced,” she added.

  

  Vice President Kamala Harris visits the Paso del Norte Port of Entry in El Paso, Texas, on June 25, 2021. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo)

  Republicans counter that the correct response centers around a simple idea—strong border enforcement.

  “This philosophy of open borders is going to be the destruction of our great democratic republic that we’re all so proud of and and have enjoyed the liberties and freedoms of  past generations, and to pass it on to future generations we’ve got to have a secure border. If we don’t have that secure border, this country is in very dire straits and in grave danger of destruction,” Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) told The Epoch Times.

  The worsening situation comes as the Biden administration reportedly considers ending Title 42, a rule that enables quick expulsion of illegal immigrants due to concerns they may be carrying COVID-19.

  Ending the rule would mean abolishing “the last great tool that our border authorities have of turning back the caravans, the hordes of people,” Babin said.

  Both Williams and Babin want to see construction on the border wall restarted. Biden halted construction after taking office. They also want a revision of policies like one that enables immigrants to enter the country and wait for a court hearing on their asylum claims. Former President Donald Trump was requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their hearings, but Biden quickly changed that policy.

  Democrats not taking action on the border will lead to Republicans flipping the House of Representatives and the Senate, Williams believes.

  “This is going to be one of the things that will defeat them in 2022, is the lack of border security, and the lack of doing your job to secure the border, the sovereignty of our country,” Williams said.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 19:25

• Portions Of Mississippi River Nearing Record Low, May Jeopardize Barge Traffic 
  Portions Of Mississippi River Nearing Record Low, May Jeopardize Barge Traffic 

  In another sign, the megadrought is wreaking havoc across the Western half of the US. There are multiple portions of the Mississippi River that are nearing record low water levels that may inhibit commercial or private vessels from traversing the critical waterway. 

  The stretch of the Mississippi River at St. Paul, Minnesota, is around 3.2 feet Wednesday. That’s about six inches from the record low of 2.6 feet set in 1976.

  

  A camera on the Wabasha Street Bridge that spans the Mississippi River in downtown St. Paul shows the receding waterline.  

  

  Downstream, the Mississippi River at Red Wing is also near the record low of 1.8 feet, set in 2003. It’s about 2.2 feet today. 

  

  Further downstream, Lucy McMartin, City of Winona, located on the Mississippi River, told local news WXOW that “we actually see a lot of commercial activity in our harbor. What concerns me is the water levels are so low, that as the barges are assembled and put together and are proceeding up and down the river, they can run into issues if the water continues to drop in its levels.” 

  More downstream, at Dubuque Marina in Dubuque, Iowa, along the Mississippi River, water levels continue to drop to their lowest in more than eight years.

  Rod and Pat Stalker, of Texas, told the Telegraph Herald that they sailed their 45-foot Carver yacht up the Mississippi River to Dubuque but are now stuck at a marina because the water in the main channel is less than 2.5 feet. The yacht requires 3.5 feet of water. 

  “Everyone here has been basically locked into the marina for the last two to three weeks,” Rod said. “We went out a couple of weeks ago and we were churning mud, so we decided not to go. Most people are choosing not to go out to avoid thousands of dollars of damage to the bottom of the boat.”

  Others on Twitter have pointed out that parts of the Mississippi River are very low. 

  Well its not a good day for boating or fishing on Mississippi River in St.. Cloud MN with the very low water levels. Those rocks are the bottom of the river. pic.twitter.com/CVcLL9ypZW

  — Peter Soregi (@PSoregi) July 2, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  This is how low the Mississippi River is in Sartell, MN. During a normal year, it would be waist deep or higher where I took this pic from. Tagging my fave weather nerd, @svensundgaard pic.twitter.com/Wi3LnW4A2J

  — Dorf (@TriviaDorf) July 10, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The Mississippi River is low. Not sure if I ever seen the water levels so low. Can see a Carp family In the weeds. pic.twitter.com/jMHU2LsMPF

  — Smile E. Face (@realsmilyus) July 10, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Crossing the low Mississippi River today to an island had me wondering, if I break a leg on these rocks does the Hennepin County Sheriff Dept have to assist since it is a River or because it is dried up they do not assist. Newbie County Commish Question of the Day !! pic.twitter.com/ykAMBCFLYe

  — Jeffrey Joneal Lunde (@JeffreyJLunde) July 10, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Not so mighty after all? 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 19:05

• Judicial Watch Asks Court To Order USPS To Disclose Social Media Snooping Documents
  Judicial Watch Asks Court To Order USPS To Disclose Social Media Snooping Documents

  Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A non-profit government watchdog is suing in federal court to force the United States Postal Service (USPS) to produce copies of documents on its tracking of social media posts about planned political protests.

  

  The suit filed by Judicial Watch in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is based on the group’s April 28 U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and the failure of USPS to respond by the required deadline.

  In its original request, Judicial Watch asked for all documents related to multiple aspects of the government’s activity that is reportedly known as the Internet Covert Operations Program (ICOP), including:

  • All records from Jan. 1, 2020, to the present identifying criteria for flagging social media posts as “inflammatory” or otherwise worthy of further scrutiny by other government agencies.

  • All records from Jan. 1, 2020, to the present relating to the ICOP database of social media posts.

  • All records and communications from Jan. 1, 2020, to the present between any USPS official and any official from the FBI and/or the U.S.  Department of Homeland Security regarding ICOP.

  • All social media posts flagged under ICOP and forwarded to other government agencies.

  • Any analyses outlining USPS authority to monitor, track, and collect Americans’ social media posts.

  • All records concerning justifications for USPS to monitor, track, and collect Americans’ social media posts.

  • All records of communication sent to and by Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale from Jan. 1, 2020, to the present concerning ICOP.

  Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement announcing the suit that he wants to know, “Did the Biden administration weaponize the United States Postal Service to improperly spy on Americans?”

  A USPS spokesman did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment on the Judicial Watch suit.

  The USPS program first came to public attention earlier this year when its existence was reported by Yahoo News. As The Epoch Times then reported, the revelation prompted a request from a group of House Republicans to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

  “If the reporting is accurate, ICOP raises serious questions about the federal government’s ongoing surveillance of, and encroachment upon, Americans’ private lives and discourse,” House Oversight Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Judiciary Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), along with 30 other Republican lawmakers, wrote to DeJoy.

  According to the bulletin, ICOP recorded the locations and times of protests. Social media websites Parler and Telegram are mentioned by name, described as “right-wing leaning” platforms on which people were coordinating events. Analysts with the USPS’ law enforcement arm were told to keep an eye out for “inflammatory” postings and share them with other government agencies.

  “The type of amorphous, broad mandate under which ICOP is allegedly operating is particularly troubling because it is unclear why the USPS, of all government agencies and the only one devoted to the delivery of Americans’ mail, is taking on the role of intelligence collection,” the lawmakers wrote.

  The Republicans asked DeJoy for a Members-Only briefing on the program, which was subsequently provided. Not long after the GOP members’ request, the oversight committee’s chairman, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) joined with Comer in a request to USPS Inspector General Tammy Whitcomb for “a comprehensive analysis of the program and its uses.”

  Among much else, Maloney and Comer encouraged Whitcomb to examine the USPS’ justification for expanding ICOP from its uses in drug interdiction to general surveillance of political expression and protest planning on social media.

  The IG was also asked to get answers from USPS to these questions:

  “What vendor does USPIS use to search publicly available information? What information is the vendor storing about searches and results, and how is this information secured? What is the total awarded value of the contract, and what are USPIS’s obligated costs under the contract? When was the contract initiated, and when does it terminate?”

  Comer told The Epoch Times July 12 that, “the United States Postal Inspection Service’s use of the Internet Covert Operations Program to spy on the First Amendment rights of the American people raises serious concerns and must be investigated.”

  The Kentucky Republican said he is “pleased the Inspector General’s office agreed to investigate the use of this program and we look forward to reviewing its findings. We must ensure the American people have transparency about how this program has been used and how [USPS] will install safeguards to prevent abuses from happening again in the future.”

  *  *  *

  Congressional correspondent Mark Tapscott may be contacted at Mark.Tapscott@epochtimes.nyc

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 18:45

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• Pandemic-Driven Hunger Hits 15-Year High As Global Crisis Unfolds 
  Pandemic-Driven Hunger Hits 15-Year High As Global Crisis Unfolds 

  The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021 (SOFI 2021) report warns food insecurity and malnutrition have hit 15-year highs and are likely to worsen. 

  Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was on track to minimize hunger and malnutrition by 2030. But the virus pandemic disrupted economic flows around the globe, unleashing supply chain hell, compounded by disruptive weather, along with overstimulation by central banks and governments, helping to induce inflation, which has put the world at a critical juncture. 

  A staggering 811 million people went hungry in 2020, or about 10% of the entire world population. The decade ending in 2014 saw the number of undernourished people fall to 607 million and base through 2019 around 650 million. But as soon as the pandemic hit, food insecurity soared by more than 150 million people to 811 million. 

  

  “The report indicates that progress has been made for some forms of malnutrition, but the world is not on track to achieve any global nutrition targets by 2030,” the report said. 

  Globally, 44 percent of infants under 6 months of age were exclusively breastfed in 2019 – up from 37 percent in 2012 but the practice varies considerably among regions. Child malnutrition still persists at an alarming rate –an estimated 149 million children were stunted, 45 million were wasted and 39 million were overweight in 2020. The report presents new projections of potential additional cases of child stunting and wasting due to COVID-19. Based on a conservative scenario, it is projected that an additional 22 million children in low- and middle-income countries will be stunted, an additional 40 million will be wasted between 2020 and 2030 due to the pandemic. -SOFI

  “This is a wake-up call to the entire world,” David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, told an audience of a webcast Monday. 

  Beasley said: “We’re heading in the wrong direction. To think that we’re going to end hunger by 2030, that’s not even possible given the direction, trajectory we’re on now.”

  None of this should come as a surprise to readers as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) global food price index recently hit a new high. The non-governmental organization warned surging food prices may induce a “potential crisis” in lower-income countries: “Rising food imports as a share of all imports can be an early warning indicator for potential crises in some areas.”  

  As a reminder, ahead of the rapid rise in food prices, SocGen’s market skeptic Albert Edwards in December shared his thoughts about why he started to panic about soaring food prices. And since then, food supply chains remain broken, trillions in fiscal stimulus spent, and exploding commodity costs, we can only imagine the situation is getting worse by the month. 

  More recently, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid reminds us that emerging markets are more vulnerable to food insecurity since their consumers spend a far greater share of their income on food than those in the developed world.

  Other highlights from the SOFI report show Asia is home to most of the undernourished people post-COVID. 

  

  Analysts Michael Every and Michael Magdovitz of Rabobank warn that surging food prices could exacerbate global food insecurity. 

  Pandemic-driven hunger may already trigger social unrest as destabilization erupts in impoverished countries such as Haiti, Cuba, and South Africa. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 02:45

• Ukraine Reprised: Victoria Nuland Eyes Belarus In Talks With Ukrainian Official
  Ukraine Reprised: Victoria Nuland Eyes Belarus In Talks With Ukrainian Official

  Authored by Rick Rozoff via AntiWar.com,

  Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland held a phone conversation with the Head of the Ukrainian President’s Office Andriy Yermak to discuss what the National News Agency of Ukraine reported was the situation in Belarus. The two were described as having “expressed concern” over developments in Ukraine’s northern neighbor. A nation doesn’t want Nuland to be concerned, much less gravely concerned over its internal affairs given her political track record.

  Unlike her telephone conversation with then US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt in 2014 in which she dictated the composition of a post-coup government in that nation weeks before the event, the above conversation has not been recorded and placed on YouTube yet, so its exact contents remain unknown.

  

  It is to be hoped that Yermak was duly deferential to the highest-ranking member of the US Foreign Service, as he would never have been granted the position he currently holds by his personal friend President Volodymyr Zelensky but for Nuland’s deft coup plotting of seven years ago. Before nepotism gained him his current position, he had been appointed Presidential Aide for Foreign Policy Issues shortly after Zelensky took office. Yermak, also an attorney, had been a film producer when he met Zelensky, at the time general producer of the TV channel Inter. Somehow one imagines the prospect of a Ukrainian television miniseries with a title like “The Battle for the Soul of Belarus” or “Free at Last, Released from the Bonds of Despotism” or, better yet, “Rock ‘n Roll Revolution” with a soundtrack by U2, Rage Against the Machine and Nicki Minaj.

  What is known of his conversation with Nuland, the pastry peddler of Maidan Square and patron saint of the seven-year war in the Donbass, is a brief account of it related by Ukraine’s presidential press secretary, Serhiy Nykyforov:

  “Andriy Yermak and Ms. Victoria Nuland discussed the situation in Belarus and expressed concern about what is happening there now. They also discussed some security issues related to Russia’s West-2021 exercises and moved on to the topic of Ukraine.”

  The joint Belrusian-Russian exercise (Zapad in Russian) is a routine one and Ukraine has no reason to fear anything from it; but Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky, for months have been prophesying, like a blind Greek soothsayer of the time of Sophocles, a threat to the very existence of Ukraine emanating from Belarus. Ukraine has a population almost five times the size of Belarus’ and armed forces trained to meet NATO standards in addition to military equipment provided by the US and other alliance members.

  The government of Belarus recently closed its border with Ukraine, accusing the latter of allowing arms to be smuggled into the country for Western-backed “protesters.” The sort of peaceful protesters that set over a hundred Ukrainian policemen on fire with gas bombs in Kiev in 2014, burning several to death. Their efforts were noted, appreciated and rewarded by Nuland and John McCain, who dispensed snacks to the CANVAS-trained perpetrators between bouts of hurling Molotov cocktails at unarmed law enforcement personnel.

  

  By the way, the government of President Viktor Yanukoych was overthrown only thirteen months before a scheduled presidential election. Surely Nuland, McCain and their friends in the National Endowment for Democracy and other “democracy enhancement” organizations could have delivered the desired result short of setting much of the Ukrainian capital on fire, overthrowing an internationally-recognized head of state and plunging the nation into endless war; with the indispensable assistance of bomb-wielding “youth activists” as in 2004 and 2014, of course.

  But a standard color revolution would have had disadvantages. Campaign slogans from approved candidates like Vote for Me and Join NATO or Support Us or We’ll Burn Your Country to the Ground don’t always appeal to targeted demographics. At least not sufficiently to motivate them to walk to the polling station on a rainy afternoon. Besides, rigging an election in 2015 might not have guaranteed a festering war with ethnic Russians in the Donbass and an excuse for further NATO buildup in the Black Sea – much less the opportunity of war with Belarus.

  For the likes of Nuland with her Bachelor of Arts in Something or Other (BASOO), film producer Yermak and his boss, comedian Zelensky (Did you hear the one about the hooker and the mushroom cloud?), politics and war are just so, like, boring without a little panache. A little flair. Éclat. Some fireworks. Taunting a neighbor with the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal by overthrowing the government of its only ally in Europe would do the trick. Now you’re talking. F*ck the world!

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 02:00

• How Google And Wikipedia Brainwash You
  How Google And Wikipedia Brainwash You

  Authored by Ryan Matters via Off-Guardian.org,

  Internet giants cover-up for Big Pharma, suppress alternative medicine and bury inconvenient facts…

  

  According to research done by We Are Social, the average internet user spends over 6 and half hours online every day.

  The internet is both a blessing as a curse.

  On the one hand, it gives us access to knowledge and technology that improves our lives, but on the other hand, it’s an addictive and dangerous mind-control tool that can be exploited to influence your choices and manipulate your thinking.

  The COVID pseudopandemic has seen internet censorship rise to an unprecedented level. The controllers and their minions are scrambling to silence anyone who dares to question the efficacy of vaccines or the existence of Sars-Cov-2.

  Let’s recap:

  In the space of a few months, thousands of YouTube channels and millions of Facebook posts have been deleted.

  The former president of the United States’ Twitter account was removed, and, Greenmedinfo, a site that aggregates research on natural remedies, had both their Facebook and Instagram accounts deleted losing over half a million followers.

  LinkedIn also joined in on the action by deleting the account of Dr. Robert Malone after he questioned the safety of the mRNA vaccines, the technology for which he himself played a huge part in creating.

  Parler was removed from the internet and so was the website of America’s Frontline Doctors after they endorsed non-agenda-approved treatments to combat COVID-19.

  More recently, in a move that’s disturbing yet predictable, Facebook has begun sending users creepy messages relating to “extremist content”.

  So content that goes against the mainstream agenda is either censored or outright deleted. We know that. But what about the content that goes against corporate interests but isn’t quite insidious enough to be removed? What does Google, the largest search engine in the world, processing over 40,000 search requests per second, do about such content?

  The first thing to understand about Google is that it’s more than just a search engine. Google develops and maintains a network of applications that all work together to collect, analyze, and leverage your data. Each application feeds data into the next, forming a global chain of information exchange.

  For example, Google’s driverless car initiative powers Google Maps, which in turn powers Google’s local listings. It is this network effect that has made Google such a powerful and unrivaled force in the search engine space.

  As a search engine, Google decides what information you see and what information you don’t. It goes without saying, but any tool with such power needs to be responsibly managed and repeatedly scrutinized.

  Anyone who chooses to use such a tool should also be aware that they are seeing the internet through a lens created by Google’s mysterious algorithms and the information they’re receiving doesn’t necessarily come from an objective or neutral source.

  Google’s ability to affect people’s thinking was demonstrated by the work of Dr. Robert Epstein when his team found that Google was profoundly influencing the results of elections. Epstein writes that:

  Our research leaves a little doubt about whether Google has the ability to control voters. In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidates by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session. […] Whether or not Google executive see it this way, the employees who constantly adjust the search giants algorithms are manipulating people every minute of every day.”

  It would also appear that Google is inherently biased towards pro-drug, pro-vaccine, Big Pharma medicine. In 2019, the search engine made an update to its algorithm that just so happened to shadow-ban health websites not affiliated with billion-dollar corporates.

  The websites affected included GreenMedInfo, SelfHacked, and Mercola.com. Some of these sites lost over 90% of their organic traffic, overnight.

  When searching for most health-related topics on Google, the first page is almost always filled with content from websites like WebMD, whose history is filled with conflicts of interest and open collaborations with Monsanto, Merck, and other corporates.

  In 2017, the search engine blacklisted naturalnews.com, a natural health advocacy organization that reports on controversial health topics including vaccine safety, GMOs, and pharmaceutical experiments, de-indexing over 140,000 of their webpages.

  In a 2019 article, the founder of NaturalNews, Mike Adams, had this to say about Google (emphasis in original):

  Make no mistake: Google is pro-pharma, pro-Monsanto, pro-glyphosate, pro-pesticides, pro-chemotherapy, pro-fluoride, pro-5G, pro-geoengineering and fully supports every other toxic poison that endangers humankind.”

  Google’s ties to Big Pharma are well-known. In 2016, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, partnered with GlaxoSmithKline to create a new company focused on research into bioelectronics – a branch of medical science aimed at fighting diseases by targeting electrical signals in the body. GSK also works directly with Google thanks to a deal between the two companies that allows GSK full control over the data that they use. What data? Whose data? That isn’t disclosed.

  Alphabet is also heavily invested in Vaccitech, a UK-based vaccine company founded by researchers at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, the Vatican (vaxxican?) of vaccine research.

  Finally, it has recently come to light that Google’s charity arm, Google.org, provided funding for research and studies carried out by Peter Daszak and his charity, EcoHealth Alliance – the same charity that previously worked with the Wuhan lab involved in so-called ‘gain of function’ research.

  These conflicts of interest alone should call into question the search engine’s ability to provide an unbiased view of health content on the internet.

  Google’s “autocomplete” algorithm is another source of manipulation that works to affect people’s perceptions about the danger of vaccines and the efficacy of natural treatments.

  For example, if you type “vaccines cause” into Google, the top suggestion is “vaccines cause adults”. I mean, seriously? In contrast, if you search “Chiropractic is”, the top suggestions are “quackery”, “pseudoscience” and “dangerous”.

  Autocomplete is supposedly based on data collected from real Google searches, especially common and trending ones. However, data from Google trends clearly show that ever since 2004, “vaccines cause autism” has been searched far more times than “vaccines cause adults”, and “Chiropractic is good” has received a far higher popularity score than “Chiropractic is quackery”, the top suggestion.

  A similar trend can be observed for terms such as “supplements are”, “GMOs are”, “glyphosate is”, “organic is”, “homeopathy is”, and “holistic medicine is”.

  Looking at the way Google favours Big Pharma content, it’s reasonable to suspect that their “data lakes” are being poisoned. In fact, this was confirmed in 2019 when former Google software engineer, Zack Vorheis, leaked 950 pages of internal company documents providing evidence that Google was shaping election results, implementing stealth censorship programmes, and maintaining undisclosed blacklists.

  Google’s algorithms are shrouded in mystery, based on black-box machine learning models that few people understand.

  Machine learning models must be “trained” and as long as Google feeds them data to say “non-drug medicine is bad, Big Pharma is good”, the algorithms will continue to re-bias the internet in that direction, altering people’s perceptions of natural health and presenting drug-based medicine as the shining light in a dark world filled with invisible enemies.

  When it comes to psychological manipulation, Google’s “partner in crime” is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a free, online encyclopedia operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

  If you’ve ever searched for anything on the internet, you’ve likely seen Wikipedia show up towards the top of the search results. When it comes to questions without any commercial impact, such as “What’s the capital of Turkey?”, Wikipedia does a pretty good job.

  But when it comes to multibillion-dollar industries, things get a little murky. Big corporates have big pockets and they aren’t opposed to the concept of “pay-to-play”. This was highlighted in 2012 when British PR firm, Bell Pottinger, was exposed for its involvement in manipulating Wikipedia entries for paying clients.

  The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is no saint, either. In 2008 he used the platform as his personal relationship break-up tool by updating his relationship status on his Wiki entry before telling his girlfriend. And in 2010, he was embroiled in a Wikipedia pornography-removal scandal that saw him “voluntarily” relinquish certain editing and admin privileges.

  One of the industries where Wikipedia’s bias is most noticeable is healthcare. In an article for the Orthomolecular News Service, Howard Strauss, Grandson of Max Gerson, MD (the creator of the Gerson cancer therapy) states that:

  This writer and many others in the field of alternative medicine and natural healing have experienced Wikipedia bias personally when contributing well-documented, carefully researched articles to the site, only to have them be radically altered and deleted, by anonymous “editors,” then being banned from further editing or contributions. This is impossible to reconcile with a free flow of information.”

  And this can be verified as Wikipedia keeps a public record of all edits made to an article over time. He goes on to comment on the history of Wikipedia and states that:

  At first, it was interesting to see uncensored information flow through the site, and even contribute to it. Then corporate America realized that Wikipedia, and similar sites, were distributing information they had carefully and thoroughly suppressed in the media, and set about correcting that omission. Soon, Wikipedia entries about natural healing, holistic medicine, and other subjects began to resemble publicity blurbs from Monsanto, or Merck, or the NIH. Contributors are supposed to be anonymous, “volunteer” editors were supposed to be both anonymous and neutral. But it was clear that for certain sensitive subjects, this was far from the case.”

  If you want to see Wikipedia’s bias for yourself, just search for any medical discipline that isn’t drug-based. And if you want to make things really fun, take a shot of whiskey every time you see the word ‘pseudoscience’.

  Here are real snippets from Wikipedia entries on alternative forms of medicine and natural healing, taken from the first few sentences of the entry…

  • Chiropractic: “Chiropractic is a pseudoscientific alternative medicine…”

  • Chinese medicine: “Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a branch of traditional medicine in China. It has been described as “fraught with pseudoscience.“

  • Homeopathy: “Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine.”

  • Ayurveda: “The theory and practice of Ayurveda is pseudoscientific.”

  • Acupuncture: “Acupuncture is a pseudoscience.”

  • German New Medicine: “Germanic New Medicine (GNM), also formerly known as German New Medicine and New Medicine, a system of pseudo-medicine.“

  • Functional Medicine: “Functional medicine is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses a number of unproven and disproven methods and treatments.“

  The editors display a shocking level of bias by cherry-picking references, many of which are not peer-reviewed or scientific, and make hollow claims which they portray as facts.

  The entry on Functional Medicine is particularly difficult to get through. Functional Medicine is a form of medicine focused on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. It often involves treatments to correct nutritional imbalances and gut dysbiosis.

  However, the author claims that functional medicine encompasses a number of ‘unproven’ and ‘disproven’ treatments and cites two articles on sciencebasedmedicine.org, a notorious ‘Skeptic’ publication, both written by the same author.

  The articles, far from scientific or scholarly, read as opinion pieces written by an MD with a chip on his shoulder, who clearly has no understanding of what functional medicine really is. The author, Dr. Wallace Sampson, passed away in 2015. Here’s his author bio:

  Retired hematologist/oncologist, presumptive analyzer of ideological and fraudulent medical claims, claimant to being founding editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, and to detecting quackery by smell.”

  Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry for the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, says that it is a discontinued medical journal and that it was evaluated at least three times by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) for indexing in MEDLINE, but rejected each time. What a shame.

  Furthermore, in 2003, a California Appeals Court found Dr. Sampson “to be biased and unworthy of credibility.” Yet these are the kind of charlatans that Wikipedia endorses as “experts”.

  Instead of citing ‘quackbuster’ publications written by biased, outdated, and nutritionally uneducated MDs, the editors would do well to dive into Alan Gaby’s Nutritional Medicine (over 16,000 scientific references), or Dr. Alex Vasquez’s Inflammation Mastery. That’s presuming they have the intelligence to read high-level, academic texts, based on real, unbiased science (not opinions).

  If I were an editor at Wikipedia, I may choose to rewrite the article on chemotherapy, claiming it is a pseudoscience by citing this 2004 study which found the overall contribution of chemotherapy to cancer survival to be barely over 2%, or this study in Nature Medicine that found chemotherapy to increase tumour growth and survival.

  Wikipedia made its stance on alternative health quite clear in 2014 when founder Jimmy Wales ridiculed an 8,000-signature petition on Change.org calling for a fairer discussion of alternative and complementary medicine on the encyclopedia. The petition stated that:

  As gatekeepers for the status quo, they [Wikipedia] refuse discourse with leading-edge research scientists and clinicians or, for that matter, anyone with a different point of view”

  Instead of recognizing his lack of expertise in the area of healthcare and re-evaluating the fraudulent and dubious wiki entries, Wales demonstrated his lack of awareness by stating that:

  What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of ‘true scientific discourse’. It isn’t.”

  Quite frankly, it’s not surprising to hear such a response from the man who heads an organization that serves the interests of the Big Money Machine and its quest to dumb down the populace. As Dr. Vasquez puts it, in a recent critique of a New York Times propaganda piece on the “danger” of nutritional supplements to fight coronavirus:

  The scaffolding of our institutionalized ignorance requires structural support from publications and organizations that pretend to inform and empower us while simply leaving us dumber and weaker than before.”

  So when did Wikipedia become an extension of Big Pharma? The truth is that the health section of Wikipedia was commandeered by a bitter group of skeptics who live within their own, egoic constructs of reality and health.

  This anti-health movement ramped up in 2006 when Paul Lee, then the listmaster of Quackwatch, made a forum post inviting skeptics to come forward and begin writing content on Wikipedia about natural and complementary health topics.

  Quackwatch, a “Skeptic” website aimed at “debunking” and smearing non-drug medicine, was founded by Steven Barrett, an unlicensed MD who failed his psychiatric board exam, and has authored zero published research (at least I haven’t been able to find any). During a court proceeding, he admitted ties to the AMA, the Federal Trade Commission, and the FDA (though his sources of funding are likely far more expansive).

  Lee was in full violation of Wikipedia’s neutrality policy and knowing this, he stated:

  Any coordination of efforts should be done by private email, since Wikipedia keeps a very public history of every little edit, and you can’t get them removed. We don’t need any accusations of a conspiracy.”

  Needless to say, a coordinated effort over private email IS a conspiracy. And not a very sophisticated one at that.

  Then, in a move demonstrating both the organization’s ethical and moral standards, Wikipedia made Paul Lee a senior editor with special rights and privileges.

  The influence that both Google and Wikipedia have is astonishing when you consider that Google receives more than 1 billion health-related questions per day. How many of those people have turned away from effective treatments due to the information Google fed them? How many people wrongly believe that COVID vaccines are safe effective?

  But who do we blame for the increasing power and influence that Google and Wikipedia hold? Perhaps we are to blame. Blindly trusting in “authorities” to have our best interests at heart is the kind of infantile thinking that got us into this mess.

  As the number one visited website in the world, Google controls ~90% of global search traffic. Our minds, health beliefs, political stances, and world views are inseparably linked to information we read on the internet and neither Google nor Wikipedia is an objective source for this information.

  It is time that we take responsibility for our own health. We have to develop the ability to read and assess health knowledge objectively and intuitively.

  Do you suffer from depression? Maybe you need to get your vitamin B12 or vitamin D levels checked, maybe you need to cut out processed and neuroinflammatory foods from your diet.

  The internet is not a miracle worker, The internet doesn’t know what’s best for you, no one does. Your body is different from mine. Treatments that work for you may not work for me. But as long as we learn to listen to our bodies, to understand our own, unique inner landscape, we can begin to seek treatments and practitioners that truly make a difference.

  The lesson is this:

  You are the authority. Read, learn, understand, and don’t take anything at face value. We need to learn to develop our intuition in parallel with our critical thinking skills.

  Discernment is our secret weapon.

  We’re fighting an information war. Arm yourself with knowledge and be free.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 07/13/2021 – 00:00

• Lawsuit Centered On Saudi Ex-Spymaster Threatens To Make US Covert Ops Public
  Lawsuit Centered On Saudi Ex-Spymaster Threatens To Make US Covert Ops Public

  A former top Saudi spymaster now living in exile with extensive assets in Canada and the United States is embroiled in a long-running legal fight with Crown Prince Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) which threatens to expose US state secrets. He was previously a spy chief seen as fiercely loyal to Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN), who is now in Saudi detention after being deposed, facilitating the rise of his rival MbS. 

  Ex-Saudi intelligence officer Saad al-Jabri already years ago (in 2018) alleged MbS ordered a hit squad to assassinate him while in Canada – an attempted said to have been thwarted by Canadian authorities, but now a complex pair of civil cases has seen the US government intervene to argue it can’t be compelled to divulge sensitive or possibly classified information as part of the suits. 

  

  What al-Jabri knowns, or what he’s willing to use to fight the kingdom as it goes after his assets abroad, could prove deeply embarrassing for both the Saudis and Americans, and potentially touches on covert operations the two allies have cooperated on. 

  Amid the ongoing feud with the Saudi government, two Saudi state-run companies recently joined the fight against Aljabri, described by AFP this week as follows: 

  The feud took a new turn this March when state-run company Sakab Saudi Holding accused Aljabri of embezzling $3.47 billion while working at the Ministry of Interior under MBN. It urged the Massachusetts court to freeze his $29 million Boston property assets.

  This came weeks after multiple state-owned companies sued Aljabri in Toronto on similar allegations. A Canadian court subsequently announced a worldwide freeze of Aljabri’s assets.

  The Massachusetts case has witnessed the US Justice Department get involved in a rare intervention, with an April filing telling of Aljabri’s intention to “describe information concerning alleged national security activities”.

  

  Washington could go so far as the invoke the “states secrets privilege” in a case that’s essentially a spat between two foreign entities. According to further details from court filings cited in AFP: 

  “The (US) government is considering whether and how to participate in this action, including if necessary and applicable, through an assertion of appropriate governmental privileges,” the filing said, without elaborating.

  In a second filing a month later, the Justice Department asked the court for more time as national security matters require “‘delicate’ and ‘complex’ judgements by senior officials”.

  The filing said the government was prepared to “provide further information” to the court in secret.

  Crucially, state-run Sakab – which is at center of the Massachusetts lawsuit – is widely known to be a front company for Saudi intelligence through which it can conduct covert operations with allied agencies abroad, particularly in the US with the CIA. 

  Middle East Eye has additionally in the past described Jabri as having had “deep ties with the CIA and had been a key go-between for western intelligence agencies and the Saudi intelligence apparatus, worked closely under bin Nayef, who in 2017 was ousted, put under house arrest, and replaced by his cousin, Mohammed bin Salman, as the country’s crown prince.” 

  Previously in the long-running saga, this US summons actually happened…

  US court issues summons for #Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman

  District court calls on crown prince to appear in court for the lawsuit filed by ex-Saudi intel official Saad al-Jabri.#SaudiArabia #MBS https://t.co/KndrGiqCmC

  — Robert Carter (@Bob_cart124) August 10, 2020

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Thus clearly the former spymaster possesses many secrets, but the kicker as noted in AFP this week is what follows: 

  In order to prove his innocence, the court would need to probe Sakab’s finances, including how they were used to “finance sensitive programs” operated in partnership with the CIA, the US National Security Agency and the US Defense Department, said a filing by Aljabri.

  While the US government has in the past often been successful in blocking court proceedings from making sensitive national security matters public, neither the DOJ or CIA have any legal standing or direct sway to do so on the Canada side of the proceedings – meaning secret information could come to light via the Toronto court. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 23:40

• The Deepest Motivation Behind China's 'Reform' Agenda Revealed As Very Simple
  The Deepest Motivation Behind China’s ‘Reform’ Agenda Revealed As Very Simple

  Authored by Anne Stevenson-Yang via themarket.ch,

  The Lobster in Beijing’s Pot

  The fiasco surrounding the IPO of the Chinese ride-hailing service Didi is a warning signal: Beijing is taking increasingly tough action against capital outflows from the People’s Republic. This is a red flag for investors in Chinese internet giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu.

  

  Bright-orange splotches appear on Gila monsters when they want to show that they can spew poison if predators mess with them. Male dogs hump females. And when Chinese companies make billions in portable, hard currency by listing overseas, as Didi Global Inc. (DIDI) did in its IPO on June 30, Chinese regulators flex their muscles.

  The wishful among the investment community see this as a one-off. It is a tectonic shift.

  China’s July 4 order to halt new downloads of the Didi app on the excuse that user data security was being compromised tanked the new listing and led to comments by Chinese officials about how companies really need to get their approval before an IPO.

  The «Wall Street Journal» explained the move as a way of fixing a lack of inter-agency coordination, claiming that China’s data watchdog is miffed that it could not stop an IPO. That does not add up: the IPO in no way made the data vulnerable to American snooping. The issue here is not data but power.

  One need only to look back to 2017, as the wrath of the central government came down on private conglomerates like the Dalian Wanda Group, Anbang Insurance, and HNA Group, all of which had committed the cardinal sin of buying offshore assets with their cash. China had grown preoccupied with regulatory capture of privately controlled assets that are held in hard currency rather than in the Monopoly money that is the Chinese Renminbi. Beijing promptly dismantled the vast empires held by these companies – including Wanda’s controlling share of AMC, HNA’s stake in Hilton, Anbang’s 15 U.S. hotels – and engineered the sale of many of the assets to military-controlled companies

  The Temperature Rises

  While the key motivation is control, there is also an element of tit-for-tat. After many years of acceding to Chinese belligerence on issues like Taiwan, Falun Gong, and the jailing of Liu Xiaobo, Western nations have begun to voice objections. There have been successive U.S. bans on purchasing from Chinese companies suspected of being connected with the military. There was the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, enacted last December, which implicitly targets Chinese companies listed in the United States for delisting. In March, there were sanctions on Chinese officials for human rights abuses in Xinjiang – measures against which Beijing immediately retaliated. In June, President Biden issued an executive order banning investments in 59 entities. China has struck back with a number of measures, the most recent being the «Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law,» which tries to keep companies from following the laws of their own countries.

  The next step in the muscle-flexing exercise will be to curtail the use of Variable Interest Entities (VIEs).

  The most valuable portions of China’s Internet, such as search algorithms, news reporting, and video rights, are by law owned by Chinese nationals. Public-market investors participate in the companies’ profit by proxy: they own offshore holding companies – VIEs – that have contractual rights to profit streams from the onshore businesses. But the contracts are legally iffy.

  Directionally, it is clear that the VIE goose is cooked. In 2015, a new Foreign Investment Law made ownership synonymous with control. This was the equivalent of putting a lobster in a pot of cold water and starting the flame. Now authorities say they need to approve Chinese companies for IPOs even when the companies are VIEs established in tax havens.

  A Taste From the Nineties

  Because of the go-go years in public markets, many have conveniently forgotten about 1998. That was the year when the telecom company Unicom decided to list in Hong Kong. Because foreign ownership was not permitted in telecoms, Unicom developed a work-around called «Chinese-Chinese-Foreign» or «CCF,» which mirrored the current VIE structure of the Internet. Companies like Siemens and Bell South would nominate employees to be the titular owners of fully domestic companies, which would joint venture with China Unicom. The domestic nominee companies, via contract, conveyed some of the economic benefit of the joint venture to the foreign telco.

  In summer of 1998, all this changed. Premier Zhu – who had previously publicly praised the arrangement – signed a decree requiring that all the foreign partners exit the trilateral arrangements and the joint ventures be unwound.

  International companies had firmly believed in China’s intention to «reform and open» its telecom sector and believed that the CCF arrangements were the start of a process. It turned out that the ventures in the end were mechanisms through which to capture needed capital and technology. Once that goal had been accomplished, the foreign ownership by proxy was ruled illegal.

  This is likely to be ultimately the fate of Chinese VIEs in general and the Internet companies in particular.

  Who Foots the Bill?

  There is still a way to make money from the rich valuations that are still being awarded to Chinese companies: let them buy you. In that regard, the Didi case is instructive: the real winner is Uber.

  Squeezed out of China by dozens of discriminatory rules, Uber threw in the towel and sold its business to Didi in 2016 for $7 bln and a 12.8% stake. Even with the share decline, that should be worth around $7.4 bln. That is more than two-thirds of Uber’s total 2020 revenue. That’s an easier way to make a living than humping rides.

  Selling to over-valued Chinese companies turns out to be the smart move. Whether Yahoo and Alibaba, Walmart and JD.com, or Tesla and Tencent, the easier path than building a Chinese business is to sell to a Chinese company for shares. Who even remembers Yahoo? Here’s a bet: Tesla will sell its troubled Chinese operations to a Chinese grandee for shares.

  But as for investing in listed Chinese companies, after the continuing house arrest of China’s most visible and successful billionaire, Jack Ma, founder of the company with the biggest IPO in history, one wonders what it will take for the U.S. market to understand that Chinese companies are simply not investable.

  Deng Xiaoping cautioned that flies would come in through China’s «open door,» so the door has been carefully watched, cracked open when it suits and shut more tightly when undesirables pass through. Currently, China’s door is closing to inbound traffic – Internet content and other forms of media, other channels of cultural influence, many kinds of inbound travelers, and many imports. In this regard, Covid-19 was a boon to regulators looking for an excuse to limit who comes into China. For capital, the inbound door remains wide open, but the way out is increasingly shut. Policies around IPO approval, VIEs, Internet control, anti-monopoly regulation, and investment policy have everything to do with capturing and holding onto hard currency.

  Thus, in the waning days of the Chinese growth story, the deepest motivation behind China’s reform agenda is revealed as very simple: capturing dollars and then leveraging up foreign reserves by printing up a massive money supply in RMB. And directing a portion of the dollars, of course, into leadership pockets.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 23:20

• Lumber Futures Wipe Out 2021 Gains As Supply Builds 
  Lumber Futures Wipe Out 2021 Gains As Supply Builds 

  Lumber futures on Chicago Mercantile Exchange have officially wiped out all gains for the year on Monday. Prices have been sliding for 44 days, down at least 60% from the record high of $1,711 per thousand board feet from late April/early May. As we’ve noted multiple times, the great lumber bubble has popped. 

  

  The drop in lumber prices has been quite dramatic and is a classic commodity blowoff top. The quadrupling of prices over the last year has been bad news bears for builders and do-it-yourselfers. Even with prices around $685, prices are still more than double pre-COVID prices. 

  Since the early 1990s, lumber futures have been range-bound between $200 to $400, with some minor exceptions when prices jumped above $600 in 2018. 

  The latest free fall in prices suggests the physical market is resetting after a historic lumber shortage was spurred by a perfect storm of factors during the virus pandemic. 

  Lumber futures’ term structure reminds us of a rollercoaster – also prices are very seasonal so this is priced in as well. 

  

  Chief Executive Officer Greg Kuta, whose Ohio-based firm focuses on lumber markets, told Bloomberg in an email that lumber futures will see “volatility” with price swings between “$550 to $1,200 for the remainder of 2021.” 

  Paul Quinn, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets, said prices could still drift lower this summer and rally in September, then drop again in November. 

  “We think 2022 spring prices will see a similar run as 2021, though likely not as high given the incremental capacity adds,” Quinn said, noting that new home construction continues to flourish.

  “We still expect prices will be higher than long-term averages going forward.”

  Readers may recall we’ve been closely following the lumber bubble: 

  • Lumber Hasn’t Had A Down Day Since March 26… And It’s Sending Home Prices Soaring Even Higher
  • “There Is No Shortage?” Train Loads Of Lumber Stacked As Far As The Eye Can See
  • Lumber Industry Has No Interest In New Mills As They Reap Rewards Of Record Prices
  • Lumber Prices Slump As Historic Boom Hits A Wall
  • Lumber Prices Record Biggest Weekly Drop Ever As Supply Increases
  • Lumber Prices Suffer Biggest Monthly Drop On Record

  More or less, BMO Capital Markets’ commodity desk noted earlier this month that lumber prices may not return to pre-pandemic levels any time soon. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 23:00

• White House Backs Teachers Unions, CRT Curricula
  White House Backs Teachers Unions, CRT Curricula

  Authored by Philip Wegmann via RealClear Politics (emphasis ours),

  The Biden administration signaled its support for the teaching of “anti-racism” curriculum in public schools Friday, wading into an ongoing culture war over critical race theory playing out on cable news and in school board meetings across the nation.

  

  Asked about a recent decision by the National Education Association to throw its weight behind controversial progressive teachings about race, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told RealClearPolitics that President Biden believes “kids should learn about our history” including the view that “there is systemic racism that is still impacting society today.”

  Psaki continued that the president and the First Lady, who is also a life-long educator, believe that “there are many dark moments, and there is not just slavery and racism in our history.”

  “And he believes, as I believe, as a parent of children, that kids should learn about our history. So as a spouse of an educator,” the press secretary added, “he continues to believe that children should learn not just the good, but also the challenging parts of our history, and that’s part of what we’re talking about here, even as it’s become politically charged.”

  Almost underscoring Psaki’s point that the issue has become politically charged, an account run by the House Republicans responded on Twitter, “critical race theory is NOT history. It’s an ideological agenda meant to divide us.”

  The press secretary’s answer was the clearest expression to date of where the White House comes down in a larger ideological battle over the soul of the nation. Progressives who espouse critical race theory argue that white people should own up to the benefits afforded to them by the systemic racism woven into the fabric of this country’s past and present. Conservatives reject that characterization. While agreeing that schoolchildren should learn about slavery and racism, they say that the current approach being pushed by progressive educators goes too far.

  In that same vein, Russ Vought, president of Center for Renewing America, told RCP that the White House “can continue to sow confusion,” but that people already know that teaching the theory “is not about learning history, it is indoctrination that America is systemically racist and people should be judged based on the color of their skin, instead of the content of their character.”

  Vought, who authored former President Trump’s executive order banning CRT in the federal government, argued that Biden had made the theory “the governing paradigm of his administration, insisting on dividing the country based on race.”

  The back-and-forth comes as schools across the country prepare to welcome students back to the classroom in person later this summer, and as the nation’s two largest teachers unions vow to support their members teaching of the theory.

  At its annual meeting, the National Association of Educators adopted an agenda item stating, “it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory.”

  NEA President Becky Pringle urged teachers to adopt similar teachings in their lesson plans, saying, “If this grand experiment in democracy is to succeed, if the inhabitants of our nation are to prosper, we must continuously do the work to challenge ourselves and others to dismantle the racist interconnected systems and the economic injustices that have perpetuated systemic inequities.”

  The NEA along with the American Teachers Federation are preparing legal challenges to state laws stripping such lessons from curricula. At least six states have passed new laws limiting how race can be taught in the classroom, the Associated Press reported, and similar proposals are being considered in more than a dozen others.

  Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill into law last month that bars schools from teaching students that anyone “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race or sex. Liberty and equality, the law states, should be taught as “authentic founding principles,” not slavery or racism, according to a majority of Texas lawmakers.

  It comes as no surprise that the White House stands with the teachers’ unions. On the first full day of the new administration, Dr. Jill Biden hosted a summit to celebrate educators, and just two guests were invited to the White House: the heads of the two largest public teachers unions in the country. “I’m so proud that you are leading the NEA, which as you probably know is my union,” the first lady told Pringle. Weingarten, the leader of the AFT, was described the first lady as “the kind of general who is never far from the front lines.”

  She promised that with her husband as president, the unions “will always have a seat at the table.”

  “Together, we are going to transform our nation’s education system. And when we do that, we will change the course of our future forever,” she added. “And if you ever wonder if it’s possible, just remember that the First Lady of the United States is one of your own.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 22:40

• Capitol Police To Use Military Surveillance Equipment In Role As 'Intelligence-Based Protective Agency'
  Capitol Police To Use Military Surveillance Equipment In Role As ‘Intelligence-Based Protective Agency’

  In response to the January 6 Capitol riot, US Capitol Police will begin employing military surveillance equipment used by the Army in what the Washington Times described as part of “sweeping security upgrades” as the force transforms into “an intelligence-based protective agency.” 

  

  Upgrades will include eight ‘Persistent Surveillance Systems Ground – Medium’ (PSSG-M) units, which provide HD surveillance video and includes night vision. According to the Pentagon, it does not include facial recognition.

  “This technology will be integrated with existing USCP camera infrastructure, providing greater high definition surveillance capacity to meet steady-state mission requirements and help identify emerging threats,” said the Pentagon.

  The technology allowed U.S. troops fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor large areas 24/7 through extremely high-resolution cameras.

  Some privacy rights advocates have raised concern that Capitol Police are getting into the business of spying on Americans.

  In a wartime application, the persistent surveillance units were mounted on tethered blimps. The data could be stored, combined with sensor data from other platforms, and later referenced or rewound to track individuals or groups.

  The military could use the system to develop “pattern of life” analyses on suspected enemy combatants or intelligence targets in war zones. It could determine, for example, who was responsible for placing an improvised explosive device. –Washington Times

  According to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report, the Department of Homeland Security leased the same, or similar technology through the Department of Defense.

  Few details were provided to the Times about the new system – such as how and where it will be deployed, or whether collected data will be stored or disseminated – or whether it will be shared with other agencies.

  

  “Hopefully, you can understand it wouldn’t be smart of us tell the world all our capabilities,” a Capitol Police official told the Times.

  The Pentagon says the Army will install the units and provide training to the Capitol Police to operate and maintain the system. Once installed, the Army won’t have any role in operation.

  Read the rest of the report here.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 22:20

• Where The Divide In Star Wars Mirrors The Culture War
  Where The Divide In Star Wars Mirrors The Culture War

  Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

  For nearly four years now I’ve struggled with putting my finger on why so many Star Wars fans hate Rian Johnson’s Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. For me it is one of the very best the franchise has ever produced because of its willingness to challenge our assumptions about how the mythology in Star Wars actually works.

  I know many out there feel very differently. And that’s fine, as long as you are honest about why you feel that way.

  And that mythology is an important thing to challenge in a time where the Myth of America is fading. The Myth of Democracy, Socialism, Equality are failing. Gender Roles and and all other societal norms are under assault. In fact, challenging dogma and narratives is what this blog and all of my content is geared towards, even if I don’t get things right all the time.

  

  No one does. Everyone fails. Even our childhood heroes.

  And I know that is difficult, if not downright disturbing, to deal with. But, we’re all going through it, even the people making these movies.

  Look at the radical shift in traditional American conservatives since the 2020 election. They’ve lost something vital, something which had previously animated them; their belief that the institutions of America were redeemable. We didn’t want to believe our courts, our votes were beyond contempt; that our leaders were more than just cowards and traitors. That when it came to a national election for President, no one would be brazen enough to systemically cheat enough to change the outcome of it.

  Don’t believe me? A simple twitter thread became the biggest news story in the U.S. over the past two days.

  You know the one.

  I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself. 1/x

  — MartyrMade (@martyrmade) July 8, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  But back to The Last Jedi. It is the exploration and inquisition of our reactions to events/movies/art that matters. Without intense examination of our own motivations and our own reactions to things there can be no growth.

  The Last Jedi, like Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice provoked people to visceral, all-consuming anger in a portion of their respective fanbases. These stories are our modern mythologies.

  You can dismiss that as the rantings of half-formed man-children or you can show a little empathy and realize that they, like those that have had their illusions ripped from them by the election, are reflecting a part of the same anxiety and fear of the future that exists all across the political divide, in all of us.

  In many ways having Batman murder bad guys is akin to Jesus rising again with an AK-47 and mowing down the Pharisees. These characters and stories are that important to them, even if they are derivatives of the more abiding, universal texts.

  That said, while I’m happy to engage that anger I’m not sympathetic to those still holding onto it after four freaking years. There comes a point where you have to face that thing you reject: that person, movie, poem, etc., go into its cave and overcome it.

  Otherwise, did you not actually listen to the stories you thought you loved so much?

  After a long time of dealing with this, privately taking more than ten thousand words of notes on this subject, I finally just put them all together into one place. One measured monologue.

  What can #StarWars Teach Us About the Culture War?https://t.co/wXHCY7k0ec

  — Tom Luongo (@TFL1728) July 11, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Because what’s the point of pointing out all of the things wrong with the world if I don’t also try to equip you with the tools you need to face what it’s going to throw at you? This isn’t about The Last Jedi or Man of Steel. It’s about all of us, all the time, having to do the hard work of self-examination to build a version of ourselves capable of withstanding the pressures of the day.

  That Batman so many hated watching on screen in BvS, the one obsessed with murdering Superman, is the end game of toxic fan culture. He’s fully objectified his target… “You were never a god…. you weren’t even a man,” he growls at Clark in rage. The same thing happened to Zack Snyder. Only empathy brings him back. His daughter committing suicide brought many back from the brink.

  Well, today, only empathy with people like Rian Johnson and Lucasfilm CEO Kathleen Kennedy can bring many Star Wars fans back from their anger. And if you can do this with something as innocuous as a movie franchise then you can maybe begin to do it in your real life as well.

  Because, the flip side to that is even more true. If you can’t ever forgive the sin of The Last Jedi then how can you ever forgive something or someone even more important to you?

  This is the essence of storytelling. This is why we create stories. Why we tell them to each other. It’s why the Bible and other religious texts are the collected wisdom of hundreds of generations of humans. They are practice runs and training manuals for how we deal with each other in real life.

  YouTube has empowered an entire sub-culture of MGTOW’s, itself the ultimate expression of male weakness in the face of toxic femininity, to obsess about these things and drive ad revenue to them.

  Their hate has made them powerful. They hold sway over a whole rotten sub-culture wallowing in their hate.

  And I believe very strongly they have been helped along by those very people intent on destroying all positive aspects of culture and community. Maybe that’s a little too tin foil hat for you.

  But how else do you account for the theatrical cut of BvS? A cut designed to make the movie and its hero, Superman, as unlikeable and unwatchable as possible?

  If you want proof many executives in Hollywood hate us, I give you that cut and Joss Whedon’s abortion of Justice League as living proof. There was something willful at play there.

  Star Wars, as much as you personally may dismiss is as silly, was and is important to millions of people. And if you were someone trying to destroy a culture wouldn’t you help something so important to entire generations of Americans as Star Wars to destroy itself? Wouldn’t you encourage the fans to fight among themselves, to nurture that anxiety in the real world spilling into their ‘safe space?’

  It’s not like we haven’t seen this playbook before either.

  I know that those same commies worked really hard to separate my generation from the religion of our parents. Star Wars came out at the exact right time in 1977 to have the biggest possible cultural impact it could. And the brunt of that impact, because of the malaise of that decade where myths about America first started failing rapidly, was felt most strongly in my generation of American boys.

  So, doesn’t it only makes sense for them to destroy Star Wars, or even better, encourage it to destroy itself rather than let it thrive during the apotheosis of Great Reset?

  Or are Millennial soy-boys going to try and tell me today’s communists are okay with Christianity now?

  I believe this is true because it is these men they are trying so hard to bankrupt, marginalize, discourage and prevent from having any voice or political power in society today. That’s why they hated Trump so much. They knew the power of our resolve. That’s why he had to go and that’s why they had to do it in the most dishonest and discouraging way imaginable.

  And The Last Jedi gave us a Luke Skywalker that saw this coming and hid from it only to come back out and become an even bigger legend than ever before by saying he was sorry and admitting his failure.

  The sad truth is that all that is good, precious and dear to us is under assault by people who are committed to depravity and control. We do ourselves zero favors thinking of people as enemies those who we share a common love but different opinions about. We can only repair this breaking world if we realize that. Otherwise, the suffering will only continue.

  If we can get back to that empathy with those we disagree with, then maybe, just maybe, Star Wars, like the Myth of America, will have validated itself as something still worth considering.

  *  *  *

  Join My Patreon even if you think Star Wars is Silly.

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 22:00

• Just 5% Of All Bitcoins In Circulation Have Traded In The Past Year
  Just 5% Of All Bitcoins In Circulation Have Traded In The Past Year

  In JPMorgan’s latest weekly bitcoin hit piece (because for some “inexplicable” reason, JPMorgan executive have instructed most of the bank’s strategists, including those covering equity and rates, to slam the cryptocurrency on a weekly if not daily basis while the bank quietly builds out its own proprietary crypto fund, almost as if it is desperate to scare its clients into selling), the bank makes an interesting argument: bitcoin is not liquid enough to be successfully implemented as a legal tender in El Salvador.

  We won’t speak to the validity of JPM’s argument – we will soon find out first hand whether or not El Salvador made a mistake in adopting bitcoin as legal tender – although it certainly is simple enough: “daily payment activity in El Salvador would represent ~4% of recent on-chain transaction volume and more than 1% of the total value of tokens which have been transferred between wallets in the past year,” the report said, with the illiquidity and nature of the volume “potentially a significant limitation on its potential as a medium of exchange.”

  Perhaps, then again in its brief history bitcoin has certainly demonstrated that it is remarkably scalable and viable even without a central bank propping it up every time there is even a modest risk-flaring hiccup, which is much more than we could ever say about the global stock market or currencies such as Europe’s “whatever it takes” euro.

  Of course, JPMorgan – a bank that directly benefited form more than one multibilion bailout – will be the last to admit just how much sustainable the cryptocurrency has become, which is why we will ignore the bank’s latest round of propaganda, but will point out an interesting fact unearthed by JPMorgan: it goes straight to the heart of the recurring argument why bitcoin is so volatile.

  The reason, as JPM has discovered, is that bitcoin’s float may be as little as 5%, if not less. Discussing the daily trading volumes of bitcoin, JPM notes that a large fraction of Bitcoin are locked up in illiquid entities (liquidity sinks), “with more than 90% not changing hands in more than a year” while roughly 80% – and rising – are held by wallets with light turnover.  This means that a paltry 5-10% of all bitcoin in circulation has traded in the past year.

  

  Another way of putting it: an asset with a $600 billion market cap has a float of just $30 billion. Which is remarkable as it means that no whales sold bitcoin when it hit its all time high of $65,000. And if they didn’t sell then, they certainly won’t sell now when it’s half that price.

  This, more than anything else, explains why bitcoin – an asset whose market cap was more than a $1 trillion as recently as April – is so extremely volatile: with the vast majority of bitcoin locked up or held by whale accounts who rarely if ever trade, the marginal price setter of bitcoin are odd lots – a burst of trading in fractions of a bitcoin, where the momentum in many cases is ignited and magnified by HFTs who then shape the movement of the crypto in hopes of hitting the max pain stop loss positions for other cryptos, and where as a result of such a unique trading environment, the price of bitcoin can swing 10%, 15% , or even 20% or more every day.

  The question we have is during liquidation pukes like the one observed recently, how much of the newly released bitcoin are gobbled up by existing or new whales. Judging by the gray line in the chart above, the answer is a record amount.

  Which means that we are now in the “weak hands” shake out and whale accumulation phase. And once the new generation of whales has bought enough, that’s when the next squeeze higher will take place, sending the crypto currency and its peers to fresh all time highs. Because if there is one thing that is very easy to do with an asset whose float is as low as bitcoin’s, it is to manipulate it as a handful of big players want.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 21:40

• WHO Is Working On "Digital Wallet" To Store Vaccination Certification: Official
  WHO Is Working On “Digital Wallet” To Store Vaccination Certification: Official

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

  A World Health Organization (WHO) official said that the organization is working to develop a COVID-19 vaccine “digital wallet” and is also seeking to “increase the distribution” of an international certificate for those who’ve been vaccinated.

  

  Dr. Michael Ryan, an Irish epidemiologist who is head of the WHO health emergencies program dealing with COVID-19, made the remarks during a daily news briefing on July 12 in Geneva.

  “We have encouraged countries that want to, they may use the international certificate for vaccination and prophylaxis … that requires other countries to recognize that certificate of vaccination,” Ryan said, adding that WHO is “working to increase the distribution of the paper versions of her international certificate of vaccination prophylaxis, and also developing a digital wallet that could be used for the same purpose.”

  The organization, he said, will provide more “detailed data standards” for individual countries “to generate their own digital vaccination certificate, but that does not get around the policy issues around which vaccines are recognized within that system that that is essentially an international policy issue between countries.”

  Ryan didn’t provide details about the digital wallet, which sparked concern and criticism on social media on July 12 about whether such an international vaccine passport-style system could be implemented by WHO for travel.

  WHO officials didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

  Vaccine passports have been panned by civil liberties and human rights groups, who have said such centralized systems could violate individuals’ privacy. Some Republican lawmakers said passports would create a two-tier society, of unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals—with unvaccinated individuals being denied services or even their rights.

  Among those critics include the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which wrote a blog post saying there is “a lot that can go wrong” with vaccine passports.

  “It’s likely that such requests will become over-used as people get asked for credentials at every turn,” the group wrote in late March.

  “While there are legitimate circumstances in which people can be asked for proof of vaccination, we don’t want to turn into a checkpoint society that outlasts the danger of COVID and that casually excludes people without credentials from facilities where vaccine mandates are not highly justified.”

  Several Republican-led states have either passed laws or implemented executive orders barring the use of vaccine passports by local or state government offices, while places including Florida have implemented bans on private businesses from doing so.

  Officials in the Biden administration said several months ago that they aren’t pushing for a federal vaccine passport mandate. Last week, however, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration wouldn’t intervene if businesses use them.

  “That’s not currently the role of the federal government,” Psaki told reporters. “There are a number of private sector entities, universities, institutions, that are starting to mandate, and that’s an innovative step that they will take and they should take. That’s not—and we’re not taking issue with that.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 21:20

• Australia's COVID Outbreak Worsens Despite Economy-Crippling Lockdowns
  Australia’s COVID Outbreak Worsens Despite Economy-Crippling Lockdowns

  By some inexplicable phenomenon, Sydney’s COVID outbreak has continued to worsen (albeit by margins that most cities would consider negligible) despite the lockdown measures that have been in place for nearly three weeks at this point.

  Now, the prospect for another lockdown extension looms as Australia’s largest city and the surrounding state – New South Wales, Australia’s largest by population – reports 112 new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases, almost all of which were linked to Sydney. However, there was a silver lining: the number of newly infected out in the community declined to 34 from 45.

  But fears about the delta variant, which has been driving the spread, might lead to even more draconian measures.

  

  State Premier Gladys Berejiklian said it was this last figure that would, in the coming days, determine whether Sydney’s lockdown, due to end on Friday, would be extended.

  “That’s the number we need to get as close to zero as possible,” Berejiklian said during her daily televised briefing. “It is really up to us. The health expert advice will be based on what those numbers look like. I can’t be clearer than that.”

  Sydney is bracing for a longer and stricter lockdown after continued increases in COVID-19 cases, while the New South Wales Premier stated things are going to get worse before they get better.

  The outbreak has prompted the Australia-Singapore travel bubble to be delayed until at least the end of the year, according to Australian press reports, despite the fact that nearly all of the new cases reported on Monday involved family members or friends of previously diagnosed patients.

  Meanwhile, a new report from Deloitte showed that consumer movement-related activity in the city’s central business district has plunged by nearly 90% in the two weeks since the Sydney lockdown started compared to its levels from two years ago. Even in Melbourne, where restrictions were just lifted, movement remained off 80% from the levels a year ago.

  The drop in activity is placing small businesses and restaurants in a difficult position. The iconic Melbourne rooftop bar Madame Brussels announced Monday that it would become the latest victim of the pandemic when it closes its doors next week after 15 years. “The city’s just not coming back,” co-owner Paula Scholes said.

  

  Andrew’s Bird & Pet Palace, which has been operated for nearly 40 years by the same couple, took in just A$150 in sales on Sunday, vs. an average of more than A$3,000 ($2,245).

  With a total of around 31.2K cases and 911 deaths tallied since the start of the pandemic, Australia has fared far better than many of its rivals. The country’s vaccine rollout.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 21:00

• DOJ Retracts Claim It Seized "Fully Constructed" Lego Set From Accused Capitol Rioter
  DOJ Retracts Claim It Seized “Fully Constructed” Lego Set From Accused Capitol Rioter

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  The Department of Justice has retracted its claim that it seized a “fully constructed U.S. Capitol Lego set” from an accused Capitol rioter.

  

  A U.S. Capitol Lego set seized by FBI agents from Robert Morss, an accused U.S. Capitol rioter. (DOJ)

  In an memorandum asking a court to order Robert Morss be held pending trial, prosecutors claimed that law enforcement officials “recover[e]d a fully constructed U.S. Capitol Lego set” while arresting the defendant.

  But in a supplemental motion, authorities said they erred in conveying that claim.

  “Please note that after a review of the photographs from the search, there appears to have been a miscommunication and that statement appears to be inaccurate. The Lego set was in a box and not fully constructed at the time of the search, as pictured below,” they wrote.

  So the fully constructed Lego set was a lie? pic.twitter.com/hbERXxsPcu

  — THOR the Deplorable 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@ThorDeplorable) July 12, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  A lawyer representing Morss did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

  

  Morss is in custody on charges including civil disorder and violent entry of a building on Capitol grounds.

  Surveillance footage showed Morss on Jan. 6 push his way toward a line of officers guarding the Lower West Terrace doors of the Capitol, prosecutors say. He then allegedly grabbed an officer’s shield and passed it back to other members of the crowd.

  Morss and other rioters ultimately entered the Capitol through a broken window, footage showed.

  Prosecutors allege he would pose a danger to the community and present a flight risk if released.

  A hearing on whether to allow Morss’s release is scheduled for July 13.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 20:40

• Pfizer Sells "Booster" Jabs To Israel As COVID Cases Rebound
  Pfizer Sells “Booster” Jabs To Israel As COVID Cases Rebound

  Despite boasting higher adult vaccination rates than any other developed nation, Israel is scrambling to stanch a resurgence of new COVID infections after the country’s top scientists revealed that they believed the Pfizer vaccine is only 64% effective at preventing infections involving the Delta variant currently stoking problems across the globe.

  Just last week, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech announced plans to seek approval for a “booster” dose, provoking a rare, and surprisingly adversarial, response from the CDC and FDA. The two government agencies warned that there was presently no reason to believe that a “booster dose” will be necessary.

  

  If nothing else, this simply demonstrates that “the science” is no longer the priority for either Big Pharma, nor the federal government, since Big Pharma is now focused on maximizing profits from its new cash cow, while the federal government is calibrating everything it says and does with an eye toward encouraging as many American adults as possible to get vaccinated.

  And if people read that they’re going to need a booster shot in a few months anyway, why would they bother getting vaccinated now?

  Anyway, having been stymied in the US, Pfizer is trudging ahead with its “booster shot” plans by striking a deal to expedite resupply to Israel, which is planning to administer a third “booster” jab to patients with certain high-risk comorbidities starting Aug. 1.

  The Jerusalem Post reports that the next shipment of Pfizer jabs will arrive on Aug. 1 instead of in September (Israel also has 200K doses of Moderna on hand, but those can only be used on adult patients).

  Israeli PM Naftali Bennett said Sunday: “We have been working on the issue of vaccines for several weeks,” Bennett said. “This morning, I am pleased to announce that after a series of discussions with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, we closed a deal last night to move up the next vaccination delivery to August 1.” “There are vaccines for everyone.”

  Last week, Israel announced it had agreed on a vaccine-exchange deal with South Korea. Under the terms of the deal, Israel delivered some 700K doses to South Korea, which it will return when it receives its next vaccine delivery.

  And as we noted earlier, immuno-compromised patients will be able to receive their third shot starting immediately, said Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz.

  In the meantime, Israel continues to register a higher number of daily cases. At the beginning of June, some 10-20 people were found to be new virus carriers every day. Currently, several hundred are testing positive on a daily basis. The number of active cases (which had shrunk to 200 recently) has rebounded to 4,000.

  

  Pfizer will meet with top US health officials on Monday to discuss Pfizer’s push to receive federal authorization for its booster shot, according to the Associated Press.

  “Certainly, immunity decreases over time…the question is how much time,” one doctor told CNBC during an interview Monday morning.

  Before Delta arrived in Israel, some believed the country had reached “herd immunity”. But as Dr. Scott Gottlieb and others have pointed out, COVID is now endemic in the human population, and reaching “COVID zero”, a standard that Israel is aiming at, simply might not be possible. Israeli officials have already acknowledged that with the large percentage of Israeli’s vaccinated, deaths and hospitalizations associated with COVID will likely continue to decline, even if the number of new cases does rise.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 20:20

• The ESG Case For Crypto
  The ESG Case For Crypto

  Authored by Omid Malekan via Medium.com, (emphasis ours)

  First, let’s state the obvious: Bitcoin mining uses a lot of electricity, so it’s bad for the environment. Anyone who claims otherwise is either a salesperson or a fool. Arguing that mining is good for the environment because it encourages investment in renewables is like arguing that smoking saves lives by driving cancer research. All of the energy comparisons to the traditional banking system are also foolish.

  There are various nuances to this debate, but none change the fact that Bitcoin has a significant carbon footprint.

  

  But so do a lot of things.

  Tellingly, none are as controversial.

  What’s the carbon footprint of people cranking the AC, ordering takeout and watching Netflix? Significant, but seldom debated. Every kind of human activity impacts the environment, and plenty of mundane activities use “more power than some countries” when measured in aggregate. Deciding which ones are worthwhile requires an objective cost-benefit analysis and comparison to similar activities. Bitcoin mining is rather unique, but for the sake of argument, let’s compare it to the US military.

  Like Bitcoin, the US military uses more energy than some countries. Also like Bitcoin, a big reason why is to secure the purchasing power of a currency. But unlike Bitcoin, the military does this in a roundabout way, protecting unsavory regimes who price their exports in dollars and dropping the occasional bomb. The relationship between money and power is almost as old as money itself, with those issuing the former often utilizing the latter to keep their currency on top. Bitcoin’s clever contribution is to make this previously implicit relationship explicit. People trust its coins because they require a lot of power to produce.

  The ESG case for crypto starts with the recognition that the power consumption of coins like Bitocin and Ether is a feature and not a bug, the most important component of a novel security mechanism that achieves something remarkable: a global monetary system that is independent of any corporation or government, and strictly opt-in.

  There are no exclusive legal tender laws, capital controls or naval fleets that force people to trust Bitcoin. And yet, hundreds of millions do, perhaps for that very reason.

  

  Crypto has no coercion. It uses transparency, math and economic incentives to build trust where it wouldn’t otherwise exist. Crypto is meritocratic. Anyone can do anything — from mining to using to saving — and lots of people all over the world do. Like Lady Justice herself, crypto is blind. It doesn’t care (or even know about) anyone’s nationality, race, age, gender or sexual orientation. It’s the first electronic payment system that is accessible to anyone anywhere, from undcoumented workers in Western countries to women in Islamists ones to dissidents fighting dictators. The environmental impact is therefore offset by the social benefits, a negative E in exchange for a positive S.

  That tradeoff is worth it, thanks to the increasingly tragic failures of the traditional monetary system. Not in terms of devaluation and inflation — though that may come later — but in terms of access. Over one and a half billion global unbanked, most of them poor, undocumented, minority and innocent. That last adjective is important, because the exclusionary nature of our existing financial system is no accident. It’s a direct consequence of a system built on a presumption of guilt.

  As proof, consider the simple fact that opening up a bank account is often more intrusive than having open-heart surgery. Your doctor doesn’t have to collect a bunch of legal documents and perform a background check before doing her job, but your banker does. Most industries operate on a presumption of innocence. They accept anyone as a customer until individual behavior or law enforcement gives them a reason not to. Banking works on the opposite principle. Everyone is a potential terrorist or money launderer until they prove otherwise.

  This presumption of guilt is a minor nuisance for the affluent, but an existential threat to the underprivileged. It’s one reason why poor neighborhoods feature more pseudo-financial services like check cashers and pawn chops than bank branches, even in rich countries. It’s also a contributor to the growing wealth gap. Those who have the least amount of money pay the highest fees, keeping them ensconced in poverty. It’s not that banks don’t want to serve these communities. It’s that so-called anti-money laundering (AML) know-your-client (KYC) & sanctions regulations make it too hard or too expensive for them to do so.

  Bitcoin itself may not be the solution to this problem, but the tokenized financial system that it represents can, because it’s built on a presumption of innocence. Unlike banks and Fintechs who have no choice but to rely on legal identity — the kind that 10 million undocumented workers in America don’t have — tokens rely on cryptographic identity. Math doesn’t discriminate, so anyone who wants to access a blockchain network — to transfer Bitcoins, dollars or any other store of value — is able to. It goes without saying that the vast majority won’t be doing anything illegal. They’ll order goods online or send money back home, without having to pay exorbitant fees.

  Here the crypto critics chime in with the now-cliched canard about illicit use. They claim that a financial system as open to undcoumented Mexicans as it is to affluent Americans will be rife with criminal activity. The inherent racism and classism of this argument aside, it fails a basic smell test. It would be one thing if the existing financial system, for all of its exclusionary tendencies, actually prevented crime. But the numbers indicate otherwise.

  According to the World Economic Forum, an estimated 2 to 5 percent of global GDP — some two trillion dollars per year — is laundered through the banking system. There is $30b a year in credit card fraud, and according to acclaimed economist Kenneth Rogoff, up to a third of all hundred dollar bills are used in illegal activity. The most reliable estimate for the amount of Bitcoins used in illicit activity in 2020 — as published by Chainalysis, the leading government contractor in this domain — is only ten billion dollars, equal to the amount of money-laundering related fines global banks paid in the same period.

  If the existing approach was remotely successful at keeping out the bad guys, then we could have a debate about whether the social costs were worth it. But guilty until proven innocent has failed on both fronts, so it’s time for a new approach, one that shifts the focus from keeping out bad actors to isolating bad money — know your token as opposed to know your client. Here the transparency and immutability of blockchain networks come in handy. Unlike duffel bags full of cash or structured wire transfers, tokens leave a perfect audit trail, one that is increasingly used to solve crimes.

  

  source: Chainalysis

  The social benefits of crypto don’t end there. Tempting as it might be to shift the ESG debate away from speculative bitcoin to less power hungry platforms or central bank digital currencies, we should not shortchange what Bitcoin itself has achieved, which is to appreciate significantly. Skeptics love to complain about its volatility, despite the fact that it has always resolved to the upside. This critique can even be heard on Wall Street, where lots of things — including credit default swaps, Tesla stock and negatively priced oil futures — are also volatile. The inconsistency might have something to do with who has benefited.

  Bitcoin has made a lot of poor, foreign, minority and young people rich, even when factoring in the recent decline. This is in stark contrast to other high flying investments such as venture capital, private equity or real estate, access to which is restricted. Before Bitcoin, a majority of people had no access to the majority of assets — a socioeconomic failure so astonishing that it’s worth repeating: poor people don’t get to invest in most things, due to a nasty combination of misguided laws, high minimum entry prices, lack of infrastructure in poor countries and KYC regulations in rich ones. According to the FDIC, up to a third of all African Americans remain underbanked, and people who have a hard time getting bank accounts have an even harder time opening brokerage ones. But anyone could have bought bitcoin at any time, and even a few dollars invested five years ago would be worth thousands today.

  

  But that’s not how crypto investing is presented. Tellingly, the only time when investment luminaries like Warren Buffet or central bankers like Neel Kashkari comment on the investment potential of Bitcoin is to criticize it — “rat poison squared” according to Buffett and “burning garbage” per Kashkari. Their ignorance of what Bitcoin has achieved for ordinary people brings us to the final ESG argument for crypto, its superior governance.

  Crypto governance is egalitarian. Anyone can contribute, and lots of people all over the world do, by holding tokens, validating transactions, hosting nodes or submitting code. Crypto governance is also meritocratic. There are no politically appointed positions, entrenched incumbents or captured regulators. Some of the most important participants are pseudonymous, because the community doesn’t care where someone comes from or what school they attended.

  All that matters is their contribution, the ultimate embodiment of Emerson’s “doing well as a result of doing good.”

  This is in stark contrast to traditional governance, where power is usually shared by a small group of people who attend the same schools, work at the same companies and exist in the same power circles. No wonder then that Mr. Kashkari (Republican, Wharton MBA, former Goldman banker) and Mr Buffett (Democrat, Wharton MBA, former Goldman shareholder) share a disdain for crypto. If traditional governance was more like crypto governance, then Mr. Kahkari, chief architect of the U.S. government’s TARP program, would have never been able to engineer the taxpayer funded bailouts that disproportionately benefited Warren Buffet’s investment portfolio, almost half of which was in financial stocks at the dawn of the 2008 crisis. Despite his poor judgement at that time, Mr. Buffett is now only richer for the experience. The countless people who lost their home or their job in the same crisis are not.

  Perhaps more than anything, the ESG case for crypto begins and ends with what it isn’t, which is the old way of doing things.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 20:00

• Mike Wilson Re-Emerges As Wall Street's Biggest Bear: Here's Why He Expects A 20% Drop In Stocks
  Mike Wilson Re-Emerges As Wall Street’s Biggest Bear: Here’s Why He Expects A 20% Drop In Stocks

  Back in the summer of 2018, when stocks were surging at least until the fourth quarter when the Fed made the policy error of hiking too hard and unleashing the first mini bear market since the financial crisis, and when virtually all sellside analysts were euphorically bullish, Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson emerged as the street’s lonesome bear (in addition to SocGen’s permabear Albert Edwards of course), and it was then that Wilson first popularized the concept of the “rolling bear market.” Speaking in May of 2018, Wilson said that “every sector has gone down at least 11 or 12 percent at least once this year. Some were down 18, 19, 20 percent. It’s fooling everybody at the index level, but there’s a lot of pain out there: Staples, homebuilders, some of these semiconductor stocks that are more cyclical are having problems.”

  Fast forward a little over three years, when Wilson has just reincarnated the “rolling” drop concept, only this time it has yet to grow to a fully mature “rolling bear market” and instead in his Monday Weekly Warmup note, Wilson defines what is plaguing thebroader market as a series of “rolling corrections”, which like 2018 has meant that while 2021 has “produced another year of above average returns for major indices, under the surface it has been far from easy to navigate.” This, to Wilson, is a classic mid-cycle transition price action (as a reminder Wilson has been pounding the table on his assertion that the market is now mid-cycle”) resulting in “rotations away from higher risk with deteriorating breadth.” The ultimate outcome of such rolling corrections will be a 20% “de-rating” in the broader market, i.e., an aggressive selloff.

  Here is how Wilson defines his own descent into bearishness:

  Over the past several months we have taken a less optimistic view of the markets than most based on our “mid cycle transition” narrative. During such periods, it’s common for the market to rotate away from early cycle winners toward larger cap, higher quality stocks. This rotation away from early cycle leadership and small caps is now well established and underway (Exhibit 1). There is also a de-rating process for the broader market of approximately 20% that usually occurs (Exhibit 2).

  

  So far, Wilson calculates, that derating process is only about 25% of the way done but he “fully expects it” to complete before year end. That means a forward P/E that is about 18x versus today’s 21.3x, which using simple math means a drop of just under 700 S&P points (assuming flat fwd earnings). And while Wilson notes that “push back to that view has been strong” he reiterates that his bearish conviction “remains high based on other moves we have observed in the markets.”

  Going back to his trademark concept of “rolling bear markets corrections“, Wilson writes that while “the S&P 500 has grinded higher and even exceeded our year end price target thanks to very positive earnings revisions, many sectors and stocks have corrected by 20%+. In fact, one could say we have experienced a rolling correction even as the index has remained in an strong uptrend.”

  Furthermore, and this validates our own recent observations on the technical cracks underneath the market surface, the Morgan Stanley strategist warns that financial markets “have taken on a much more defensive posture which is in-line with his midcycle transition narrative. Nowhere has this defensiveness been more visible than the Treasury market where 10 year yields have plummeted along with the yield curve.”

  

  While most have blamed extreme positioning and short covering on the back of the Fed’s modest hawkishness after its June meeting, Wilson disagrees and argues that rates, and the yield curve topped in March, long before the Fed pivoted in June: “As such, we have taken a different view than the consensus citing the potential for a slow down in the second half of the year due to monetary aggregates’ growth decelerating and peak rate of change on economic and earnings revisions.”

  There’s more behind Wilson’s growing bearish sentiment, and it has to do with the economy’s deteriorating fundamentals.

  In addition to the very difficult comps from last year’s pull forward of demand for many consumer and technology goods, Morgan Stanley’s chief equity strategist also thinks the consensus underappreciates the magnitude of the fiscal stimulus that was distributed in 1Q, or as he puts it, “The effect on personal disposal income, and spending, cannot be over-stated.” And so, given the sharp decline in personal income since the last stimulus checks went out in March, retail sales and consumer spending more generally will likely follow soon, he argues.

  

  Here Wilson notes that while some have countered that the child care tax credit checks will maintain the momentum in consumer spending, he disagrees stating that it doesn’t really compare: “we’re talking about $18B per month versus trillions over the past year from other programs that are fading fast. For example, the expiration of the supplemental unemployment benefits in August which will essentially offset the child care tax credits. Net net, when we include all these programs, our economics team forecasts a trajectory that moves more in line with GDP from here.” Based on the impossible comparisons, Wilson warns that the US economy is headed for a big deceleration in y/y growth from the 22% surge in 1Q21 that troughs at -9% y/y decline in 1Q2022. Unless, of course, a new mega-crisis “unexpectedly emerges” greenlighting the injection of several trillions more in fiscal stimulus – one wonder if said crisis will be the “delta”, “lmabda” variant, or something yet undefined…

  

  Still looking back at the recent economic performance, Wilson notes that the trillions in Q1 stimulus translated into much better than expected GDP, sales growth and operating leverage, which he notes was “part of our bullish view a year ago but now it’s played out and more importantly, it has been embedded into earnings expectations.” Paradoxically, earnings revision breadth has never been higher even though the underlying causes behind the growth bump are now long gone.

  

  Furthermore, absolute increases to 2Q estimates for the S&P 500 since the end of 1Q have amounted to +7.5% or 2x the typical revision during a normal quarter. In some sectors, it’s much more extreme. In particular, we would cite consumer durables and tech hardware as outliers where a payback in demand seems likely.

  Stepping away from economic fundamentals and turning back to recent market performance, Wilson says that he believes “the recent decline in rates, commodities, and cyclical stocks geared to economic growth is indicative of a market that is getting worried about the sustainability of the pace of recovery, especially relative to expectations.”

  He adds that perhaps the greatest warning sign coming from the market is “the increasing deterioration in breadth as the index makes new highs every week”, something we highlighted last week when we showed the collapse in new 52-week highs on the NYSE.

  

  And while the decline in long end rates has appropriately benefited large cap growth stocks over the past month, with the likes of AAPL, MSFT and AMZN all hitting record highs in recent days, Wilson argues that lower rates from here will no longer prove to be beneficial to stocks “as it will signal these growth fears are coming true.”

  We then get to one of Wilson’s favorite topics: The equity risk premium.

  We have long argued that the Equity Risk Premium (ERP) is unlikely to break 275bps on the downside as long as we are in a world of financial repression (Exhibit 9). Indeed, the ERP bottomed once again at that level in April just as rates were topping. Since then, rates have backed up 50bps as ERP has risen by slightly more, thereby keeping PEs the same. From here, our view is that ERP will rise further as rates drift lower, particular as the market starts to interpret these lower rates as bad for economic growth. Furthermore, whenever real 10 year yields have been this low in the context of decelerating growth, the ERP has been materially higher (Exhibit 10).

  

  Conversely, should rates begin to recover and move higher later this year as the growth scare comes to an end, the ERP is unlikely to offset on the downside as it will begin to price in the continued recovery and inevitable move higher in rates as the Fed tapers asset purchases and raises the front end.

  Wilson’s bottom – and bearish – line is that valuations are coming down further as they typically do during all mid cycle transitions; the coming correction also fits with Wilson’s 1940s analog (which he first detailed back in March), in which the MS strategist showed how ERPs bottomed around the same levels about a year after WWII ended and the economy reopened. In other words, “similar to today, the market anticipated the end of the war and appropriately priced the recovery to come. PEs fell sharply once the recovery was in full bloom in 1946 and the Fed began its long move away from the zero bound“

  

  The only difference between the 1940s and now, is that back then the US was coming out of a war; well, according to many the only thing that can keep the US economy – and stocks – growing at the current nosebleed pace, is entrance into a war, either a regional, container conflict or something much bigger: think China.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 19:44

• Top US General In Afghanistan Steps Down In "Symbolic End" To America's Longest War
  Top US General In Afghanistan Steps Down In “Symbolic End” To America’s Longest War

  The top US commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, has stepped down on Monday in what’s being dubbed a symbolic end to to two decades of war. Miller has overseen American military forces in Afghanistan for almost three years, and formally relinquished responsibility in a ceremony in Kabul.

  He’s considered the longest serving commander in Afghanistan and has recently consistently raised the alarm of the pace of Taliban gains amid the US withdrawal effort. According to The Hill, ahead of Biden’s expected August 31 ‘completion’ of the mission date issued last week, “Virtually all other troops, contractors and equipment already have exited, defense officials said on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.”

  

  Monday’s “Transfer of Authority ceremony” in Kabul handed over the reigns to CENTCOM chief Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, who will oversee the final exit and deployment of the planned-for approximately 650 troops to guard the large US embassy compound in Kabul.

  McKenzie will manage the final logistics and winding down of the military mission from his headquarters in Tampa. CNN has meanwhile reported that “Rear Adm. Peter Vasely will reportedly lead approximately 650 troops that are responsible for protecting the US Embassy.”

  President Biden in his big Afghan exit speech days ago said it’s “highly unlikely” that “there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country.”

  However, the terror group has continued advancing at lightning pace, particularly in the north, where multiple districts were recently overrun and Afghan forces abandoned their posts in droves. The Taliban has also lately overrun prisons where they’ve freed hundreds or possibly thousands of detained jihadists which have rejoined Taliban ranks.

  An American soldier is speaking truth.#Afghanistan #911 #Taliban pic.twitter.com/iRhKIhbvof

  — Retainer (@againkhilafat) July 9, 2021

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  Hundreds of Afghan national forces have reportedly sought refuge in neighboring Tajikistan, with this episode providing a perhaps early answer to Biden’s rhetorical question last week…

  “They have the capacity. They have the forces. They have the equipment. The question is: Will they do it?,” the US president said of the Afghan government. Based on early clashes (or lack thereof) between national forces and the Taliban, the final answer to this is not looking good.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 19:40

• The Illusion Of Action: Cuomo's New Gun Manufacturer Liability Law Is A Colossal Misfire
  The Illusion Of Action: Cuomo’s New Gun Manufacturer Liability Law Is A Colossal Misfire

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on the declaration of a gun violence emergency by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.  The centerpiece of Cuomo’s plan is a new law to allow victims of gun violence to sue gun manufacturers under a nuisance theory.

  If it sounds familiar that is because it is painfully familiar.  It has failed repeatedly in various states, including New York. It is doubtful that Cuomo truly believes that the law will make a significant, if any, impact on gun violence. However, that is not the point.

  The point is the appearance of action, not the ultimate result of such action.

  

  Here is the column:

  Much of politics is based on what behavioral economists call “action bias,” the compulsion “to act even if there’s no evidence that it will lead to a better outcome.” That bias was evident this week when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a gun-violence emergency, explaining that “we went from one epidemic to another epidemic.”

  Cuomo’s declaration will do little beyond satisfying a need to act. Indeed, its main component — a law allowing citizens to sue gun manufacturers — will be as productive as trying to win the New York Marathon by running furiously in place. Yet Cuomo noted that crime fears have drained New York City of people and “they’re not coming back unless they feel safe.” That demands action, even when it is purely illusory.

  To be fair, politicians are not alone in action bias. A 2007 study showed the same bias among soccer goaltenders who instinctively jump to the right (44.4 percent) or the left (49.3 percent) without knowing where a penalty kick will land, even though staying in the center (6.3 percent) is the optimal choice. But politics is about perception so “doing something is better than nothing,” even when nothing will likely be achieved.

  Cuomo’s gun emergency package does include some concrete benefits not directly tied to gun violence. Of the $138.7 million in funding, for example, $58 million will go to summer youth programs.

  The highlight of the package, though, is a new law allowing people harmed by firearms to sue the manufacturers. Not only does that law face serious constitutional challenges but similar lawsuits brought on similar grounds have failed miserably in the courts.

  The new law is written to get around a federal ban on such lawsuits. After a slew of lawsuits against the gun industry on a variety of different claims, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005, giving gun sellers and manufacturers immunity from liability arising out of the criminal misuse of firearms. The New York law focuses on an exception under the law if a company “knowingly violated a state or federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing” of firearms.

  However, the New York law is precisely what Congress sought to deter in lawsuits designed to curtail Second Amendment rights by seeking “damages and other relief for the harm caused by the misuse of firearms by third parties, including criminals.” The exception under the law expressly refers to knowing or reckless violations of state reporting and qualification rules.

  Cuomo himself may have undermined the law at its signing, declaring that it was designed “to reinstate public nuisance liability for gun manufacturers.” He hailed the law as effectively reversing the federal legislation: “The only industry in the United States of America immune from lawsuits are the gun manufacturers, but we will not stand for that any longer.” Sponsors and supporters specifically referred to the continuing effort to repeal the federal law by using this law to effectively negate it — but states are not allowed to simply negate or nullify federal laws under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

  The law itself does not help much. It advances a vague standard to hold gun manufacturers and sellers responsible for the public nuisance of illegal gun use if they fail to implement “reasonable controls” to prevent the unlawful sale, possession or use of firearms within the state. It only references the federal exception in defining “reasonable controls” to include implementing programs to secure inventory from theft and prevent illegal retail sales. If the law is narrowly confined to such reporting and qualification violations, it is unlikely to have much of an impact on gun manufacturers. If it is used more broadly, it is unlikely to be upheld by the courts. Either way, it is not the law being pitched to the public.

  New York City previously tried to use nuisance law to hold gun manufacturers liable and even challenged the federal law as unconstitutional. It failed on both grounds in 2013 before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In City of New York v. Beretta, the Second Circuit left open what a “predicate statute” might look like for the exception, but it rejected the prior nuisance statute. New York responded by simply taking the same nuisance tactic and putting it into a gun law. It is the type of argument that a number of judges (and Supreme Court justices) would find too clever by half.

  Even if the law passes constitutional review, there remains its ambiguous standard. For decades, states and cities have tried to curtail gun sales through nuisance litigation; they have uniformly failed because the effort is transparently an effort to achieve gun control through litigation. They also have sought to hold companies liable vicariously for the crimes of third parties. Yet the Second Amendment is an individually-held right that the Supreme Court has repeatedly protected from such clever legislative measures. Each law was popular when enacted and then bemoaned when it became the vehicle for even greater gun-rights decisions.

  New York has a history of reckless legislation on gun control, and it previously earned the ire of some Supreme Court justices by abandoning litigation. Last year, the court was faced with a challenge to a New York law that imposed what some of us viewed as clearly unconstitutional limits on the transport of lawful firearms (even after it was upheld by lower courts). In passing the law, New York officials publicly promised they were certain of the constitutionality of the law and would litigate it all the way to the Supreme Court. When the court accepted the case for review, however, the same officials bolted like a flock of seagulls to avoid a decision, amending the law to moot the issue before the court could strike it down. The court ultimately dismissed the case, over three dissenting justices. It was a rare instance in which the court resisted such a mootness ruling after a party sought to withdraw — but, then, few litigants were as open about evading a contrary decision. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas specifically called out New York for “manipulating” the docket by withdrawing an unconstitutional law just before a final opinion.

  Politicians have “action bias” because they know the public favors leaders of action and rarely blame them when their actions prove to be costly failures. The question is whether New York officials will keep this renewed pledge to litigate the law all the way to the Supreme Court. There are at least three justices who likely are eager to see them fulfill that pledge.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 19:20

• "I'm Not Seeing This As Transitory": Paint Supplier PPG Raises Prices For Second Time This Year Due To "Obvious" Inflation
  “I’m Not Seeing This As Transitory”: Paint Supplier PPG Raises Prices For Second Time This Year Due To “Obvious” Inflation

  Paint supplier PPG knows that inflation isn’t just “transitory”.

  In fact, the company, who supplies to major manufacturers like Ford and Boeing, is raising the prices of its paint and coatings solely as a result of “inflation in raw material and logistics costs”, according to a new Bloomberg article. 

  Chief Executive Officer Michael McGarry made sure PPG was one of the first to raise prices earlier this year, as the company anticipated an inflationary environment. Now, they’re raising prices again. 

  McGarry said: “What we’re obviously studying now is the need to be out with a third set of price increases. Inflation is across-the-board, it’s obvious and customers don’t have a lot of good ways to counter the argument that we need to have price relief.”

  

  And it isn’t like PPG is just a localized business experiencing a one-off in costs: the company is in more than 70 countries and is still “feeling the pinch from the prices of oil, freight and distribution going up and raw materials running scarce”. 

  “I’m not seeing this as transitory. This work-from-home phenomenon is going to lead to additional wage inflation, because people are going to have the opportunities to figure out where they want to work,” McGarry continued. 

  McGarry says the trend is visible in the U.S. and he expects to see it “spread to other regions”. 

  Meanwhile, one man’s finished product is another man’s raw material: the price of paint and coatings going up will add to raw material supply costs for companies like Stellantis, who is one of PPG’s biggest customers. This comes as other raw materials for automakers, like copper, aluminum and steel, are all rising in price as well. 

  PPG generates about 40% of its revenue in the U.S., Bloomberg notes. It has boosted pricing for 17 consecutive quarters and McGarry says the steak should continue through the rest of this year.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 19:00

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• German Court Orders YouTube To Pay 100,000 Euros For Censoring Pandemic Protest Footage
  German Court Orders YouTube To Pay 100,000 Euros For Censoring Pandemic Protest Footage

  YouTube has been fined 100,000 euros by the German Higher Regional Court at Dresden after it wrongly deleted a user’s video which showed massive pandemic lockdown protests in Switzerland – and then failed to reinstate the video ‘immediately’ after the court ordered it to do so on April 20.

  

  Instead, the company waited nearly a month to revive the video, which led to last week’s fine, issued on July 5th, according to WELT.de.

  Lawyer Joachim Steinhöfel, who represents the account operator, considers the court’s decision to be a guideline for freedom of expression on the Internet. “With the historically high fine, the Higher Regional Court makes it very clear that court decisions must be observed without restriction, regardless of whether YouTube assumes a violation of its guidelines or not,” said Steinhöfel. -Welt.de (translated)

  YouTube, however, doesn’t seem phased. A spokesman told WELT, “We have a responsibility to connect our users with trustworthy information and to combat misinformation during Covid-19. This is a decision on a case-by-case basis that we respect and will review accordingly.”

  The protest video was deleted at the end of January, with YouTube citing its “Policy on medical misinformation about COVID-19,” however the court rejected their reasoning, concluding in part that the company’s amended guidelines had not been sufficiently conveyed to the account operator – and that a literal amendment to the user agreement is required for this. The mere indication that changes may occur surrounding their COVID-19 policies is not enough.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 02:45

• Why Africa's Geography Is A Barrier To Growth
  Why Africa’s Geography Is A Barrier To Growth

  Authored by Lipton Matthews via The Mises Institute,

  Browsing through history, we can identify several examples of states overcoming the hurdles of geography to achieve great feats. Though the plague of an inhospitable geography is not an insurmountable obstacle to development, it remains crucial to understanding disparities in income across countries. However, some mainstream economists place a premium on institutional development as a panacea for economic growth. Institutions are indeed important, but the legacy of geography still lingers.

  

  Compared to the rest of the world, economic growth in Africa has been quite sluggish. A stunning fact is that during 1965–90, GDP (gross domestic product) per capita growth in Africa averaged 0.8 percent per year. Yet growth in the seven fastest-growing developing countries outside the region averaged 5.8 percent, and growth in the rest of the developing world recorded an average growth of 1.8 percent. Economic decline was so dramatic that the average 1972 GDP level was not attained again until 2004. 

  Economists admit that exploring Africa’s lackluster performance requires a multidimensional approach. However, many argue that geography is a major contributor to Africa’s anemic performance. According to a landmark study by Sachs and Warner (1997), countries in tropical regions grow more slowly than countries in temperate environments, and unfortunately, a sizeable proportion of the African population is in tropical climates.

  Relative to temperate zones, tropical countries encounter a litany of parasitic diseases that are less pervasive in the former. Furthermore, as Austin (2008) reports, such places are also characterized by fragile soils. When combined, these features greatly inhibit agriculture productivity in tropical climates. To some onlookers, the negative implications of a hostile environment may not seem obvious, but studies show that the consequences for development are enormous.

  Economic analysis suggests that after accounting for initial poverty, economic policy, and tropical location, among other variables, countries with intensive malaria grew 1.3 percent less per person per year, but a 10 percent reduction in malaria increased growth by 0.3 percent. Malaria is one of several diseases responsible for limiting the dynamism of African economies through its adverse impact on working hours by lowering life expectancy.

  Similarly, adding to the burden of malaria is the TseTse fly. Marcella Alsan in a 2012 paper singled out this insect as an impediment to development in Africa. Alsan contends that the TseTse Fly restricted the capacity of Africans to generate an agricultural surplus by historically limiting the use of domesticated animals and impeding the adoption of animal-powered devices. By undermining the potential of livestock, the TseTse fly made it difficult for capital-intensive agriculture to emerge in Africa.

  Estimates indicate that the typical African country would be 30 percent richer had the fly not impacted the quality of institutions. Moreover, recent research posits that the TseTse fly continues to affect the development of modern finance in Africa. Jianfu An and Wenxuan Hou in a 2017 paper argue that because of the TseTse fly some parts of Africa failed to harness institutions conducive to interclan transactions: “Ethnic groups in TseTse-infested areas were more likely to rely on hunting and gathering and therefore divided into small bands. This consequently solidified and perpetuated narrow ethnic identities and created ethnically fragmented societies that stymie the development of institutions associated with property rights and contract enforcement.”

  Apart from the torrent of diseases, Africa is also a victim of inconsistent rainfall. In fact, rainfall has been declining in Africa since the 1960s. Salvador Barrios, Luisito Bertinelli, and Eric Strobl submit that if rainfall did not recede, the gap in African GDP per capita relative to the rest of the developing world would decline by around 15 to 40 percent.

  Another striking feature of Africa is that it contains the largest share of landlocked countries. These countries face substantially higher costs in trade and transportation. For example, research reveals that the cost of tradable commodities is more expensive for sub-Saharan Africa due to the region’s landscape and coastlines. In their study of economic growth in Africa, Tin Mang and Dwayne Woods conclude:

  “Geography is most favorable to economic production for Europe, next to America, then to Asia, and least favorable to Africa…. If it were not for the unfavorable physical environment, African countries would be better off economically than South American countries.”

  In general, we are not implying that Africa’s challenges are impossible to solve. However, due to its unique geography, the region requires policies that account for its peculiar condition. As such, primacy should be accorded to improving transportation networks and reducing barriers to trading. Solving the problem of a harsh geography demands bold thinking and surely Africans are up to the task.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 07/12/2021 – 02:00

• "Down With Dictatorship": Thousands of Cubans Demonstrate Against Communist Regime
  “Down With Dictatorship”: Thousands of Cubans Demonstrate Against Communist Regime

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

  Thousands of Cubans took to the streets on Sunday in a number of cities to protest against human rights abuses, a lack of freedom, and a worsening economic situation in the communist-ruled country.

  

  People gather during protests outside the Capitol building, in Havana, Cuba July 11, 2021. (REUTERS/Stringer)

  Videos uploaded to social media appear to show demonstrations in a number of towns and cities, including the capital, Havana, on Sunday. Protesters, chanting in Spanish, said they “weren’t afraid” of the regime led by Miguel Diaz Canel, and said they wanted access to COVID-19 vaccines and an end to the regime.

  It comes amid reports of gas, electricity, and vaccine shortages across the Caribbean island nation. Some analysts noted online that Sunday’s demonstrations are the first time that so many had protested the government since the Maleconazo uprising in 1994, which prompted a number of Cubans to leave the country by boat to the U.S.

  Shouts of “down with the dictatorship,” “freedom,” and “homeland and life” were also heard during the demonstrations, according to footage uploaded online.

  During different live broadcasts across Facebook, thousands of people can be seen marching through the streets of cities like San Antonio de los Baños, Guira de Melena, and Alquízar, reported South Florida’s WTVJ-TV.

  Spontaneous street protests breaking out in several cities in #Cuba right now with chants of #NoTenemosMiedo (We Are Not Afraid)

  Frustration with the dictatorships incompetence,greed & repression is mounting rapidly pic.twitter.com/eSAr8Xrxpf

  — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 11, 2021

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  “I just walked through town looking to buy some food and there were lots of people there, some with signs, protesting,” local resident Claris Ramirez said by phone.

  “They are protesting blackouts, that there is no medicine,” she added, reported the Reuters news agency.

  In response to the demonstrations, Diaz-Canel echoed an often-repeated claim by other Marxist governments and blamed the protests on a foreign smear campaign initiated by the United States.

  “The order of combat is given, the revolutionaries take to the streets,” he said on a state-run radio and television network, apparently ordering his security forces to disperse the demonstrators.

  Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is of Cuban descent, chronicled the protests on Twitter.

  “Spontaneous street protests breaking out in several cities in #Cuba right now with chants of #NoTenemosMiedo (We Are Not Afraid),” he wrote in a tweet. “Frustration with the dictatorships incompetence,greed & repression is mounting rapidly.”

  Here come the Communist repression squads in #Cuba

  Still largely being ignored so far by US corporate media outlets. pic.twitter.com/ldprYCmk46

  — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 11, 2021

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  The Senator also appeared to take note of security forces that were deployed.

  “Here come the Communist repression squads in #Cuba … Still largely being ignored so far by US corporate media outlets,” Rubio wrote.

  Florida Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, the daughter of Cuban exiles, said that Diaz-Canel’s regime is now shutting off internet on the island.

  Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, also the son of Cuban exiles, whose city has a significant Cuban diaspora, called for an American-led intervention.

  “Cubans are worthy and ready to rule themselves without tyranny,” Suarez said during a press conference. “It can end today and it must end today. The implications of this moment can mean freedom for millions of people in the hemisphere, from Nicaraguans and Venezuelans and so many more.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 23:30

• FBI Wants Family Members To Snitch On Each Other To Prevent 'Homegrown Extremism'
  FBI Wants Family Members To Snitch On Each Other To Prevent ‘Homegrown Extremism’

  “As the Nazis worked to consolidate their power and build a cohesive “national community,” suppression of dissent played a key role. In 1933, the Nazis issued a decree that required Germans to turn in anyone who spoke against the party, its leaders, or the government…” –Facing History

  The FBI issued an ominous tweet on Sunday which encourages “family members and peers” to “learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the FBI” in the name of national security.

  The broadly-worded tweet from the same agency that confiscated an unassembled Lego model of the US Capitol as evidence against a Jan. 6 protester – suggests that family members are “often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence.” For example, your radicalized Antifa nephew is being encouraged tell the FBI that you might be a domestic terror threat because you own guns and told the family at Thanksgiving you don’t like illegal immigration.

  Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence. Help prevent homegrown violent extremism. Visit https://t.co/bql36iSbig to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the #FBI. #NatSec pic.twitter.com/ZwJp5h5bWD

  — FBI (@FBI) July 11, 2021

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  The FBI’s tweet goes hand-in-hand with a campaign dating back to at least September of 2020, when FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress that the greatest threat facing America comes from domestic extremists (and not the thousands of ‘protesters’ who spent much of last year looting, murdering and setting fires across American cities), which quickly morphed into ‘angry white men’ who disagree with Democratic policies.

  The #FBI cares more about impeaching trump and finding legos in Republicans homes rather than investigating the Las Vegas shooting https://t.co/s1EyFIf5tA

  — ⛹🏻‍♀️Adri 🇺🇸 (@simpliadri) July 11, 2021

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  Combine that with President Biden framing the Capitol rioters as ‘white supremacists,’ which he said is ‘he most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland today’, and Gen. Mark Milley, the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifying last month that he wants to understand where ‘white rage’ comes from, and it couldn’t be more clear that this is a coordinated propaganda campaign to demonize an entire race to solve a problem that largely doesn’t exist, while actual domestic terrorism is excused as ‘mostly peaceful’ protests.

  The American Stasi is urging people to report their family members for thoughtcrime. https://t.co/WvzRmJeBAk

  — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 11, 2021

  Know the signs. See something, say something pic.twitter.com/NV1AnOGLfX

  — ELIJAH (@ElijahSchaffer) July 11, 2021

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  The #FBI cares more about impeaching trump and finding legos in Republicans homes rather than investigating the Las Vegas shooting https://t.co/s1EyFIf5tA

  — ⛹🏻‍♀️Adri 🇺🇸 (@simpliadri) July 11, 2021

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  Chicago’s 400 homicides year-to-date (black rage?) apparently don’t register on the radar, but if your indoctrinated leftist family member thinks you’re on the path to ‘extremism’, you may receive a knock on the door.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 23:05

• Critical Race Theory & The Big Lie Behind It
  Critical Race Theory & The Big Lie Behind It

  Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

  Let’s discuss what Critical Race Theory really is including  the big lie behind it all.

  

  What is Critical Race Theory?

  The Encyclopaedia Britannica Explains CRT

  • Critical race theory (CRT), intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. 

  • Critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.

  One would have to be nuts to believe CRT theory should be taught in grade school. 

  Unfortunately, that’s where we are, and embraced by the Biden administration and the Left media.

  Donna Brazile, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a WSJ Op-Ed, Don’t Ban Critical Race Instruction.

  “Patriotism requires that we face up to our past, including slavery and racism.”

  Few would disagree with facing up to slavery. But where is the Civil War and slavery not taught? Anywhere? 

  We can and should go beyond that. What the US government did to Native Americans including the Trail of Tears is absolutely worthy of discussion.

  Woke Culture Hiding Behind Lies

  CRT proponents hide behind lies. The lie is that CRT discussion is about history suppression when it’s really about indoctrination. 

  The result is a Woke Culture War embraced by Leftist media.  

  Two of the country’s important newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, are unashamedly woke. The New Yorker and the Atlantic have ceased to be general-interest magazines and are now specific-interest publications—that interest being the spread of woke ideas. The major television networks early fell in line without a fight.

  Universities, in their humanities and social-sciences divisions, are not merely devoted to the propagation of woke ideas but initiate most of them.

  Capitalism and Racism are ‘Conjoined Twins’

  Critical Race Theorist Ibram X. Kendi says Capitalism and Racism are ‘Conjoined Twins’

  Donna Brazile wants critical race theory taught in K-12 schools (“Don’t Ban Critical Race Instruction,” op-ed, July 2). Its contribution to improving race relations is to tell children that the color of their skin determines their destiny, not the content of their character, as Martin Luther King Jr. had it.

  White children are to be told they enjoy “white privilege” and oppress their fellow students of color. Consequently, white students must publicly admit to specific advantages they enjoy stemming from their privileged position. The shaming will set them on the road to becoming “antiracists.”

  Any disparity in disciplinary actions or enrollments is also ipso facto evidence of implicit racial bias. Ibram X. Kendi, a popular exponent of critical race theory, says capitalism and racism are “conjoined twins” that must be fought together.

  Ms. Brazile is doing what many advocates of critical race theory do: Change the subject from critical race theory’s agenda to undermine our culture to the noble-sounding “look honestly at American history—much of it good, but some of it immoral and horrific.”

  Culture Wars

  Leftist mainstream media is in bed with CRT proponents. They both attempt to pawn this all off as some sort of noble history lesson.

  But if you read the definition itself, CRT it is not remotely about history.

  It is about a theory that says “race is culturally invented” and “legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist.”

  That is what CRT proponents want taught because that is the actual theory.

  White kids are made to feel inferior simply because they are white.

  CRT proponents want those preposterous theories taught to K12 schools (Kindergarten to 12th grade).

  Many if not most of those who support CRT do so only because they do not understand that the basis for CRT is a brazen lie. 

  Political Backlash

  Those who see through the lies are infuriated. 

  Amazing parent testimony on Critical Race Theory in our schools. pic.twitter.com/Llbe0yBn4U

  — James Lindsay, getting one billion moms (@ConceptualJames) July 5, 2021

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  Please play that video, and again if you already played it once.

  I discussed this previously in Critical Race Theory Should Be Banned, and a Black Parent Explains Why

  “Educators use CRT as their own agenda, to indoctrinate the kids to hate each other.”

  “And who are you to educate my children, or any of our children on life issues? That’s our job.”

  I transcribe the entire video in the above link.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 22:40

• Voter ID: Kamala Mocked After Suggesting Rural Americans Can't Use Copy Machines
  Voter ID: Kamala Mocked After Suggesting Rural Americans Can’t Use Copy Machines

  Vice President Kamala Harris has been roundly mocked after suggesting that rural Americans don’t have the ability to photocopy their ID in order to prove their identity while voting.

  When asked during a Friday BET interview whether she would compromise on voter ID provisions in order to pass voting legislation, Harris said that for some, “you’re going to have to Xerox or photocopy your ID to send it in to prove that you are who you are,” and that many people live where “there’s no Kinko’s, there’s no OfficeMax near them.”

  Kamala Harris absurdly says it’s “almost impossible” for rural Americans to photocopy their ID pic.twitter.com/J94IuGBFLv

  — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 10, 2021

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  What do ‘rural’ citizens do in France, Germany, Mexico, Israel, Iceland or any other country which require voter ID?

  Harris’ extremely weak justification to prevent voter ID was roundly mocked on social media:

  Cause, you know, country folks don’t have electricity, much less access to copiers or smart phones.

  They’re too busy running moonshine & sliding on the hoods of their cars. https://t.co/arpIX2Yl1l

  — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 11, 2021

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  It’s true. I just moved from a rural town and the only photocopier we had was an old Amish man named Malaki who would produce a sketch on parchment paper in exchange for three bushels of hay and two ears of corn. https://t.co/C8ZKXCqf42

  — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) July 11, 2021

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  I lived in one of the most rural parts of America for 5 years and photocopied crap all day as part of my job duties. I wish I could say I was considered a demigod for my amazing xerox abilities but alas! Those damn Appalachians were unimpressed by the technology. https://t.co/ohuI7HzEMw

  — Adele Scalia (@AdeleScalia) July 11, 2021

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  🤔WHAT? She’s not worried about rural Americans, because most of them are republicans anyway! She’s worried about the millions of people living in cities, that democrats consider their voter base! If you can give them a vaccine, you can give them a photo identification! https://t.co/H2ciLk6Gkn

  — kung fu jedi (@jedi_fu) July 10, 2021

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  No, no, no, it’s not cheating.

  You have to understand that POC can’t make copies, even though they’re almost as smart as poor white kids.

  (Yes, Biden has said these things)

  — Peace & Freeom (@flippersrevenge) July 11, 2021

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  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 22:15

• Real-Time Proof In Oakland That 'Defunding The Police' Is A White Issue
  Real-Time Proof In Oakland That ‘Defunding The Police’ Is A White Issue

  Authored by Andrea Widburg via AmericanThinker.com,

  Eric Adams won the Democrat primary for mayor in New York City because he campaigned on a law-and-order platform. The New York Times found his popularity mystifying and disturbing because he refused to play to the stereotype that Blacks hate the police. If that wasn’t a strong enough signal that the Defund the Police movement is hostile to people living in crime-ridden neighborhoods, Black families in Oakland stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the police against Antifa’s “defund the police” madness.

  

  Make no mistake about Eric Adams: He’s a leftist. However, he’s a leftist who understands that even socialism needs a functioning infrastructure, and that cannot exist when anarchy is the name of the game in a community.

  Already before the primary anointing Adams as the Democrat candidate for mayor, the New York Times struggled to understand why minorities would flock to a candidate who promised to put more cops on the streets. After all, aren’t all minorities supposed to hate the police? Not so much, according to Adams, who said that policies such as “defend the police” were the purview of “a lot of young, White, affluent people.”

  Even the Times figured out that there was

  a disconnect between progressive activists and the rank-and-file Black and Latino voters who they [i.e., progressive activists] say have the most to gain from their agenda. As liberal activists orient their policies to combat white supremacy and call for racial justice, progressives are finding that many voters of color seem to think about the issues quite a bit differently.

  It doesn’t speak well for the thinkers and writers at the New York Times that they hadn’t noticed that the White leftists pushing the whole package of criminal justice reform – defunding the police, ending bail, electing non-prosecuting prosecutors – aren’t affected by those policies. They live in gracious suburban enclaves or pricey urban neighborhoods far removed from the criminals who benefit from these policies. Minorities aren’t so lucky.  

  The fact that minorities suffer from the policies that White leftists impose on them was vividly illustrated in Oakland, California, a city in which the activists on the City Council had voted to defund the police. As a result, violence in Oakland has shot into the stratosphere. Indeed, all over California crime has soared.

  Sane people, when looking at 2020 and the start of the crime surge in urban America, concluded that it happened because of leftist “criminal justice reform,” courtesy of those White wokesters and Black race hustlers. The San Francisco Chronicle, though, is confused:

  California officials recently released data showing that homicides in the state were up 31% in 2020. But the reasons for the spike — the largest percentage increase in years — are still unclear.

  The surge — while not unique to California — comes after a yearslong downward trend in the state’s homicide rate. But 2020 was an exceptional year, and crime experts, government officials and advocates alike wonder whether the spike can be attributed to the economic and social strain caused by the pandemic.

  Oakland, of course, is part of this violent trend and the City Council just can’t figure it out:

  Oakland City Council Member Loren Taylor — whose district has been affected by violent crime — also said he thinks several factors have contributed to last year’s increase in violence, including worsening economic and mental health conditions, isolation and lack of access to social services due to the pandemic.

  On Oakland’s streets, though, Blacks and Hispanics caught in the crossfire aren’t confused at all. On Saturday, a perplexed journalist for the leftist Intercept, described what he saw as a “surreal moment in Oakland”: Minority victims of crime joined with police, with White Antifa protesters facing off against them:

  Dramatic confrontation before I got there. A lot of the anti-violence activists from East Oakland said they were disappointed in the white anti-police antifa protesters, said they seemed close minded and disconnected from the actual violence in the city. https://t.co/UEByf9WH5E

  — Lee Fang (@lhfang) July 10, 2021

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  As Glenn Greenwald tweeted:

  “Few things make the liberal-left angrier than when Lee Fang goes out on the street in the place where he live and reports on what he sees and gives voice to those you’re supposed to pretend don’t exist. They think reporting is only reporting if it advances their agenda.”

  We are looking at a great realignment in America, one that explains huge minority support for Trump. White leftists and minority race-hustlers, secure in their affluent fortresses, what communism. Meanwhile, ordinary people across America, no matter their color, what good governance: sound economic policies, law-and-order, national security priorities, and the freedom to make their way in the world.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 21:50

• Visualizing The Biggest Political Spenders And Donators In America, By Generation
  Visualizing The Biggest Political Spenders And Donators In America, By Generation

  In politics, the candidate who spends the most money usually wins. Because of this, donations are an important part of political campaigns, and the people behind those donations wield an intangible level of power and influence.

  As Visual Capitalist put together the inaugural Generational Power Index (GPI), which looks at power dynamics across generations in the U.S., we started wondering which generation spent the most on political campaigns and lobbying.

  

  Here’s what we found out.

  Old Money

  Of top spenders in the U.S., the Silent Generation (age 76+) and Baby Boomers (age 57-75) both sit at the top of the ranking.

  In 2020, 55% of the biggest campaign donations in the U.S. came from the Silent Generation, and meanwhile, more than 60% of the biggest lobbying expenditures came from organizations run by Baby Boomers.

  

  Outliers

  Of course, there were a few exceptions.

  Facebook, run by Millennial Mark Zuckerburg, spent over $19 million on lobbying in 2020. The social media giant spent more than any other Big Tech monolith, with lobbying efforts focused on competition and consumer privacy issues.

  When it comes to electoral spending, Millennial Dustin Moskovitz is the youngest person on the list, contributing over $50 million to the Democrats in 2020. Interestingly, he co-founded Facebook back in 2004, but he left in 2008 to start the project management platform, Asana.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 21:00

• Illinois Teacher Sues District, Claims "Anti-Racist" Curriculum Teaches That Whites Oppress, Violates Constitution
  Illinois Teacher Sues District, Claims “Anti-Racist” Curriculum Teaches That Whites Oppress, Violates Constitution

  Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times,

  A middle school drama teacher in Illinois has filed a lawsuit against her school district, alleging that it is violating anti-discrimination laws and the U.S. Constitution through its curriculum that pits “different racial groups against each other” in the name of “anti-racism.”

  

  Teacher Stacy Deemar, in her lawsuit (pdf) filed in federal court on June 29, alleges that since 2017, teachers in Evanston-Skokie district (District 65) have been made to under go so-called “antiracist training,” and continue to do so.

  Deemar is being represented by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

  Among a number of objectives in the training, teachers are stereotyped by trainers and divided according to their race, the complaint says. Teachers are required as part of the training to accept that white individuals are “loud, authoritative … controlling” and to hold the view that “to be less white is to be less racially oppressive,” according to the lawsuit. It added that teachers were taught to modify their viewpoint to fit the theory that “White identity is inherently racist” and to denounce “white privilege.”

  If teachers oppose, question, or “disengage” from the views promoted in the training, the district “blatantly calls them ‘racist,’” the lawsuit alleges.

  Students in the district, meanwhile, are then taught these concepts by their teachers who are mandated according to the curriculum for Pre-K through eighth grade to impose the race-based worldview on their students, the lawsuit added. As a result, students are expected to gather by race in “affinity groups,” and to participate in “privilege walks” based on their skin color. They are also given books depicting “whiteness” as a devil that “mess[es] endlessly” with “all fellow humans of color.”

  The children were also taught “whiteness is a bad deal,” white people send “overt and subliminal messages” that they are “superior” and black people are “bad, ugly, and inferior,” and that pretending not to see skin color “helps racism,” according to the complaint.

  The lawsuit alleges these practices violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection guarantee, as well as the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

  “Fostering racial identities, promoting the idea that they are in conflict, and perpetuating divisive stereotypes pits teachers and children against one another based on the color of their skin,” the lawsuit says.

  “They teach them that their whole identity comes from the color of their skin. They teach them to hate each other. They teach them not only how to be racist, but that they should be racist.”

  The Evanston School District didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.

  On its website, the district says that it has “persistent and unacceptable opportunity and achievement gaps for students of color.”

  “The racial predictability of achievement and disciplinary outcomes is attributable to institutional racism, cultural biases and other societal factors,” it says.

  “The district recognizes that in order to provide educational opportunities that result in equitable outcomes, particularly for Black/Brown students, that it must proactively acknowledge and intentionally address racial and cultural biases, in an effort to eliminate institutional structures and practices that affect student learning and achievement.”

  The lawsuit come as efforts to incorporate elements of the quasi-Marxist Critical Race Theory (CRT) into American classrooms face intense pushback from moderates and conservatives. States that have banned or restricted the teaching of CRT in public schools include Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas, while more than a dozen states are considering or have partially imposed similar restrictions.

  The CRT is rooted in the Marxist theory of class struggle but with a particular focus on race. Proponents of CRT see racism in every aspect of the American public and private life, and seek to dismantle American institutions—such as the Constitution and legal system—which they deem to be inherently and irredeemably racist.

  The effort to promote CRT in K-12 education drew national attention in April when the Education Department under the Biden administration proposed a rule to prioritize funding U.S. history and civics programs that incorporate the works of critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi and the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which centers around the idea that America was founded as, and remains today, a racist nation.

  The lawsuit commented that ideologies like CRT are advocating “equity” in a departure from the U.S. tradition of striving for equality as “proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence [and] defended in the Civil War,” which is about sameness and treating everyone in an identical manner regardless of their race.

  “Equality strives for equal opportunity while equity strives for equal outcomes,” it said.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 20:30

• US Military Tank Listed On Popular Auction Site 
  US Military Tank Listed On Popular Auction Site 

  Popular US-based auction website Bring a Trailer has recently listed a World War II US military tank for sale.

  The M3 Stuart, officially Light Tank, M3, was initially supplied to British and other Commonwealth forces during the second war. 

  But the auction for this M3 Stuart Light Tank produced in 1941 reportedly ended up in Australia for training purposes until 1946. “It remained in the country until it was acquired by the current owner in 2018 and reimported to the US,” the listing said. 

  

  Equipment on the tank includes a “manually rotating turret, a de-milled M22 gun with a shoulder mount, a Mark 19 radio set, and canvas seatbacks.”

  

  The auction has been newly listed with a starting bid of $2,000, but the price will likely move higher as popularity around this listing grows over the coming week. 

  Another tank we noted for sale on Bring a Trailer was a 1943 M4A1 Sherman tank, “one of fewer than 20 known-running M4A1s,” according to the listing, which sold for $480,000 last November. 

  Besides tanks becoming popular as America descends into years of socio-economic crisis, demand for armored vehicles indistinguishable from an ordinary Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Range Rover, Cadillac, and or Lincoln has increased.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 20:00

• Suspected Assassins Of Haitian President Moïse Trained By US, Linked To Pro-Coup Oligarchy
  Suspected Assassins Of Haitian President Moïse Trained By US, Linked To Pro-Coup Oligarchy

  Authored by Dan Cohen via MintPressNews.com,

  As the investigation into Moïse’s murder unfolds, the U.S. is laying the groundwork to deploy troops into Haiti for the fourth time in 106 years, at the request of a figure it has spent decades grooming…

  

  Suspects in the assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moise are shown to the media, along with the weapons and equipment they allegedly used in the attack, at the General Direction of the police in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, July 8, 2021. Joseph Odelyn | AP

  As shock grips the Caribbean island nation of Haiti following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, the Haitian government has carried out a campaign to arrest suspects it alleges are responsible for the murder.

  Haitian Director of National Police Leon Charles announced at a press conference that the assassination squad that killed Moise is comprised of 28 foreigners, including two Haitian-Americans and 26 Colombian nationals. Fifteen of those Colombians have been detained while three were killed in a gun battle and eight remain fugitives. Colombian Defense Minister Diego Molano has admitted that some of the Colombians are retired military personnel. Among them are at least one highly decorated soldier who received training from the United States and another who has been implicated in the murder of Colombian civilians.

  Ties to oligarchs

  The Haitian-Americans have been identified as James Solages, 35, and Joseph Vincent, 55. Solages lives in Fort Lauderdale where he is the CEO of EJS Maintenance & Repair and runs a nonprofit group, the website of which has since been scrubbed of information. Prior to relocating to Florida, he lived in the southern Haitian coastal city of Jacmel.

  According to The Washington Post, Solages’ Facebook profile, which has since been removed, listed him as the chief commander of bodyguards for the Canadian Embassy in Haiti. The Canadaian Embassy confirmed that Solages previously worked as a security guard. While in Florida, Solages was an “avid and vocal supporter of former President Michel Martelly,” the founder of Moïse’s Haitian Baldheaded Party (PHTK), according to Tony Jean-Thénor, leader of the Veye Yo popular organization in Miami, founded by the late Father Gérard Jean-Juste.

  

  Photos of James Solages and an armored military vehicle that he posted to his now-removed Facebook page

  The Haitian Times reported Solages also used to work as a security guard for both Reginald Boulos and Dimitri Vorbe, two prominent members of Haiti’s tiny bourgeoisie. Although initially friendly to him, they both became bitter opponents of Moïse. Boulos was also a prominent supporter of previous coups in 1991 and 2004 against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

  The Boulos family is one of the wealthiest in Haiti and owns a pharmaceutical company that, in 1996, was responsible for poisoning scores of children with its tainted fever medicine, some fatally. Since the July 6-8, 2018 national uprising against the IMF-dictated hike of fuel prices, Boulos has attempted to recast himself as a popular and progressive figure (after one of his stores was burned and looted), heading a political party called the Third Way Movement (MTV).

  Vorbe is the executive director and vice president of Société Générale d’Énergie SA, one of the largest private energy companies in Haiti which had a sweet-heart deal providing power to the energy grid that Moïse sought to renegotiate after the collapse of the PetroCaribe program, under which Venezuela provided Haiti with cheap oil and credit from 2008 to 2018.

  Many believe Boulos is the intellectual author and financial backer of Moïse’s murder.

  “Solage’s employment by Boulos and centrality to the operation appears to confirm the growing popular consensus in Haiti that this controversial merchant-turned-politician was the principal backer of Moïse’s assassination,” explained journalist Kim Ives, continuing:

  A lot of factors have been pointing to his involvement: The arrival of the mercenaries in nine brand new Nissan Patrol vehicles without license plates suggests that they were vehicles coming from the Nissan dealership owned by Reginald Boulos. The Haitian people have already concluded that Boulous was behind the assassination and have dechoukéed [uprooted] the dealership, Automeca, that he owned.”

  Colombian assassin trained by the U.S.

  While the Haitian-Americans reportedly served as translators, the muscle of the assassination squad came from Colombia, the U.S.’s top regional ally, which serves as a platform for destabilization and regime change plots in the region, from Venezuela to Ecuador – and now apparently Haiti.

  The most prominent member of the hit squad is Manuel Antonio Grosso Guarín, a 41-year-old former special operations commando who retired from the military as a member of the Simón Bolívar No. 1 infantry battalion on December 31, 2019. According to the Colombian newspaper La Semana, Grosso “had several special combat courses, had been a member of the special forces and anti-guerrilla squads, and was known for being a skilled paratrooper who flew through the air without fear.”

  

  Grosso is pictured in the rear (blue jeans) being moved following a press in Port-au-Prince, July 8, 2021. Joseph Odelyn | AP

  In 2013, Grosso was assigned to the Urban Anti-Terrorist Special Force group, a secretive elite military detachment dedicated to counter-terrorism operations and carrying out kidnappings and assassinations (euphemistically known as ‘high value target acquisition and elimination’). This branch of the military is also tasked with providing security to VIP figures from the Colombian president to U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush.

  “He was one of the most prepared,” a source remarked to La Semana.

  Among Grosso’s preparations was special command instruction from the United States military, which supplies training and weapons to the Colombia military, one of the most repressive armed forces in the region and one that works to secure international corporate interests and drug trafficking routes.

  “How many false positives (see the following paragraph), how many social leaders, how many signers of the peace accord, will be on this man?” left-wing Colombian Senator Gustavo Bolivar commented on Twitter.

  Cuántos falsos positivos, cuántos lideres sociales, cuántos firmantes del Acuerdo de Paz tendrá este hombre encima?#VerguenzaMundial pic.twitter.com/y6RMjULFtd

  — Gustavo Bolívar (@GustavoBolivar) July 9, 2021

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  Grosso was joined by Francisco Eladio Uribe Ochoa, who had retired from the Colombian Army in 2019, according to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo. Eladio Uribe’s wife told the newspaper that he had been investigated for participation in the execution of civilians — a practice known as “false positives,” in which the Colombian military lured at least 6,402 civilians, murdered them, and dressed them in guerrilla fatigues in order to inflate their kill numbers. This gruesome practice helped military commanders reach lofty kill-count quotas set by the United States and was incentivized with bonus pay and vacation time for soldiers who carried out the killings.

  Though Eladio Uribe’s wife said that he had been exonerated, his name has appeared in a file of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a court formed out of the 2016 peace accord, which has investigated several thousand cases of false positives that the Colombian government had not previously admitted. Eladio Uribe is one of two soldiers accused in the 2008 murder of Luis Carlos Cárdenas in the village of Chorros Blancos in Antioquia region.

  Other alleged members of the hit squad alleged to have killed Moïse include:

  • Duberney Capador Giraldo, a retired Deputy First Sergeant (killed in a gun battle in Haiti)

  • ​​Alejandro Giraldo Zapata

  • John Jairo Ramírez Gómez

  • Víctor Albeiro Piñera

  Of the 28 total people who allegedly participated in the assassination, four of the Colombians arrived in Haiti on June 6, 2021. Grosso arrived in the Dominican city of Punta Cana and crossed the land border into Haiti two days later. Photos show him and other suspects at popular tourist sites in the Dominican Republic.

  

  A photo of Grosso, left, along with some of the other suspects posing in Haiti posted to Grosso’s Facebook page

  Unanswered questions and a growing consensus

  Questions also remain about why Moïse’s security team failed to protect him, and if any of its members were complicit in the murder. Dimitri Herard, the head of the General Security Unit of the National Palace, is under investigation by the United States government for arms trafficking, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). While there is no evidence (but many rumors) linking him to the murder, “Herard is one of the individuals most responsible for the safety of the president.”

  While the Haitian government has identified what appear to be Moïse’s assassins, there is still no hard evidence — just circumstantial — linking them to Boulos and possibly even Vorbe. Nonetheless, “there is a growing consensus that Reginald Boulous, for whom an arrest warrant [was] issued last week, paid for the mercenaries,” according to Ives. “It appears to be becoming more and more evident that the sector of the Haitian bourgeois, with whom Jovenel Moïse was at war, are intimately linked to his assassination.”

  As the investigation into Moïse’s murder unfolds, the U.S. appears to be preparing the groundwork to deploy troops to Haiti at the request of a figure whom it has spent decades grooming. According to The New York Times, Claude Joseph, who is in a struggle against Dr. Ariel Henry to head the Haitian state in the wake of Moïse’s assassination, requested the U.S. send military forces to guard key infrastructure, including the port, airport, and gasoline reserves. White House Spokeswoman Jen Psaki announced that the U.S. would reinforce U.S. personnel in Haiti with FBI and DHS deployments.

  CIA’s NED created fake student movement GRAFNEH in #Haiti in the 2000s, which partnered with the bourgeoisie mafia to destabilize/destroy the nascent and promising democracy the poor majority fought to establish. Current de facto puppet PM Claude Joseph was one of NED’s minions. https://t.co/zgz6GCQxpU pic.twitter.com/w1Q83qIfN2

  — Madame Boukman – Justice 4 Haiti 🇭🇹 (@madanboukman) July 4, 2021

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  Joseph is an asset of the United States and its regime-change arm, the National Endowment For Democracy. Wikileaks cables revealed that he first came to prominence in 2003 as the leader of a NED-spawned student front called GRAFNEH in the lead up to the coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He also founded another NED-funded anti-Aristide group Initiative Citoyenne (Citizens’ Initiative). He is reported by Haitian radio stations to have been, with prominent Haitian ex-Deputy Gary Bodeau, one of the principal assailants who severely beat the late Father Gérard Jean-Juste in a Pétionville church in 2005.

  Jean-Juste, perhaps the most prominent supporter and surrogate of the then exiled-in-South-Africa President Aristide, had been falsely accused of involvement in the killing of his own cousin, Jacques Roche, a writer.

  “Essentially, we have a U.S. puppet asking his puppeteer to invade Haiti for the fourth time in just over a century,” Ives concluded. “But both the region and, above all, the Haitian people are sick and tired of U.S. military interventions, which are largely responsible for the nation’s current debilitated, critical state both economically and politically. Much of the most oppressed neighborhoods are now heavily armed and have already announced a revolution against the likes of Boulos, so the U.S.-led invaders of 2021 are likely to face a resistance similar to that which emerged against the U.S. Marines in 1915 and UN ‘peace-keepers’ in 2004, only more ferocious.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 19:30

• New York Hydro Power Plant Mines Bitcoin Because More Profitable Than Selling Electricity To Grid
  New York Hydro Power Plant Mines Bitcoin Because More Profitable Than Selling Electricity To Grid

  This year, some of the hottest trends in the crypto industry have been bitcoin adoption and environmental, social, and governance factors into crypto mining. 

  Tesla CEO Elon Musk pushed bitcoin’s environmental concerns into the forefront, calling for “renewable energy” to be used for mining instead of fossil fuels. It’s no secret that bitcoin mining takes a massive amount of electricity. It’s estimated that energy consumption exceeds the power consumption of countries like the Netherlands and the UAE. 

  With the push towards ESG-Friendly bitcoin mining operations, there’s one historic hydroelectric plant near Albany, New York, using power generated from its massive water turbines to mine crypto. 

  “We think this is the oldest renewable energy facility in the world that’s still running,” Albany Engineering Corp. CEO Jim Besha told the Times Union.

  He said the plant “could actually make more money with bitcoin than selling the electricity to National Grid.

  Albany Engineering Corp. receives around 3 cents per kilowatt-hour when it sells energy to National Grid. Mining bitcoin makes about three times the amount of money, Besha said. 

  

  “It’s the best (type of bitcoin mining) because we’re using renewable energy,” Besha said. “We’re just doing it on the side, experimenting with it. We’re buying used servers.”

  Each week Besha converts thousandths of a bitcoin into fiat rather than ‘HODL’ because he’s worried about crypto volatility.  

  The hydroplant was constructed in 1897 and is getting new life amid China’s crackdown on miners, resulting in the hash rate —the computational power available to mine the cryptocurrency, reflecting the efficiency of the bitcoin blockchain network, plunging since mid-May. 

  

  The only issue Besha has to worry about is a bill that would ban cryptocurrency mining in New York. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 19:00

• "Down With Dictatorship" – Tens Of Thousands Of Cubans Take To Streets 
  “Down With Dictatorship” – Tens Of Thousands Of Cubans Take To Streets 

  Tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets Sunday in rare protests against the communist government. The island nation faces mounting socio-economic issues, food inflation, and other problems exacerbated by the virus pandemic.

  

  Protestors chanted “down with the dictatorship,” “freedom,” and “homeland and life” across multiple Cuban cities. Here are the scenes on the ground. 

  Ya no hay miedo despertó la Habana, despertó Cuba coño!!! 🔥💖#AbajoLaDictadura #SOSCuba #PatriaYVida pic.twitter.com/CFZs9kz8gn

  — Diana🆓🇨🇺 (@veliz_diana) July 11, 2021

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  #CubaLibre #Cuba No hay mal que dure 100 💯 años y pueblo que lo resista . 👏👏pic.twitter.com/J09IcocsFa

  — alba marina messa (@albamarinamessa) July 11, 2021

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  Protest in Cuba against communism. The Cuban people are fed up with communism, the Cuban people are fed up with the dictatorship, they are fed up with the so-called revolution and they take to the streets. pic.twitter.com/sRxTRBzPZ8

  — jorge Felix (@Jorgefelix2006) July 11, 2021

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  Cubans are fed up with worsening economic problems, food shortage/runaway food inflation, lack of medicine and other essential products, rolling electricity blackouts, as well as the third wave of the virus pandemic. 

  CUBA: Social media videos of rare anti-government protests in various cities amid reports of gas, electricity and vaccine shortages.

  President Miguel Díaz-Canel responds, calls it a provocation and calls on supporters of the revolution to take to the streets.

  — Gabriel Elizondo (@elizondogabriel) July 11, 2021

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  Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel blames the uprising on a foreign smear campaign initiated by the US. 

  “The order of combat is given, the revolutionaries take to the streets,” Díaz-Canel said.

  “In several protest areas, internet service on cell phones has been cut off, so news from the island is being interrupted, according to NBC Miami.” 

  

  We wonder who started the hashtag on Twitter: “#soscuba.” Remember, social media played a significant role in facilitating Araba Spring more than a decade ago. 

  

  US leaders in South Florida, such as Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, took to Twitter Sunday evening to support the protests. She said: 

  “We stand united with the Cuban people on the island and across our community at this historic moment in the struggle for freedom, dignity, and basic human rights, Levine Cava tweeted. “May their courageous actions bring about real change and move us closer to the dream of a free Cuba.”

  “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Rep. María Elvira Salazar tweeted. “The Cuban people are determined to be free.”

  🚨 #HAPPENINGNOW

  Tens of thousands of people in #Cuba are protesting at this very moment.

  The regime is shutting off the internet on the island. The Castro dictatorship doesn’t want the world to see what’s happening.

  Please SHARE & stand with these freedom fighters! #SOSCuba pic.twitter.com/qdKupC9r1N

  — María Elvira Salazar 🇺🇸 (@MaElviraSalazar) July 11, 2021

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  Senator Marco Rubio also chimed in: 

  Spontaneous street protests breaking out in several cities in #Cuba right now with chants of #NoTenemosMiedo (We Are Not Afraid)

  Frustration with the dictatorships incompetence,greed & repression is mounting rapidly pic.twitter.com/eSAr8Xrxpf

  — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 11, 2021

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  Rubio tweeted a video showing “Communist repression squads” preparing to battle protesters.

  Here come the Communist repression squads in #Cuba

  Still largely being ignored so far by US corporate media outlets. pic.twitter.com/ldprYCmk46

  — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 11, 2021

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  Cuba’s communist government is known for repressive crackdowns on dissent and today’s protest is rather astonishing. It also comes days after the Haitian president was assassinated by a heavily armed hit squad of two Americans and more than a dozen Colombians. 

  Focusing on Food, the island nation faces one of the worst food shortages since the 1990s. Shortages have resulted in out-of-control food inflation – and much of this was called by SocGen’s Albert Edwards in December.

  What’s happening is rapidly rising food costs and other essential goods are producing social instability in the fragile country.

  Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid recently reminded us that emerging markets are more vulnerable to social unrest because their citizens spend a far greater share of their income on food than those in the developed world.

  Also, Michael Every and Michael Magdovitz of Rabobank warned about the correlation between rising food prices and major socio-political unrest.

  Perhaps, the Arab Spring of 2010 is repeating, but this time it’s happening in the Caribbean. Maybe call it “Caribbean Summer.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 18:31

• Volocopter's Flying Taxi Secures Production Organization Approval As Commercialization Nears
  Volocopter’s Flying Taxi Secures Production Organization Approval As Commercialization Nears

  eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) air taxis are emerging as a revolutionary means of transportation across metro areas. Though no urban air mobility service exists at the moment, plenty of startups have touted their future air taxi designs and or test flights. 

  One company that could be way ahead of the competition is closer than ever to commercialization. 

  German aircraft manufacturer Volocopter GmbH announced Tuesday that it had received Production Organization Approval (POA) with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Notably, Volocopter was the first eVTOL company to obtain Design Organizations Approvals (DOA) in 2019. 

  Volocopter also announced it had acquired German manufacturer of sailplanes DG Flugzeugbau for production of the new eVTOL. This means with a DOA and POA, the future towards a commercial launch could be in a few years. 

  “Our ten-year partnership with DG Flugzeugbau has been an extraordinary learning experience. Having this legendary industry leader on our side to kick-start scalable and affordable UAM [urban air mobility] for people and cargo has been a game-changer. Today marks an exciting milestone as we unify DG Flugzeugbau’s leadership in aviation production with Volocopter’s pioneering UAM goals to establish yet another crucial stepping-stone for our collective global endeavors,” said Florian Reuter, CEO of Volocopter. 

  As populations increase and metro areas become larger, urban air mobility services using eVTOLs could be the solution to decrease congested highways. Urban air mobility is faster and cleaner than traditional ground-based vehicles.

  Volocopter’s certifications with EASA are recognized across global markets and positions it to launch future services in Europe, Asia, and North America.

  Volocopter recently unveiled its new winged eVTOL that can cruise around 110 mph, with a range of about 60 miles, and carry a payload of 660 to 880 pounds. 

  Volocopter’s first passenger flight may happen in the second half of 2023 in Singapore. 

  By 2024, United Airlines is preparing to launch an eVTOL service of its own.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 18:00

• Enough About Interest Rates!
  Enough About Interest Rates!

  Authored by Alexander William Salter via The American Institute for Economic Research,

  Monetary policy isn’t about interest rates. It’s about money. Specifically, it’s about the supply of money relative to the demand to hold it. But you wouldn’t know that from financial journalists’ constant focus on interest rates. Sentences like “The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates today,” or “Yesterday, the Fed debated whether to start raising interest rates” are all too common. They are also highly misleading.

  

  Financial journalists usually focus on the federal (fed) funds rate. This is the rate banks charge each other for overnight loans. The Fed has a target for the fed funds rate as part of its monetary policy strategy. But the fed funds rate is not an instrument. That is, it’s not something the Fed directly controls. Rather, the Fed sets its federal funds rate target and then uses its instruments to push the federal funds rate toward its target. The federal funds rate might be thought of as a barometer for monetary policy. But it is not the substance of monetary policy. 

  What about the so-called administered rates, which the Fed does control? These include the discount rate, which the Fed charges for loans, and the interest rate on excess reserves, which the Fed pays to banks that keep funds in their accounts at the Fed. The discount rate usually doesn’t matter much, because banks try not to borrow from the Fed directly, given the stigma associated with discount window lending. Interest on excess reserves is another story. Especially in a floor system, which the Fed has embraced since 2008, interest on excess reserves matters. But even here the Fed does not have complete freedom. Set the interest on excess reserves too low, and banks won’t keep their funds with the Fed. Set it too high and you choke off economic activity, because banks let capital sit idle rather than investing it in productive projects. The feasible range for interest on excess reserves is determined by factors largely outside the Fed’s control.

  It’s very important to separate monetary policy from interest rates. Yes, monetary policy affects interest rates, because changing the money supply by buying or selling assets affects yields. But, ideally, monetary policy keeps these effects to a minimum. Good monetary policy is about allocatively neutral demand stabilization, giving markets the liquidity they need to operate at full employment. If monetary policy were “about” changing interest rates, it would become something entirely different. Interest rates are prices and some of the most important ones in the economy: the prices of various capital instruments, and hence of time and risk. 

  If monetary policy purposefully changed interest rates, it would by definition alter relative prices. In market economies, relative prices guide resource allocation. If you believe monetary policy is about interest rates, you must also believe the central bank has better knowledge about the opportunity costs of capital than the market. This seems unlikely, to put it mildly. 

  It’s not the central bank’s job to pick winners and losers in the markets by altering the terms of exchange (prices). The central bank’s job is to create a stable foundation for the market process, in the form of monetary equilibrium: not too much money, nor too little, but just the right amount.

  We need to change the public conversation surrounding monetary policy. Talking about the Fed’s activities in terms of interest rates is easy, but deeply flawed. It is better to keep an eye on more relevant variables, like the overall size of the balance sheet. Of course, if central bankers start making crazy statements about “yield control,” as they do from time to time, we will have to talk about interest rates.

  It’s absolutely proper to push back against bureaucrats with minimal skin in the game who try to tinker with the yield curve. But for ordinary Fed policy, strategy, and announcements, keep your eye on money supply and demand. That’s where the action is.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 17:30

• Watch: CNN Doctor Says It's "Time To Start Mandating" COVID Vaccines
  Watch: CNN Doctor Says It’s “Time To Start Mandating” COVID Vaccines

  Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

  CNN ran a broadcast Thursday with its own medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner declaring that it is “time to start mandating” coronavirus vaccines for all Americans to counter people opting not to take the shots.

  

  CNN host Erin Burnett said to Reiner “when you look at this in the broader context, there’s still a third of the eligible population in the United States that hasn’t got a single dose.”

  “Given where things are going, is it time to move on from saying please to mandating?” Burnett asked.

  Reiner replied “I do think it’s time to start mandating vaccines. And I think that the private industry and private organizations will do that.”

  “At GW university, where I work, starting in fall, you can’t be on campus unless you’re fully vaccinated,” Reiner added.

  He continued, “We’re at the part of the pandemic now where the problem in this country is that 150 million Americans are not vaccinated. Half of that number is less than 18 years of age. But let’s look at the adults. Seventy-five-million adults have chosen not to get vaccinated. That choice has consequences.”

  Reiner noted that the government cannot physically force vaccinations on people (for now), but advocated making it basically impossible for those who choose not to take it to live their lives normally.

  “Now, we can’t force you to take a jab in the arm,” Reiner said, adding “But there are many jobs, perhaps, that can prevent you from working if you decide not to get vaccinated. So I think we need to be more proactive, and we will see industry take the lead in this.”

  Watch:

  Earlier in the day, CNN hosted Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who said that “it is absolutely the government’s business” to know if Americans have been vaccinated.

  In a telling statement, Becerra said “We want to give people the sense that they have the freedom to choose, but we hope they choose to live.”

  HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra: “It is absolutely the government’s business” to know who has and who has not been vaccinated. pic.twitter.com/Kukod1zIUO

  — Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 8, 2021

  Meanwhile, over at MSNBC they took things a step further with anchor Chris Hayes declaring that everyone who has scepticism about the efficacy of vaccines and opts not to take them are “cowardly.”

  Hayes blamed the ‘right wing media’, proclaiming “You saw some of it there, people of the most conservative parts of the country turning against the vaccine. The leaders of this movement are cowardly. They refuse to have the courage of their convictions. They will not come out and say they are against the vaccine. Instead, they take this straw-man stance saying they’re just against anyone trying to promote the vaccine or heaven forbid mandate it.”

  He continued, “So on the ‘Fox & Friends’ and others on the right say they don’t want anybody try to convince them to take the shot. They don’t want it mandated. They just want it out there. What they’re saying is you don’t want people to get the vaccine. Come out and say it, but they won’t say it. Because that means you want people to die. Those are the options right now.”

  Tucker Carlson, whom MSNBC’s Hayes also targeted in his rant, said Thursday that the Biden administration is “no longer pro-choice” when it comes to vaccines.

  “It’s so obviously unnecessary that it’s vindictive, and it makes you wonder, what is this really about?” Carlson said, adding “Medical privacy, physical autonomy, the right to control the medicines you take. These are the pillars of medical ethics, officially, or were. They no longer are.”

  “Tony Fauci has declared [these pillars of medical ethics] merely a political statement,” Carlson continued.

  The host further noted, “They’re telling you that you’ll wind up in a government database if you don’t comply, and that government agents could be showing up and knocking on your door. What is happening? What is this about?”

  Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

  White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who declared earlier this week that the Biden administration is to send “strike forces” to people’s homes to ensure children get vaccinated, decreed Thursday that criticism of the plan is a “disservice to the country.”

  In regards to community-based vaccination programs, Press Secretary Psaki says “when people are critical of these tactics, it’s really a disservice to the country.” pic.twitter.com/gmzP0c8Si7

  — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) July 8, 2021

  *  *  *

  Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/

  In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here. Support our sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, we urgently need your financial support here.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 16:30

• Former Canadian Embassy Worker Arrested In Haiti Assassination Worked For Shadowy Security Firm
  Former Canadian Embassy Worker Arrested In Haiti Assassination Worked For Shadowy Security Firm

  Update: The Sun-Sentinel reports that the two South Florida Haitian Americans currently in custody in Haiti claimed to have been recruited to do work in the country by an “under-the-radar firm in Doral” called CTU Security.

  According to the report, it’s run by a Venezuelan émigré, Antonio Enmanuel Intriago Valera.

  The Miami Herald visited the company’s offices on Thursday, where a doorbell rang to a phone, and a man declined to discuss the events in Haiti. He did not return phone calls, texts or emails asking about reports of involvement in the monumental developments gripping Haiti. No one answered on Saturday.

  Multiple sources in Haiti, requesting anonymity for their safety, have confirmed to the Herald that the detained men said they were hired by CTU, and several of the men indicated they had been in Haiti for at least three months, some longer. It is unclear if they knew or believed CTU leaders were aware of the assassination plot.

  *  *  *

  The assassination of Hatian president Jovenel Moïse has taken yet another strange twist, after ABC News reports that a Florida man arrested in connection with the hit formerly worked in Canada’s Embassy in Haiti, and also worked for a Hatian Relief Organization founded by suspected spooky actor Sean Penn following a 7.0 earthquake in 2010 that killed over 300,000 people.

  James Solages, a 35-year-old Haitian-born resident of Miami, is one of 28 suspects accused by the Haitian government of participating in the deadly July 7 ambush attack that killed Moïse.

  

  Solages, along with 55-year-old Joseph Vincent (also of Miami), claim they thought they were acting as interpreters ‘for an authorized operation to arrest the Haitian president’ by a group of Columbians, who told them Moïse was going to be arrested, not killed, according to the Washington Post.

  According to NBC News, Solages worked as a bodyguard at Canada’s Embassy in Port-au-Prince, however relatives say he has no formal military training. Canada, of course, is adding as much distance as possible (via the Florida Sun-Sentinel):

  Solages is also the president of a nonprofit organization with an office in North Lauderdale. FWA SA A JACMEL AVAN, which is Creole for “This Time Jacmel First,” has a mission of “rebuilding Haiti,” according to its website. The website as well as its Facebook page — both which were working Thursday — were no longer accessible Friday.

  The website on Thursday said Solages claimed to be the chief commander of bodyguards for the Canadian Embassy in Haiti. However multiple news outlets are reporting that Canada’s foreign relation department said one of the men detained in the assassination (it did not name Solages) had been employed only briefly as a reserve bodyguard at its embassy by a private contractor.

  Meanwhile, Solages worked as a driver and in a security capacity for Sean Penn’s J/P Haitian Relief Organization according to two sources.

  Penn laid down what he considers lifelong roots in Haiti following the earthquake, at one point even living in a tent city among some 40,000 Haitians left homeless by the natural disaster.

  For his multi-year efforts on behalf of the Haitian people, former President Michel Martelly — the mentor of slain President Jovenel Moise — named Penn ambassador at large, the first non-Haitian to receive that designation. -ABC News

  

  The assassination was carried out early Wednesday when a heavily armed group of men stormed the presidential mansion and shot Moïse multiple times, injuring his wife in the process. Prior to the storming, a man with an American accent could be heard on a megaphone announcing that it was a “DEA Operation.”

  NEW – Assailants of Haiti’s president and his wife “identified” themselves to be agents with the United States: “DEA operation. Everybody stand down. DEA operation.” Government official thinks the assassins were mercenaries.pic.twitter.com/tK4hTLaeCx

  — Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) July 7, 2021

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Last months, Solages filed for divorce from his wife of three years, according to court records. On June 15, he signed a financial affidavit claiming that he was unemployed, had zero cash on hand, and zero assets, according to the Sun-Sentinel. His uncle by marriage, Schubert Dorisme, said he had not seen Solages for a few months – while the Post reported that he had been in Haiti for about a month, while the other Florida suspect, Vincent, had been there about six months.

  Solages and Vincent were among several suspects captured and detained on Thursday evening, while three suspects have been killed and eight are on the run.

  

  Of course, now that FBI and Homeland Security officials are on their way, we’re sure the situation will be fully investigated and an honest accounting will be made public (perhaps after a few Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuits).

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 15:58

• "Utterly Unacceptable": Judge Blasts DC Jail For Not Allowing Jan. 6 Capitol Defendant Access To Evidence
  “Utterly Unacceptable”: Judge Blasts DC Jail For Not Allowing Jan. 6 Capitol Defendant Access To Evidence

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

  A federal Washington D.C. judge faulted a district jail on Thursday for failing to provide evidence to a defendant who was arrested for allegedly being involved in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach and has been held there for months.

  

  Jorden Mink, the defendant in the case, was indicted (pdf) on several federal charges, including destruction of government property and theft. Mink, who has pleaded not guilty, has been held in jail since January. Officials have alleged Mink used a baseball bat to smash windows at the Capitol and passed furniture through the smashed windows to the crowd outside.

  “I can’t allow someone to sit in prison for this long without access to material,” Judge Randolph Moss said at a court hearing on Thursday, saying the delay in evidence was “utterly unacceptable” and “not consistent with due process.”

  During the Thursday court hearing, prosecutors said they had given the evidence to the jail in May and didn’t understand why Mink hasn’t been able to obtain the documents. Mink was offered a plea deal, prosecutors noted, but they said he can’t decide on whether to accept the deal because he hasn’t seen the evidence against him.

  Randolph ordered prosecutors to work with the jail to grant the defendant access to the evidence against him by the end of Thursday, reported CNN. If Mink doesn’t gain access to the documents soon, the judge said, his detention may be reconsidered.

  There have been other reports of Jan. 6 defendants not being able to gain access to evidence against them, essentially denying them due process under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. Prosecutors have suggested that due to the sheer number of arrests related to the incident, there have been delays.

  So far, more than 500 defendants across nearly every U.S. state have been charged over the past six months over the Jan. 6 breach, according to the Department of Justice in early July.

  It comes as lawyers earlier this month said that dozens of people in federal custody following the Jan. 6 incident are currently being held in solitary confinement, denied access to legal counsel, and are being denied medical care.

  “There are about 50 plus or minus that are being detained, that have been in prison for months and will likely remain in prison for many more months until their day in court,” attorney John Pierce told EpochTV’s “The Nation Speaks.”

  Mink was scheduled to appear before Randolph in April but missed the court date because he tested positive for COVID-19. His attorney, Michael Mosher, said that Mink was having difficulty gaining access to medication that he takes regularly while in jail.

  “He takes medications to treat those, but since coming to Virginia and DC, he’s not been getting those meds as prescribed,” Moser told a court at the time, according to local media.

  In January, Mink was arrested at his home in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, and was held in the Butler County Jail. Federal court records say that he was transferred from the county jail to the D.C. jail.

  The Epoch Times has contacted the D.C. jail for comment.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 15:30

• Watch Kyle Bass On The "Cancer" Of China’s New Digital Currency
  Watch Kyle Bass On The “Cancer” Of China’s New Digital Currency

  “Imagine a currency that almost has a mind of its own … It knows your account data, knows your birthday, your social security number, where you live” and exactly what you like to buy. And all of this knowledge would be sitting in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

  In this Epoch Times interview of American Thought Leaders, Kyle Bass, founder of Hayman Capital Management and one of the few people who successfully bet on the bursting of the subprime bubble, breaks down the threat of a new Chinese digital currency and how the regime could force countries to use it.

  “They’re so good at exploiting every crack, every nook, every cranny … They take our openness, and they exploit it,” Bass says.

  Watch more in the full American Thought Leaders interview below.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 07/11/2021 – 15:00

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• What If An Alien Probe Visited Earth?
  What If An Alien Probe Visited Earth?

  Authored by Ross Pomeroy via RealClearScioence.com,

  Popular media portrayals of extraterrestrials visiting Earth have tended to display the dramatic: giant spaceraft, killer robots, and nefarious aliens. A more realistic scenario is decidedly more mundane, but still undeniably world-shattering: a single, robotic probe, visiting Earth in orbit or landing as a rover.

  Back in 1998, Allen Tough, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and an expert in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) before his death in 2012, postulated that there might be alien civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy with the ability to send out hundreds of small, intelligent probes to explore space. His supposition was reasonable. Today, well-funded collaborations like Breakthrough Starshot here on Earth are now actively working toward such an endeavor.

  So what if Tough was right, and tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years ago, a far-off alien civilization dispatched dozens of robotic scouts out into the cosmos and one such rover eventually cruised its way to Earth?

  

  What should be humanity’s response?

  The first step, according to Tough, would be to confirm that the craft really isn’t from Earth, perhaps from a secretive government. A smart, skeptical team, ideally composed of scientists from various countries, would need to be recruited to examine the probe. If it’s on land, the rover should probably be quarantined at the area it touched down. If it’s in space, a robotic or a crewed mission would undoubtedly be required for an up-close look.

  Once the probe’s authenticity is confirmed, Tough stresses that the finding should be made public worldwide, with all collected data openly shared.

  What to do next depends upon the nature of the probe.

  According to SETI Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak, we’d want to find out if it’s broadcasting any radio signals out into space, and probably block them at least temporarily. Such signals, especially if they are unidirectional, would likely be attempts to communicate with the aliens who sent it. We might not want the probe revealing too much about humanity before we can ascertain its intent.

  If the probe’s intent is judged to be benign, or even friendly, we’d next want to try to communicate with it. If it’s plainly unintelligent, this could take some time. After unblocking its communications, we’d likely have Earth representatives attempt to share basic information, something like mathematical principles, gestures of friendship, or music. We’d then have to wait for the probe’s handlers to respond through it. If the craft traveled for a long time, this could take hundreds of years! Shostak isn’t sure humans would be able to wait that long – the desire to disassemble the probe and learn from it’s technological guts might be too great.

  But how would extraterrestrials feel if we took apart their probe? Shostak doesn’t think aliens would be too mad. After all, if genial Martians suddenly appeared and messed with Curiosity, NASA engineers would be ecstatic – nothing would increase the space agency’s budget more.

  It would be more interesting if the probe or rover was artificially intelligent, thus capable of communicating with humans directly. Tough believed that any alien probe sent expressly for long-distance exploration would likely be capable of learning from, and even communicating with, a race it encountered.

  “The probe has presumably already monitored our radio and television broadcasts, learned at least one of our languages, and learned about our culture and history,” he wrote.

  That certainly would be convenient and fascinating! While it’s hard to hypothesize on what exactly an intelligent alien probe might tell us, Tough has a good idea about how we should act around it: show respect, avoid violence, speak and act truthfully, and deal with it fairly and honestly.

  He also thought that any communication should be attempted with international scientific cooperation as well as openness to the public, aspirations perhaps as unlikely as an alien probe visiting Earth in the first place!

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 23:30

• Visualizing Silver's Uses Through The Ages
  Visualizing Silver’s Uses Through The Ages

  Silver is one of the most versatile metals on Earth, with a unique combination of uses both as a precious and industrial metal.

  Today, silver’s uses span many modern technologies, including solar panels, electric vehicles, and 5G devices. However, as Visual Capitalist notes, the uses of silver in currency, medicine, art, and jewelry have helped advance civilization, trade, and technology for thousands of years.

  The Uses of Silver Over Time

  The below infographic from Blackrock Silver takes us on a journey of silver’s uses through time, from the past to the future.

  

  3,000 BC – The Middle Ages

  The earliest accounts of silver can be traced to 3,000 BC in modern-day Turkey, where its mining spurred trade in the ancient Aegean and Mediterranean seas. Traders and merchants would use hacksilver—rough-cut pieces of silver—as a medium of exchange for goods and services.

  Around 1,200 BC, the Ancient Greeks began refining and minting silver coins from the rich deposits found in the mines of Laurion just outside Athens. By 100 BC, modern-day Spain became the center of silver mining for the Roman Empire while silver bullion traveled along the Asian spice trade routes. By the late 1400s, Spain brought its affinity for silver to the New World where it uncovered the largest deposits of silver in history in the dusty hills of Bolivia.

  Besides the uses of silver in commerce, people also recognized silver’s ability to fight bacteria. For instance, wine and food containers were often made out of silver to prevent spoilage. In addition, during breakouts of the Bubonic plague in medieval and renaissance Europe, people ate and drank with silver utensils to protect themselves from disease.

  The 1800s – 2000s

  New medicinal uses of silver came to light in the 19th and 20th centuries. Surgeons stitched post-operative wounds with silver sutures to reduce inflammation. In the early 1900s, doctors prescribed silver nitrate eyedrops to prevent conjunctivitis in newborn babies. Furthermore, in the 1960s, NASA developed a water purifier that dispensed silver ions to kill bacteria and purify water on its spacecraft.

  The Industrial Revolution drove the onset of silver’s industrial applications. Thanks to its high light sensitivity and reflectivity, it became a key ingredient in photographic films, windows, and mirrors. Even today, skyscraper windows are often coated with silver to reflect sunlight and keep interior spaces cool.

  The 2000s – Present

  The uses of silver have come a long way since hacksilver and utensils, evolving with time and technology.

  Silver is the most electrically conductive metal, making it a natural choice for electronic devices. Almost every electronic device with a switch or button contains silver, from smartphones to electric vehicles. Solar panels also utilize silver as a conductive layer in photovoltaic cells to transport and store electricity efficiently.

  In addition, it has several medicinal applications that range from treating burn wounds and ulcers to eliminating bacteria in air conditioning systems and clothes.

  Silver for the Future

  Silver has always been useful to industries and technologies due to its unique properties, from its antibacterial nature to high electrical conductivity. Today, silver is critical for the next generation of renewable energy technologies.

  For every age, silver proves its value.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 23:00

• Meet Jigsaw: Google's Intelligence Agency
  Meet Jigsaw: Google’s Intelligence Agency

  Via PrivacyToGo.co,

  It’s no secret that Google regularly collaborates with intelligence agencies.

  They are a known NSA subcontractor. They launched Google Earth using a CIA spy satellite network. Their executive suite’s revolving door with DARPA is well known.

  In the wake of the January 6th Capitol event, the FBI used Google location data to pwn attendants with nothing more than a valid Gmail address and smartphone login:

  A stark reminder that carrying a tracking device with a Google login, even with the SIM card removed, can mean the difference between freedom and an orange jump suit in the Great Reset era.

  But Google also operates its own internal intelligence agency – complete with foreign regime change operations that are now being applied domestically.

  And they’ve been doing so without repercussion for over a decade.

  

  From Google Ideas to Google Regime Change

  In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt created Google Ideas. In typical Silicon Valley newspeak, Ideas was marketed as a “think/do tank to research issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.“

  Astute readers know this “think/do” formula well – entities like the Council on Foreign Relations or World Economic Forum draft policy papers (think) and three-letter agencies carry them out (do).

  And again, in typical Silicon Valley fashion, Google wanted to streamline this process – bring everything in-house and remake the world in their own image.

  To head up Google Ideas, Schmidt tapped a man named Jared Cohen.

  

  He couldn’t have selected a better goon for the job – as a card-carrying member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Rhodes Scholar, Cohen is a textbook Globalist spook. The State Department doubtlessly approved of his sordid credentials, as both Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton enrolled Cohen to knock over foreign governments they disapproved of.

  Google Ideas’ role in the 2014 Ukraine regime change operation is well-documented. And before that, their part in overthrowing Mubarak in Egypt was unveiled by way of the Stratfor leaks.

  More recently, the role of Google Ideas in the attempted overthrow of Assad in Syria went public thanks to the oft-cited Hillary Clinton email leaks:

  Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.

  Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.

  Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria. I’ve attached a few visuals that show what the tool will look like. Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything eke you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact.

  -Jared Cohen to State Dept. Officials, July 25, 2012

  With all this mounting evidence, surely Google Ideas was decommissioned. Surely Jared Cohen was swiftly ousted from his position at one of America’s premier Big Tech darlings for crimes against humanity, right?

  Of course not!

  Why scrap all that hard work when you can just rebrand and shift your regime change operations to domestic targets?

  Google Jigsaw – USA Psyop Edition

  Google Ideas was renamed Google Jigsaw in 2015 after years of bad press and controversy – this time with an eye on performing psychological operations in the United States.

  But all that experience data mining and overthrowing Middle Eastern nations wasn’t just thrown out. Rather, Jigsaw repurposed its internal psychological operations program (code-named Operation Abdullah) to instead target “right-wing conspiracy theorists,” as revealed by privacy researcher Rob Braxman.

  Using a technique known as the redirect method, Jigsaw attempts to populate outbound links to dissuade potential thought-criminals from looking at wrongthink.

  Make no mistake – the redirect method is about more than manipulation of search engine results. It’s one thing to manipulate the content of searches based on query strings, but to target the psychology of the searcher themselves requires an accurate psychological profile of the person doing the searching.

  And Google has psych profiles in spades thanks to centralized Google logins: To Android phones, to Gmail accounts, to adjunct services like YouTube, even to children via Google Classroom.

  You don’t even need to use Google’s search engine to populate them with weaponized data. In fact, search alone provides far fewer avenues for offensive metadata usage than a cell phone.

  We would implore readers to take a look at Jigsaw’s site. It’s a study in how to use front-end design to creep out your visitor, as a snippet of JavaScript code ensures your cursor is tracked in a spotlight throughout your visit:

  

  Jigsaw’s front-end design team has a clear message for you: There’s nowhere to hide.

  The site also uses another bit of intelligence tradecraft known as “transferrence” – it’s a simple psychological tactic of shifting blame from yourself to your target.

  The four subheaders on Jigsaw’s homepage, Disinformation, Censorship, Toxicity, and Violent Extremism demonstrate this tactic at work.

  • There is no greater source of media disinformation than MSM and the information served up by Google search engines.

  • Big Tech are at the forefront of destroying free speech through heavy-handed censorship, Google among them.

  • Psychological manipulation tactics used by the social justice crowd doubtlessly instill toxicity in those subjected to them.

  • And Google’s well-documented history of participating in bloody regime change as described in this article are textbook cases of violent extremism.

  Yet Jigsaw markets itself as combating these societal ails. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, just as Google’s former company tag-line of “Don’t Be Evil” was a similar reversal of reality.

  And yes, regime change aficionado Jared Cohen is still the CEO of Google Jigsaw. In fact, Jigsaw, LLC was overtly brought back in-house as of October 2020.

  In Closing

  As we’ve described in previous articles, vast swaths of the State-controlled Panopticon are currently being outsourced to Big Tech companies.

  Call this phenomenon a public-private partnership. Call it the Great Reset. Call it Agenda 2030, or Agenda 21, or “stakeholder capitalism,” or any of the other euphemisms dreamt up by these hapless would-be oligarchs to sell neofeudal Technocracy to the public.

  Making intelligence services pseudo-independent from the State is simply a mandatory prerequisite for fully globalizing them.

  Furthermore, as the Biden administration seeks to reclassify half of the country as domestic extremists, it’s no secret that companies like Google, with their vast data weaponization programs, will play a key role in identifying Public Enemy #1:

  You.

  There is no “silver bullet” solution to this problem. Nearly all consumer electronics can be exploited at very low levels. Even the Internet itself is a longstanding military intelligence operation.

  But this doesn’t mean any action short of becoming a Luddite is meaningless!

  If data is the new oil, it’s time to shut off your well:

  • Abstain from using Google Mail, Docs, or Search where possible.

  • Seek out alternative social media and content creation platforms.

  • If your smartphone requires heavy dependence on Apple or Google for logins or closed-source apps, consider privacy-respecting alternatives.

  • Familiarize yourself with common data harvesting tactics and take action where you can.

  While a full list of meaningful action is beyond the purview of this post (or any single blog entry for that matter), the important takeaway here is this:

  We cannot opt out of mass government surveillance. But we knowingly consent to most forms of “privatized” intelligence gathering.

  Take the first step and revoke your consent.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 22:30

• Air Force Releases New B-21 Raider Stealth Bomber Rendering
  Air Force Releases New B-21 Raider Stealth Bomber Rendering

  The B-21 Raider – the US Air Force’s secretive, next-generation, long-range stealth bomber, was featured in a new artist rendering graphic for a new fact sheet. This is the third official rendering of the B-21, as there are no images of the stealth bomber. 

  The new rendering shows a previously unseen cockpit windscreen configuration as the bomber takes off from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. We noted several years ago that the bomber would be tested at Edwards AFB. 

  

  Testing is expected to occur in May 2022 where actual images of the plane may be released before or during its maiden flight. The 420th Flight Test Squadron will plan, test, analyze and report on all flights on the new bomber. 

  The B-21 is the most advanced bomber to date, with complex nuclear long-range missions built into its airframe. It may even be able to carry hypersonic weapons. 

  “Nuclear modernization is a top priority for the Department of Defense and the Air Force, and B-21 is key to that plan,” Randall Walden, Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office director, said in a Tuesday press release.

  Senior Air Force officials have testified before Congress that the service is in desperate need of ordering the new stealth bombers that would increase its competitiveness globally. 

  The service plans to replace the B-1 Lancer and the B-2 Spirit bombers with the B-21. 

  “The built-in feature of open systems architecture on the B-21 makes the bomber effective as the threat environment evolves. This aircraft design approach sets the nation on the right path to ensuring America’s enduring airpower capability,” the press release continued. 

  The service’s current plan is to purchase at least 100 B-21s. There is no timeline on when the first B-21 would enter deployment. 

  Simultaneously, China has unveiled renderings of its next-generation Xian H-20 strategic bomber. As the US-China relationship continues to sour and a new “Cold War” is underway, both countries are racing to deploy their next-gen stealth bomber. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 22:00

• China: Fragile Giant
  China: Fragile Giant

  Authored by Jim Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

  I’ve made many visits to China over the past thirty years and have been careful to move beyond Beijing (the political capital) and Shanghai (the financial capital) on these trips.

  My visits have included Chongqing, Wuhan (the origin of the coronavirus outbreak), Xian, Nanjing, new construction sites to visit “ghost cities,” and trips to the agrarian countryside.

  My trips included meetings with government and Communist Party officials and numerous conversations with everyday Chinese people.

  These trips have been supplemented by reading an extensive number of books on the history, culture and politics of China from 3,000 BC to the present. This background gives me a much broader perspective on current developments in China.

  In short, my experience with China goes well beyond media outlets and talking heads.

   

  An objective analysis of China must begin with its enormous strengths. China has the third-largest territory in the world, with the world’s largest population (although soon to be overtaken by India).

  China also has the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, with over 280 nuclear warheads. This is about the same as the U.K. and France but well behind Russia (6,490) and the U.S. (6,450). China is the largest gold producer in the world at about 500 metric tonnes per year.

  Its economy is the second-largest economy in the world — behind only the U.S. China’s foreign exchange reserves (including gold) are the largest in the world.

  By these diverse measures of population, territory, military strength and economic output, China is clearly a global super-power and the dominant presence in East Asia. Yet, these blockbuster statistics hide as much as they reveal.

  China’s per capita income is under $12,000 per person compared to per capita income of about $64,000 in the United States. Put differently, the U.S. is only 38% richer than China on a gross basis, but it is 500% richer than China on a per capita basis (of course the massive economic fallout from the coronavirus will have an impact).

  China’s military is growing stronger and more sophisticated, but it still falls short against the U.S. military when it comes to aircraft carriers, nuclear warheads, submarines, fighter aircraft and strategic bombers.

  Most importantly, at under $12,000 per capita GDP, China is stuck squarely in the “middle income trap” as defined by development economists.

  The path from low income (about $5,000 per capita) to middle-income (about $10,000 per capita) is fairly straightforward and mostly involves reduced corruption, direct foreign investment and migration from the countryside to cities to pursue assembly-style jobs.

  The path from middle-income to high-income (about $20,000 per capita) is much more difficult and involves creation and deployment of high-technology and manufacture of high-value-added goods.

  Among developing economies (excluding oil producers), only Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea have successfully made this transition since World War II. All other developing economies in Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Middle East including giants such as Brazil and Turkey remain stuck in the middle-income ranks.

  China remains reliant on assembly-style jobs and has shown no promise of breaking into the high-income ranks.

  

  To escape the middle income trap requires more than cheap labor and infrastructure investment. It requires applied technology to produce high-value added products. This explains why China has been so focused on stealing U.S. intellectual property.

  China has not shown much capacity for developing high technology on its own, but it has been quite effective at stealing such technology from trading partners and applying it through its own system of state-owned enterprises and “national champions” such as Huawei in the telecommunications sector.

  But the U.S. and other countries are cracking down on China’s technology theft and China cannot generate the needed technology through its own R&D.

  In short, and despite enormous annual growth in the past twenty years, China remains fundamentally a poor country with limited ability to improve the well-being of its citizens much beyond what has already been achieved. And that has serious implications for China’s leadership…

  China’s economy is not just about providing jobs, goods and services. It is about regime survival for a Chinese Communist Party that faces an existential crisis if it fails to deliver.

  It’s an illegitimate regime that will remain in power only so long as it provides jobs and a rising living standard for the Chinese people. The overriding imperative of the Chinese leadership is to avoid societal unrest.

  If China’s job machine seizes, as parts of it did during the coronavirus outbreak, Beijing fears that popular unrest could emerge on a potentially scale much greater than the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. This is an existential threat to Communist power.

  President Xi Jinping could quickly lose what the Chinese call, “The Mandate of Heaven.”

  That’s a term that describes the intangible goodwill and popular support needed by emperors to rule China for the past 3,000 years.

  If The Mandate of Heaven is lost, a ruler can fall quickly. Even before the crisis, China has had serious structural economic problems that are finally catching up with it.

  China is so heavily indebted that it’s at the point where more debt does not produce growth. Adding additional debt today slows the economy and calls into question China’s ability to service its existing debt.

  China also confronts an insolvent banking system and a real estate bubble. Up to half of China’s investment is a complete waste. It does produce jobs and utilize inputs like cement, steel, copper and glass. But the finished product, whether a city, train station or sports arena, is often a white elephant that will remain unused. The Chinese landscape is littered with “ghost cities” that have resulted from China’s wasted investment and flawed development model.

  Essentially, China is on the horns of a dilemma with no good way out. China has driven growth with excessive credit, wasted infrastructure investment and Ponzi schemes.

  The Chinese leadership knows this, but they had to keep the growth machine in high gear to create jobs for millions of migrants coming from the countryside to the city and to maintain jobs for the millions more already in the cities.

  The two ways to get rid of debt are deflation (which results in write-offs, bankruptcies and unemployment) or inflation (which results in theft of purchasing power, similar to a tax increase).

  Both alternatives are unacceptable to the Communists because they lack the political legitimacy to endure either unemployment or inflation. Either policy would cause social unrest and unleash revolutionary potential.

  China also has serious demographic challenges that will limit future growth…

  In 1980, China instituted a one-child policy in an effort to control population growth. But the 1980 announcement was really a matter of formalizing an existing policy. The Chinese have a cultural preference for boys over girls. So, when the one-child policy was implemented, the Chinese used pre-natal tests to determine sex and then aborted the girls.

  At a more crude level, families kept buckets of water next to birthing beds so that if a girl was born she could be drowned immediately. It is estimated that between 20 million to 30 million baby girls were killed this way, resulting in an equivalent surplus of men over women.

  These excess men will never find wives in China. Since women can be selective about husbands, it follows that the 30 million excess men will be the least talented and poorest in Chinese society. This cohort is highly prone to antisocial behavior, including alcohol and drug abuse and violence.

  The demographic time bomb is now detonating. The missing children from thirty or forty years ago are the missing prime age workers of today. The Chinese economy grew strongly from 1995 to 2010, mainly because of a rural-to-urban migration and the rise of assembly-style manufacturing jobs.

  Now the migration is over, the assembly-style jobs are moving to Vietnam and India, and China’s lack of high-value-added technology has left it stuck in the slow-growth middle-income trap. China might have overcome this through the sheer weight of low-wage workers, but they don’t exist.

  China will lose over 100 million workers in the next ten years due to aging, retirement and the absence of working-age replacements. China is now trying to undo the demographic damage with a new “three-child policy.”

  But, it’s too late. Demographic disasters take thirty years or more to create and they can take thirty years or more to cure. For the next thirty years, China’s worker shortage will be a drain on growth.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 21:30

• Unfavorable Opinions About China Have Reached Historic Highs
  Unfavorable Opinions About China Have Reached Historic Highs

  As China celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of its Communist Party last week, the Pew Research Center released a new report showing that unfavorable views of Beijing have reached historic highs in 17 advanced economies.

  As Statista’s Niall McCarty notes, in most places, large majorities of the public also agreed that China is not respecting the personal freedoms of its people.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Views of China are broadly negative across most of the world’s advanced economies including approximately three-quarters of respondents in Japan, Sweden, Australia, South Korea and the United States. While overall views did not change significantly in most countries, they did rise in Austria, Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom as a result of bilateral tensions and the feeling that the pandemic was badly handled.

  Eight-in-ten or more respondents said that the Chinese government does not respect the personal freedoms of its people and that view is at record highs in nearly every market surveyed. In a further sign of negativity to towards Beijing, Pew found that few countries have confidence in Xi Jinping doing the right thing regarding world affairs while there is a widespread preference for closer economic ties with the U.S. rather than China.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 21:00

• Dershowitz: Trump Lawsuit Against Twitter "Will Shake Things Up Considerably"
  Dershowitz: Trump Lawsuit Against Twitter “Will Shake Things Up Considerably”

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

  Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz on Wednesday said that President Donald Trump’s class-action lawsuits against Facebook, Google, and Twitter are “very, very important” for the future of free speech in the United States, arguing that the Big Tech firms have special exemptions from the government and aren’t just any ordinary private companies.

  

  The former president, during a news conference in New Jersey, announced several lawsuits were being filed in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida. They’re asking a judge to order an immediate halt to social media companies’ alleged shadowbanning, censoring, blacklisting, and canceling of people. Trump is also seeking punitive damages.

  Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor emeritus, told Newsmax that recent actions taken by the social media giants are “inconsistent with the spirit of free speech that underlies our First Amendment.” According to him, the lawsuit “will shake things up considerably, though I can’t predict in the end how it will come up.”

  Trump’s suit, he continued, is “a complicated case because, as the president pointed out, and as [lawyer] Pam Bondi pointed out, the others pointed out, these are not just ordinary private companies—they have special exemption … and therefore they partake of some kind of government action, and the courts will have to parse this issue.”

  Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other platforms, under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, are generally protected from liability for the content that users post.

  The law allows social media companies to also moderate their platforms by removing posts that violate their terms and conditions as long as they’re acting in “good faith.”

  Bondi on Wednesday suggested that Section 230 is currently outdated because it was drafted in the mid-1990s with the intention to protect children from harmful content online. The way in which Big Tech firms currently use the law as a shield, she argued, oversteps what it originally intended to do.

  

  Former President Donald Trump speaks at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., on July 7, 2021. (Seth Wenig/AP Photo)

  Twitter, Facebook, and Google-owned YouTube suspended Trump’s accounts in January, claiming that the former president incited violence on Jan. 6 and said he violated the companies’ terms and conditions regarding allegations about election fraud.

  “What we don’t want is the government telling private companies what they can say and what they can do,” Dershowitz said.

  “That would be wrong, but we don’t want these crazy, public, enormous, monopolistic companies to be restricting our free speech. The current situation is unacceptable, and this lawsuit, I think, will shake things up considerably, though I can’t predict in the end how it will come up.”

  Dershowitz further noted that private firms should be able to regulate content on their sites—a common argument that has been deployed against Trump and others who have been suspended.

  But he said the “argument on the other side is they’re not really private, and the courts are going to have to resolve that.”

  “There is some precedent on that, there’s a case called Marsh v Alabama, where a company town, a town-owned by a company, forbade free speech and the Supreme Court said, ‘no, although it’s owned by a company it partakes of the public and therefore the First Amendment applies,’” Dershowitz said.

  He added: “Clearly what’s happening here is prior restraint. That is, they’re telling the former president of the United States, ‘we don’t want you on our platforms, no matter what you say, we’re going to restrain you.’ So, the issue is not so much prior restraint. I think everybody will acknowledge this is prior restraint. It’s whether or not the prior restraint is subject to the First Amendment or [Trump] himself has a First Amendment right. That’s what’s so complicated about this, that’s why I call this the new censorship. The old censorship involved pure government. McCarthyism. Congress. Today we have these companies that are the new censors.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 20:30

• China Tightens Grip On Tech Companies With Crackdown On Foreign IPOs
  China Tightens Grip On Tech Companies With Crackdown On Foreign IPOs

  China’s unprecedented crackdown on its burgeoning (for now) tech industry just won’t stop and overnight, China’s Cyberspace Administration of China – the same entity responsible for the crackdown on Didi – proposed new rules that would require nearly all companies seeking to list in foreign countries to undergo a cybersecurity review, a move that would significantly tighten oversight over its internet giants.

  Confirming our thoughts from last week, namely that “with 34 Pending Filings, China Sends A Message: No More US IPOs“, tech platform companies that possess the personal data of at least 1 million users will have to apply for approval from the Cybersecurity Review Office, a group backed by 12 powerful Chinese ministries, if they plan an IPO in a foreign market according to a draft of the updated version of Beijing’s Measures for Cybersecurity Review published on Saturday, which is open for feedback until July 25.

  While the draft does not specify if it exempts or covers Hong Kong – the world’s favorite IPO destination in seven of the past 12 years – the city is usually not considered a “foreign” market under Chinese regulations, and especially now following the its quasi-annexation by China.

  According to the SCMP, the threshold was set at 1 million – a low bar a country where almost 1 billion people go online actively – apparently to conform with Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of the United States, which requires approvals by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) for deals that involve the personal data of 1 million or more US individuals.

  Coming in the aftermath of a series of aggressive crackdowns by the cyberspace regulator on China’s dominant ride-hailing service Didi-Chuxing, the new rules will transform the regulatory landscape for Chinese tech firms wanting to raise funds from foreign markets.

  Didi, which raised US$4.4 billion in a June 30 stock sale in New York, angered Chinese regulators – especially the CAC – because of the way that it forced its way to the listing, with SCMP sources describing the company’s insistence to list as akin to a “deliberate act of deceit”.

  As Bloomberg notes, the move is “one of the most concrete steps taken yet to restrain the ability of technology firms to raise capital in the U.S. through a so-called Variable Interest Entity model that the likes of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Baidu Inc.and Didi Global Inc. have adopted. Regulators are also considering requiring VIEs like Alibaba that have already gone public to seek approval for additional share offerings in the offshore market, people with knowledge of the matter have said.”

  The crackdown is also meant to send a clear signal to the US: according to You Yunting, senior partner at Shanghai Debund Law Firm, the draft is mainly aimed at listings in the US. 

  “The Chinese government has been hoping to strengthen supervision of Chinese companies listed overseas for some time … but since the start of the China-US trade war, data has become a focus of the power play between the two sides,” You said. “Didi’s US listing was only the fuse that lit the supervision, but even without the Didi incident, the Chinese government would still have taken the initiative.”

  So far this year, 37 Chinese companies have listed in the U.S., surpassing last year’s count, and raised a combined $12.9 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

  “These rules will push more Chinese internet firms to list in Hong Kong instead of in another country, to bypass such a review,” said Feng Chucheng, a partner at research firm Plenum in Beijing. “The one million-user threshold is very low and would basically apply to every internet company aspiring for an IPO.”

  The draft regulations also cover data security risks involving foreign powers, with reviews assessing the risks of data being transferred abroad illegally, or being stolen, leaked and destroyed. Reviews will also consider the national security risks of critical information infrastructure: whether critical and personal data is being affected, controlled, or maliciously used by foreign governments after a foreign listing, according to the draft.

  The proposal did not say whether Chinese tech companies that have already filed to list in New York must go through the cybersecurity review. LinkDoc Technology, a company backed by Alibaba Group Holding’s Alibaba Health unit, and the Beijing-based Daojia are among the China-domiciled technology companies that have filed to raise funds in the US.

  The current regulations, issued in April and effective from June 2020, require that critical information infrastructure operators go through a cybersecurity review if they acquire network products or services that may threaten national security. Just days after the Didi IPO, the Cyber Security Review Office announced probes into Didi, truck-hailing apps Yunmanman and Huochebang, as well as a recruiting app operated by Boss Zhipin, all on national security grounds.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 20:00

• Escobar: Say Hello To The Diplo-Taliban
  Escobar: Say Hello To The Diplo-Taliban

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

  Deploying diplomatic skills refined from Doha to Moscow, the Taliban in 2021 has little to do with its 2001 incarnation…

  

  Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (center) and other members of the Taliban arrive to attend an international conference in Moscow on March 18, 2021. Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko / AFP

  A very important meeting took place in Moscow last week, virtually hush-hush. Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, received Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan’s national security adviser.

  There were no substantial leaks.

  A bland statement pointed to the obvious:

  They “focused on the security situation in Afghanistan during the pullout of Western military contingencies and the escalation of the military-political situation in the northern part of the country.”

  The real story is way more nuanced. Mohib, representing embattled President Ashraf Ghani, did his best to convince Patrushev that the Kabul administration represents stability. It does not – as the subsequent Taliban advances proved.

  Patrushev knew Moscow could not offer any substantial measure of support to the current Kabul arrangement because doing so would burn bridges the Russians would need to cross in the process of engaging the Taliban. Patrushev knows that the continuation of Team Ghani is absolutely unacceptable to the Taliban – whatever the configuration of any future power-sharing agreement.

  So Patrushev, according to diplomatic sources, definitely was not impressed.

  This week we can all see why. A delegation from the Taliban political office went to Moscow essentially to discuss with the Russians the fast-evolving mini-chessboard in northern Afghanistan. The Taliban had been to Moscow four months earlier, along with the extended troika (Russia, US, China, Pakistan) to debate the new Afghan power equation.

  

  Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev. Photo: AFP / Viktor Tolochko / Sputnik

  On this trip, they emphatically assured their interlocutors there’s no Taliban interest in invading any territory of their Central Asia neighbors.

  It’s not excessive, in view of how cleverly they’ve been playing their hand, to call the Taliban desert foxes. They know well what Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has been repeating: Any turbulence coming from Afghanistan will be met with a direct response from the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

  In addition to stressing that the US withdrawal – actually, repositioning – represents the failure of its Afghan “mission,” Lavrov touched on the two really key points:

  • The Taliban is increasing its influence in the northern Afghanistan border areas; and

  • Kabul’s refusal to form a transitional government is “promoting a belligerent solution” to the drama. This implies Lavrov expects much more flexibility from both Kabul and the Taliban in the Sisyphean power-sharing task ahead.

  And then, relieving the tension, when asked by a Russian journalist if Moscow will send troops to Afghanistan, Lavrov reverted to Mr Cool: “The answer is obvious.”

  Shaheen speaks

  Mohammad Suhail Shaheen is the quite articulate spokesman for the Taliban political office. He’s adamant that “taking Afghanistan by military force is not our policy. Our policy is to find a political solution to the Afghan issue, which is continuing in Doha.” Bottom line: “We confirmed our commitment to a political solution here in Moscow once more.”

  That’s absolutely correct. The Taliban don’t want a bloodbath. They want to be embraced. As Shaheen has stressed, it would be easy to conquer major cities – but there would be blood. Meanwhile, the Taliban already control virtually the whole border with Tajikistan.

  

  New face of the Taliban: The insurgents’ spokesman Mohammad Suhail Shaheen speaks to media in Moscow on February 15, 2021. Photo: AFP / Elena Teslova / Anadolu Agency

  The 2021 Taliban have little in common with their 2001 pre-war on terror incarnation. The movement has evolved from a largely Ghilzai Pashtun rural guerrilla insurgency to a more inter-ethnic arrangement, incorporating Tajiks, Uzbeks and even Shi’ite Hazaras – a group that was mercilessly persecuted during the 1996-2001 years of Taliban power.

  Reliable figures are extremely hard to come by, but 30% of the Taliban today may be non-Pashtuns. One of the top commanders is ethnically Tajik – and that explains the lightning-flash “soft” blitzkrieg in northern Afghanistan across Tajik territory.

  I visited a lot of these geologically spectacular places in the early 2000s. The inhabitants, all cousins, speaking Dari, are now turning over their villages and towns to Tajik Taliban as a matter of trust. Very few – if any – Pashtuns from Kandahar or Jalalabad are involved. That illustrates the absolute failure of the central government in Kabul.

  Those who do not join the Taliban simply desert – as did the Kabul forces manning the checkpoint close to the bridge over the Pyanj river, off the Pamir highway; they escaped without a fight to Tajik territory, actually riding the Pamir highway. The Taliban hoisted their flag in this crucial intersection without firing a shot.

  The Afghan National Army’s chief, General Wali Mohammad Ahmadza, fresh into his role by appointment from Ghani, is keeping a brave face: ANA’s priority is to protect the main cities (so far, so good, because the Taliban are not attacking them); border crossings (that’s not going so well), and highways (mixed results so far).

  This interview with Suhail Shaheen is quite enlightening – as he feels compelled to stress that “we don’t have access to media” and laments the “baseless” barrage of “propaganda launched against us,” which implies that Western media should admit the Taliban have changed.

  Shaheen points out that “it’s not possible to take 150 districts in just six weeks by fighting,” which connects to the fact that the security forces “do not trust the Kabul administration.” In all districts that have been conquered, he swears, “ the forces came to the Taliban voluntarily.”

  

  A smoke plume rises from houses amid an ongoing fight between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters in the western city of Qala-i- Naw, the capital of Badghis province, on July 7. The Taliban launched its first major assault on a provincial capital since the US military began its final drawdown of troops from the country. Photo: AFP

  Shaheen makes a statement that could have come straight from Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s: The “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan are the real freedom fighters.” That may be the object of endless debate across the lands of Islam.

  But one fact is indisputable: The Taliban are sticking by the agreement they signed with the Americans on February 29, 2020. And that implies a total American exit: “If they don’t abide by their commitments, we have a clear right of retaliation.”

  Thinking ahead to “when an Islamic government is in place,” Shaheen insists there will be “good relations” with every nation, and embassies and consulates will not be targeted.

  The Taliban “goal is clear: to end the occupation.” And that brings us to the tricky gambit of Turkish troops “protecting” Kabul airport. Shaheen is crystal clear. “No NATO forces – that means continuation of occupation,” he proclaims. “When we have an independent Islamic country, then we will sign any agreement with Turkey that is mutually beneficial.”

  Shaheen is involved in the ongoing, very complicated negotiations in Doha, so he cannot allow himself to commit the Taliban to any future power-sharing agreement. What he does say, even though “progress is slow” in Doha, is that, contrary to what was previously reported by media in Qatar, the Taliban will not present a formal written proposal to Kabul by the end of the month, The talks will continue.

  Going hybrid?

  Whatever the “Mission Accomplished” non-denial denials emanating from the White House, a few things are already clear on the Eurasia front.

  The Russians, for one thing, are already engaging the Taliban, in detail, and may soon strike their name off their terror list.

  The Chinese, for another, are assured that if the Taliban commit Afghanistan to join the Belt and Road Initiative, connecting via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, ISIS-Khorasan will not then be permitted to go on overdrive in Afghanistan bolstered by Uyghur jihadis currently in Idlib.

  

  American soldiers retrieve their duffel bags after they returned home from a nine-month deployment to Afghanistan on December 10, 2020, at Fort Drum, New York. Photo: AFP / John Moore / Getty Images

  And nothing is off the table for Washington when it comes to derailing BRI.

  Crucial silos scattered across the deep state must be already at work replacing a forever war in Afghanistan with hybrid war, Syria-style.

  Lavrov is very much aware of Kabul power brokers who would not say “no” to a new hybrid war arrangement. But the Taliban for their part have been very effective – preventing assorted Afghan factions from supporting Team Ghani.

  As for the Central Asian “stans,” not a single one of them wants any forever wars or hybrid wars down the road.

  Fasten your seat belts: It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 19:30

• 25K Applicants In First Week After Indiana Offers Free Gun Carry Licenses
  25K Applicants In First Week After Indiana Offers Free Gun Carry Licenses

  At the beginning of July, Indiana exempted all fees for a lifetime license to carry a handgun. The response was so overwhelming that in the first 24 hours, more than 7,000 people successfully applied for the free license. In the seven days following the new law taking effect on July 1, more than 25,000 people had signed up for the license, according to Bearing Arms. 

  A lifetime permit originally cost $125, but now it’s free of charge and overwhelming the state as they struggle to process thousands of applications. 

  “As expected, we’ve had an influx of applications on our website. We’re asking folks that want to apply for that to be patient,” said Indiana State Police (ISP) public information officer Sgt. John Perrine.

  

  ISP warned due to the high volume of applications, there may be delays in accessing the firearms portal. 

   “We’re sorry, due to a high number of current applicants, we must limit the number of individuals applying at one time. Please try again later,” ISP said. 

  Because of the expected demand for free licenses, state police say it could take months to process all the new license paperwork. 

  However, there are some hidden fees – when Indiana legislators removed the state fees on the permit, they didn’t remove fees for background checks or fingerprinting.  

  Whether or not lawmakers take the next step and abolish carry licenses is still an open question.

  Readers may recall a massive surge in Second Amendment sanctuaries at the state, county, and local levels are sweeping across the country. Lamestream media fails to report that 61% of US counties now protect gun rights. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 19:00

• Activism Uncensored: Colombia In Chaos
  Activism Uncensored: Colombia In Chaos

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

  Any American correspondent working abroad will tell you: coverage of in-country upheavals are dictated by the nature of the government’s relationship to the United States. If they’re technically allies, protests tend to be portrayed as illegitimate. Hence the dilemma in Colombia, as depicted in this episode of Activism Uncensored.

  Colombia for some time now has been considered America’s key strategic ally in South America — “think of it as similar to Israel in the Middle East,” says correspondent Maranie R. Staab, above. Colombia is the top recipient in the region of American aid, collecting $800 million in 2020 alone, being central to multiple American objectives, from drug interdiction to opposition to the left-wing government of Nicolas Maduro. The State Department last year issued a fact sheet explaining the relationship:

  Colombia is a key U.S. partner in ongoing efforts to help Venezuela in its return to democracy and economic prosperity. Colombia’s leadership has been essential in coordinating regional support for Interim President Juan Guaidó, as well as condemning Maduro’s misrule and adopting policies to isolate his regime…

  The usual “Democracy Promotion” script involves the U.S. backing this or that politician with money, weapons, and sometimes even military manpower, turning a blind eye to corruption or other excesses connected to that politician, then ultimately being forced to double down on the money and weapons when anti-American protest movements rise in response.

  This isn’t exactly that situation, but close: a government in America’s good graces largely thanks to its role as a launching pad for the dubious effort to install Guaidó in Venezuela, under pressure from a frustrated and impoverished population reacting in this case to a proposed tax hike on basic goods.

  Foreign news outlets like Al Jazeera have openly described the Colombian protests as a “class war,” while groups like Amnesty International have tried to bring attention to the fact that the Colombian police suspected in the disappearances of some of the protesters may be armed with American weapons. Outlets like the Washington Post, meanwhile, have used more neutral language in describing “anti-government protests,” almost describing the Duque administration as a bystander to the chaos:

  The White House has taken notice. Spokeswoman Jen Psaki urged authorities last month to “continue to work to locate all missing persons as quickly as possible.” The government of President Iván Duque has said it’s doing all it can.

  The Colombian attorney general’s office says it received 572 reports of people “not located…”

  In most cases, the office told The Post, the reports “correspond to the normal dynamics of people who voluntarily left their family circle…”

  The footage gathered by Staab, Ford Fischer, and News2Share above shows a different picture: the Colombian protests as a serious foreign policy dilemma for the Biden administration, which finds itself caught between its strategic sponsorship of the Colombian government and pressure to respond to wide-scale accusations of human rights violations.

  When the U.S. doesn’t have a clear horse to back in these standoffs, coverage tends to be muted. Here we at least get a long look at the scene on the ground, where over 1,000 have been injured and at least 50 have been killed.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 18:30

• Will The Pandemic PTSD Ever End: Maui's Mayor Asks For "Fewer Tourists" As Tourists Arrive En Masse
  Will The Pandemic PTSD Ever End: Maui’s Mayor Asks For “Fewer Tourists” As Tourists Arrive En Masse

  Proving that the PTSD from the pandemic is going to offer up likely several decades more of total fear porn, Maui’s mayor is pleading to airlines: “Please don’t bring so many people to our island.”

  For a year, Hawaii, which derives much of its revenue from tourism, was shut down to everyone but locals. Now, it seems the once-prominent issue of “over-tourism”, often cited by locals as a complaint of living on the island, is back in full force. Except this time, when the tourists showed back up, the island is scurrying to make up a shortage of hospitality workers, U.S. News and World Report said. The islands restaurants are struggling to keep up, the report says. 

  Mayor Michael Victorino recently said: “We don’t have the authority to say stop, but we are asking the powers to be to help us.”

  Victorino has blamed the airport: “It’s the airlift that really drives all of this. Without airlift, people don’t come.”

  Hawaiian Airlines spokesman Alex Da Silva responded by saying that while the company is conscious of the regulations and requests, it is visitors that drive the state’s economy.

  

  The island still has “some of the nation’s most stringent coronavirus public health restrictions”, according to the report. It is also the only state that hasn’t fully reopened, mostly due to its remote location and limited hospital capacity. The islanders also have on their mind “the memory of diseases that wiped out 80% of the Native Hawaiian population in the century after Europeans arrived”, U.S. News and World Report writes. 

  The state’s governor doesn’t plan on lifting all restrictions until 70% of the state is vaccinated. As of right now, 58% of the state was vaccinated. 

  The state has become a destination, meanwhile, as travel restrictions from other states start to loosen. It’s also a great destination for those that are looking to fly overseas, but can’t yet due to Covid restrictions. 

  215,148 visitors came to the island in May compared to just 1,054 during the same month last year, the report notes. That number stood at 251,665 in May of 2019. Travelers still must quarantine upon their arrival.  

  Jack Starr, who manages Kimo’s in Lahaina, said: “We’re under more pressure than we’ve been in pre-COVID, that’s for damn sure.” Restaurants have still been operating at 50% capacity and will be allowed to fill 75% of their seats later this week. Starr says that the distancing requirements and employee shortage are making life difficult for restaurant owners. 

  “Are you kidding me? You got to take that down to 3 feet, and we might have something going here,” he told U.S. News.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 18:00

• The Blind Leading The Clueless
  The Blind Leading The Clueless

  Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

  Most of us watch television. In part, we seek to be entertained, but, additionally, we often seek to be enlightened as to “what’s going on.” In a difficult era like the present one, in which some of the most prominent countries are experiencing the onset of an economic crisis, virtual cartoon characters are competing as choices in political contests, governments are becoming increasingly rapacious and a police state is developing rapidly, it’s not surprising if the average person questions, “What on earth are they thinking?”

  Well, there’s no shortage of media exposure to answer that question. Today, there are a multitude of channels offering 24/7 “news,” from which we may hope to glean some insight as to what the leaders of the world are thinking. Yet, in spite of the endless folderol being offered, the leadership vision remains about as clear as mud.

  They don’t want war, but are invading more countries than ever before in history. Political hopefuls are vague at best regarding their proposed platforms for action, yet they attack each other as though they’re reporters for the tabloids. Governments continually speak of their wish to lighten the load on the common man, whilst heaping laws, regulations, fines and taxes on him like never before, and whilst heaping billions in tax dollars on their cronies in the financial industry. They claim to seek greater security for all, but instead, create an endless stream of agencies that have the authority to ignore basic rights and behave more like Mafia shakedown operators than law enforcers. Governments claim to be pursuing a sounder economy, but have created an unprecedented level of debt, that promises to crush the economies of several of the world’s most prominent countries in the very near future.

  And so, many people look to the media, seeking answers. Typically a news programme will feature a “panel of experts,” who will debate the latest issues. They rarely reach a conclusion, but do succeed in creating a general impression that one political party is out to destroy the country and that the other (which they represent) is out to save it.

  

  (Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard, interviews Janet Yellen.)

  In addition to the panels, the media go straight to the source on frequent occasions, interviewing political and financial leaders. The list of questions is invariably prepared well in advance and the interviewee is never caught off guard. His handlers have prepared his answers for him and, on every occasion, a full plate of predictable reheated rhetoric is served up to the viewer for his consumption.

  In these repartees, the interviewer is intended to appear congenial yet probing, yet the questions asked are invariably bland enough for the interviewee to either dismiss them or provide an easy retort. The interviewee is intended to appear as though he is informing the public of policies and procedures that, whilst too complicated for the viewer to fully grasp, are well in hand and will provide solutions in the not-too-distant future. Be patient.

  The fact that these solutions never seem to arrive seems to be less relevant than the fact that a new solution is underway. In this manner, the viewer, no matter how badly his life is being affected, continues to sit tight and be hopeful, for, surely, better days are just around the corner.

  Incredibly, the average viewer seems to be able to consume endless quantities of this propaganda, year after year, and never say to himself, “Something’s radically wrong here.”

  If he were to actually turn off the television for a week or so, stand back, and assess the propaganda as a whole, he might conclude that, in fact, the media acts at the behest of the economic and political leaders, to propagate their message. The “debates” and “pressing questions” are limp at best and never lead to any significant change or improvement. Nor are they intended to. They are pacifiers only.

  Worse, the leaders themselves continue to not only fail the public, but to steadily morph the governmental, economic and social systems in a direction that will lead inevitably to a bad end.

  It is true, of course, that the citizens of these leading nations are becoming increasingly cynical about their leaders and their own futures, but their reaction to the pablum, after having a good grumble, tends to be to “hope the next administration will be better.” This is very foolhardy indeed. (Once the apple is thoroughly rotten, expect to see only worms inhabiting it.)

  But those who sense that they’re being shafted need to vent somehow. And, for this we have political parties. Whether our country has Democrats and Republicans, Tories and Labour, or any other such groupings, those who are elected are under no illusion that they exist to serve those who elected them; they exist to serve the major donors who pay for the elections. And the major donors contribute to both parties, in order to ensure that their objectives are carried out by the candidates who are successful, regardless of their party. The overall plan will continue, full steam, regardless of who’s in office.

  But the parties do provide the electorate with targets at which to aim their rubber-tipped arrows. Regardless of which party is in power, liberal voters will complain that not enough is being done for their causes and conservative voters will do the same.

  Will one win out over the other eventually? Unquestionably not. The system is designed to remain as is – with endless bickering encouraged, but no actual progress planned.

  The most prominent countries in the world are on the cusp of a major economic crisis. With it will come political and social crises and, most certainly, war. The television viewer, if he accepts this at all, will say, “Well, that will teach them. Then they’ll have to admit that our side was right.”

  Unfortunately, no. After the inevitable economic crashes, after years of pointless warfare, after increased totalitarianism at home, there will be an eventual end to the strife. When the dust begins to settle, the average person will turn on his television, hoping to see that some answers have been reached.

  Instead, what he’ll witness, if he turns on a liberal station, will be pundits stating that, if only there had been more QE and more entitlements, it might have all worked out, but that, instead, there was disaster, as a result of the conservatives.

  Likewise, the pundits on the conservative station will expound that all the suffering could have been avoided if the entitlements had been kept in check and the bombs could have been dropped on the enemy earlier. Both liberals and conservatives will return to their corners to dress their wounds and prepare for the next round of polarization against each other.

  So, who is it that we blame for mankind’s debacles? Surely, we were tricked by the leaders – the politicians, central bankers, leaders of major industries, etc. Or was it the media that did such a sterling job of packaging up the propaganda that we were unable to see the forest for the trees?

  It will matter little, because nothing will be learned and we shall begin the game anew. But if it’s a genuine solution we’re after, yes, that is possible. But that solution depends upon whether we’re prepared to cease to allow the media to provide our reasoning for us.

  We must be prepared to study our leaders’ actions, to be prepared to be contrarian and, most importantly, to question everything. If not, we ourselves are amongst the blind and the clueless and we can expect an endless cycle of the same dog and pony show.

  *  *  *

  All you can hope to do is to save yourself from the consequences of all this stupidity. The coming financial collapse is going to be much worse, much longer, and very different than what we saw in 2008 and 2009. That’s exactly why New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video. Click here to watch it now.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 17:30

• Every State's Least-Favorite State
  Every State’s Least-Favorite State

  That’s a lot of ‘hate’ for California…

  

  Source: @Mattsurelee

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 17:00

• Rand Paul Says He Will Introduce Bill To Scrap Mask Mandate "Farce" On Planes
  Rand Paul Says He Will Introduce Bill To Scrap Mask Mandate “Farce” On Planes

  Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

  Senator Rand Paul declared Thursday that he intends to introduce legislation that would scrap mask mandates, specifically on planes, calling the practice a ‘farce’.

  

  Paul noted that he intends to seek a repeal of Joe Biden’s executive order mandating masks on public transit.

  Paul tweeted that he will seek “immediate repeal of the mask mandate on planes” when the Senate reconvenes next week, adding, “let people travel in peace!”

  When the Senate returns to session, I will be introducing an immediate repeal of the mask mandate on planes. Enough! Time to stop this farce and let people travel in peace!

  — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 8, 2021

  The Transportation Security Administration has decided to continue its mask mandate at least into September, with fines for those who fail to comply.

  According to reports, the FAA has handed out fines to unruly travelers totaling $682,000 this year alone.

  Paul has consistently railed against the mask mandate, previously calling it a strategy of government “fear mongering,” “security theater,” and calling for Biden to burn his mask on live TV.

  Last week, Paul made an assertive case for natural immunity and the misinformation on the matter that is coming from the government in indiscriminately pushing vaccinations:

  The Senator also made his feelings clear this week regarding Biden’s door to door vaccination “strike forces”.

  No.

  The gov’t doesn’t decide who gets vaccinated. You do.

  Do not submit to the fearmongers. https://t.co/NDCRUE3wCV

  — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 7, 2021

  *  *  *

  Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/

  In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here. Support our sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, we urgently need your financial support here.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 16:30

• Goldman: Here's Why The Shorts Will Have To Cover This Week
  Goldman: Here’s Why The Shorts Will Have To Cover This Week

  Last weekend, before the S&P broke out into a series of new all time highs despite Thursday’s “harrowing” 1% dip, we shared Goldman’s observations on why the market was entering the best 2-week seasonal period of the year. Since then, the SPX has hit new all time highs 3 out of the past 5 trading days, and on 9 out of the last 11 even as sentiment substantially declined this week in global equities. For context, on Thursday we observed that the TICK Index logged one of the largest (top 4) selling pressure on the open on record.

  

  For those asking what was behind Thursday’s wobble, we mentioned previously listed the reason for the selloff, none of which were new. The general feeling was that equities needed to catch down to other asset classes.

  But, as Goldman flow trader Scott Rubner correctly predicted on Friday, when he said that “I think local shorts will need to cover this am” only to see a new all time high in the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq, the selling is pretty much over “as long dealer gamma muted a larger potential drawdown.” Another reason why Goldman expects stocks to keep rising: JPM kicks off the defacto new buyback window on Tuesday.

  With that in mind, here is a mini thread from Rubner on “where we came from” and where we are going next.

  1. GS Wedge: Since January 2019, Money Markets have seen +$1.707 Trillion inflows and Global Bonds have seen +$1.629 Trillion inflows, while Global Equities just +$154 Billion worth of inflows. GS wedge stands at $3.2 Trillion ~ aka the defensive buffer.

  

  2. Cash on the sidelines is waiting for a dip and bought the Thursday dip.

  

  3. 1H 2021 actually logged the 2nd largest money market inflows on record. 1H 2020 was the largest.

  

  4. The cash pile from 2021 has not been reduced.

  

  5. 1H 2021 Bond inflows seem significant? On pace for best year in a decade.

  

  

  6. Q1 2021 saw the 3rd largest quarterly inflow on record, Q2 2021 saw the 7th largest on record.

  

  7. Global Equity inflows are the biggest story of the year, but do not seem extreme at all when I zoom out.

  

  Goldman’s bottom Line: “We are still in the best two week period of the year, equity inflows are large, 401k are going back into stocks at a record pace. I think local shorts will need to cover.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 16:00

• Galloway: FinTech Is As Under-Hyped As Space Is Overhyped
  Galloway: FinTech Is As Under-Hyped As Space Is Overhyped

  Authored by Scott Galloway via No Mercy / No Malice blog,

  Bank

  My north star(s) for philosophy, management, and politics are Star Wars, The Sopranos, and Game of Thrones, respectively. The Iron Bank (GoT) is a metaphor for today’s financial institutions, if present-day banks didn’t need bailouts or to invent fake accounts to juice compensation. Regardless, it was well known throughout Braavos that The Iron Bank will have its due. If you failed to repay, they’d fund your enemies. So today’s Iron Bankers are the venture capitalists funding (any) incumbents’ enemies. If this makes VCs sound interesting/cool, don’t trust your instincts.

  Lately, I’ve spent a decent amount of time on the phone with my bank in an attempt to get a home equity line, as I want to load up on Dogecoin. (Note: kidding.) (Note: mostly.) If Opendoor and Zillow can use algorithms and Google Maps to get an offer on my house in 24 hours, why does it take my bank — which underwrote the original mortgage — so much longer?

  How ripe a sector is for disruption is a function of several factors. One (relatively) easy proxy is the delta between price increases and inflation, and if the innovation in the sector justifies the delta. Think of the $200 cable bill, or a $5.6 million 60-second Super Bowl spot, as canaries in the ad-supported media coal mine.

  Another, easier (and more fun) indicator of ripeness is the eighties test. Put yourself smack dab in the center of the store/product/service, close your eyes, spin around three times, open your eyes, and ask if you’d know within 5 seconds that you were not in 1985. Theaters, grocery stores, gas stations, dry cleaners, university classes, doctor’s offices, and banks still feel as if you could run into Ally Sheedy or The Bangles.

  It’s hard to imagine an industry more ripe for disruption than the business of money.

  Let’s start with this: Twenty-five percent of U.S. households are either unbanked or underbanked. Half of the nation’s unbanked households say they don’t have enough money to meet the minimum balance requirements. Thirty-four percent say bank fees are too high. And, if you’re trying to get a mortgage, you’d better hope the house isn’t cheap.

  

  Inequity is a breeding ground for disruption, leaving underserved markets for insurgents to seize and launch an attack on incumbents from below. We have good reason to believe that’s happening in banking.

  

  Insurgents

  A herd of unicorns is at the stable door, looking to trample Wells Fargo and Chase. Fintech is responsible for roughly one in five (17%) of the world’s unicorns, more than any other sector. In addition, there are already several megalodons worth more than financial institutions that have spent generations building (mis)trust.

  

  How did this happen? The fintechs are zeroing in on everything big banks aren’t.

  Example #1: Innovation. Over the past five years, PayPal has issued 26x more patents than Goldman Sachs.

  

  Example #2: Cost-cutting. “Neobanks” offer the basic services of a bank, with one less expensive and cumbersome feature: the branch. A traditional bank branch needs $50 million in deposits to generate an adequate return. Yet nearly half (48%) of branches in the U.S. are below that threshold. Neobanks don’t have that problem, and there are now at least 177 of them. Founders frame these offerings as more progressive, less corporate. Dave, a new banking app, offers a Founding Story on its website (illustrated with cartoon bears) about three friends “fed up” with their banking experience, often incurring $38 overdraft fees. Fed up no longer: Dave provides free overdraft protection and has 10 million customers.

  Example #3: Less inequity. NYU Professor of Finance Sabrina Howell’s research found fintech lenders gave 18% of PPP loans to Black-owned businesses, while small to medium-sized banks provided just 2%. Among all loans to Black-owned firms, Professor Howell found 54% were from fintech startups. Racial discrimination is the most likely explanation, as lenders faced zero credit risk.

  Example #4: Serving the underserved. Unequal access to banking is a global botheration. Almost a third of the world’s adults, 1.7 billion, are unbanked. In Argentina, Colombia, Nigeria, and other countries, more than 50% of adults are unbanked.

  

  But innovation is already on the horizon: Take Argentine fintech Ualá, whose CEO Pierpaolo Barbieri I spoke with on the Pod last week. In just 4 years, more than 3 million people have opened an account with his company — about 9% of the country — and over 25% of 18 to 25-year-olds now have a tarjeta Ualá (online wallet). Ualá recently launched in Mexico, where, as of 2017, only 2.6% of the poorest 40% had a credit card. This is more than an economic issue — it’s a societal issue, as financial inclusion bolsters the middle class and forms a solid base for democracy.

  Interest(ed)

  Chase savings accounts are offering, no joke, 0.01% interest. Wells Fargo? The same, though if you keep your investment portfolio with Wells, they’ll double that rate to 0.02%. Meanwhile, neobanks including Ally and Chime offer 0.5% — 50 times the competition.

  There is also blood in the water for fintech unicorns that have created a debit, vs. credit, generation: The buy-now-pay-later fintech Afterpay has more than 5 million U.S. customers — just two years after launching in the country. As of February, its competitor Affirm has 4.5 million customers.

  Unicorns are also coming for payments. The megasaurus in this space is PayPal, which has built the first global payments platform outside the credit card model and is second only to Visa in payment volume and revenue. Square’s Cash app is capturing share, and Apple Cash is also a player, as it’s … Apple.

  

  Square, Apple, and a host of other companies are taking the “partnership” approach, bolting new services onto the existing transaction infrastructure. Square’s little white box is a low-upfront-cost way for a small merchant to accept credit cards. It’s particularly interesting that Apple teamed up with Goldman Sachs instead of a traditional bank. Goldman is looking to get into the consumer space (see Marcus), and Apple is looking to get into the payments space — this alliance could be the unsullied fighting with air cover from dragons. It should make Wells and BofA anxious.

  The Big Four credit card system operators (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express) are still the dominant payment players, and they have deep moats. Their brands are global, their networks robust. Visa can handle 76,000 transactions per second in 160 currencies, and as of this week it had settled $1 billion in cryptocurrency transactions.

  Still, even the king of payments sees dead people. In 2020, Visa tried to buy Plaid for $5.3 billion. Plaid currently helps connect existing payments providers (i.e. banks) to finance software such as Quicken and Mint. But it plans to expand from that beachhead into offering a full-fledged payments system. Visa CEO Al Kelly initially described the deal as an “insurance policy” to neutralize a “threat to our important U.S. debit business.” In an encouraging sign that American antitrust authorities are stirring, the Department of Justice filed suit to block the merger, and Visa walked.

  Beyond Banking

  Fintech is also coming for investing with online trading apps (Robinhood, Webull, Public, and several of the neobanks) and through the crypto side door (Coinbase, Gemini, Binance). Insurance is under threat from companies like Lemonade (home), Ladder (life), and Root (auto).

  In sum, fintech is likely as underhyped as space is overhyped. Why? The ROI on your professional efforts and investing are inversely proportional to how sexy the industry/investment is, and fintech is … boring. Except for the immense opportunity and value creation — for multiple stakeholders. “Half the world is unbanked, but we need to colonize Mars,” said no rational investor ever.

  Re investing in fintech: What has, and will always be, a good rap? The guy/gal who owns the bank.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 15:00

• The Millennials Who Swore Off Cars Pre-COVID Are Now Buying Them
  The Millennials Who Swore Off Cars Pre-COVID Are Now Buying Them

  The auto market is so hot, post-pandemic, that many of those who once wrote off car ownership are coming around to the idea of buying a vehicle.

  It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of car ownership disappearing was being discussed: younger generations moving to the cities, combined with ridesharing companies like Uber, were prompting questions of whether or not car ownership would be permanently impaired. 

  But as the world recovers from Covid, used car prices are skyrocketing (as we have documented), public transit route inquiries have “plunged” and a recent EY survey showed that 32% of non-car owners were intending to get a car in the next six months, Bloomberg reported this week. 

  

  Of those who responded to the survey, about half were millennials. 

  “If it weren’t for the pandemic, I wouldn’t have thought about getting a car. I would have thought it a hassle,” 32 year old Georgios Basdanis told Bloomberg. 

  Prior to the pandemic Basdanis lived in an apartment complex in London with a no-car policy. With the London Tube the best option to get around town, there was nary a problem for intra-city travel. But after Covid hit, public transit became a faux pas and being able to drive himself “seemed much safer.”

  

  While he is now vaccinated and will likely be back on the Tube more often, he said about his car: “It’s certainly a useful thing to have, for out of hours work or just driving to the gym on a weekend. Also trips. I can just jump in the car and go to the countryside for a day.”

  His sentiments are being shared by many other millennials, despite the fact that there was a serious pre-covid push (both for environmental reasons and space issues in major cities) to limit vehicles.

  

  Eric Zayer, a partner in Bain & Co’s automotive and mobility practice in Munich, told Bloomberg: “There will be a strong push of cities trying to limit and reduce the number of cars. They have made huge investments in public transport, and they need to be amortized. They will not give up on their mass transport systems.”

  The shift in attitude can also be seen in places like Japan, where 10 million people per day used to cram into Tokyo’s subway lines. Now, the article notes, interest in car ownership in rising. New licenses increased in 2020 for the first time in eight years, with most of the growth coming from people in their 20s and 30s. 

  

  Gypsy Byrne, a 19-year-old student in Melbourne, also shifted her views on car ownership: “You can’t trust public transport now. I got my driving instructor to start doing five-hour lessons instead of one because I just need my Ps [provisional license plates] to be able to get out and do things.”

  Michael Brisson, a senior economist at Moody’s Analytics in the U.S. argued that while ownership may be on the rise, total miles driven still hasn’t eclipsed previous highs. He concluded: “A resurgence of car ownership might be more of the story versus a resurgence of car usage. People may want the ability to travel and may be taking more short trips, but I can’t see anywhere that shows they are driving more miles.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 15:00

• Federal Government Paying $6.1 Million To Create Database For Capitol Riot Prosecutions
  Federal Government Paying $6.1 Million To Create Database For Capitol Riot Prosecutions

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  The Department of Justice has committed to paying over $6 million to a multinational firm to create a database to host the reams of data prosecutors are gathering in cases against accused participants of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

  

  Deloitte Financial Advisory Services, LLP was contracted in late May to help develop the database and the government has started transferring a large volume of materials, including tens of thousands of records from the U.S. Capitol Police, prosecutors said in a court filing this week.

  “Following the Capitol Breach, the United States recognized that due to the nature and volume of materials being collected, the government would require the use of an outside contractor who could provide litigation technology support services to include highly technical and specialized data and document processing and review capabilities,” prosecutors wrote in the filing, which was submitted in a case against several accused Capitol rioters.

  The government will work with Deloitte to process, review, and produce material related to the breach, using various tools to redact certain personal information.

  Prosecutors expect the database to be available for use in the near future.

  “Once it is, the government will begin systematically reviewing materials for potentially discoverable information, tagging when possible (e.g., video by a location or type of conduct, tips by a type of allegation), and redacting when necessary,” prosecutors wrote.

  Deloitte did not return a request for comment.

  The firm, which was listed as having a Virginia address, was awarded $6.1 million by the Department of Justice for “automated litigation support services,” according to a database holding government contracts.

  That figure could swell to $25.9 million, according to the database listing, which was reviewed by The Epoch Times.

  The start date of the contract was June 1. The current end date is May 31, 2022. A potential end date was listed as May 31, 2027.

  The existence of the database was first reported by Politico.

  Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) on Friday said the development signaled that U.S. prosecutors are focused only on prosecuting cases related to the breach.

  “The DOJ is going to spend $6.1 million on a January 6 database. Where is the ANTIFA database? Where is the BLM database? It’s as if the DOJ has given up on all investigations other than January 6,” she wrote on Twitter.

  Antifa is a far-left, anarcho-communist network that has perpetrated violence across the United States, primarily in the Pacific Northwest. BLM refers to Black Lives Matter, a movement that alleges minorities are systematically treated unjustly by law enforcement, among other claims. DOJ stands for the Department of Justice, which did not return a request for comment.

  

  Protesters are seen inside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

  More than 535 people have been charged as of July 6 with crimes related to the breach, including 165 for assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, according to the DOJ.

  FBI agents are still seeking assistance identifying another 300 or so persons accused of participating in the tumult on Jan. 6.

  The Federal Public Defender’s Office (FPD), meanwhile, is also mulling putting in place multiple databases to help with the defense of accused riot participants, prosecutors also said.

  “Given the volume of information that may be discoverable, FPD is carefully examining options for accepting materials. We understand that FPD is considering contracting with a vendor to establish databases that can be used to receive and perform technical searches upon discoverable materials. The government’s discovery team is in the process of identifying the scope and size of materials that may be turned over to FPD with as much detail as possible, so that FPD can obtain accurate quotes from potential database vendors,” they wrote in the new filing.

  “It is hoped that this database will be used by FPD offices nationwide that are working on Capitol Breach cases and counsel that are appointed under the Criminal Justice Act. We believe that a database will be the most organized and economical way of ensuring that all counsel can obtain access to, and conduct meaningful searches upon, relevant voluminous materials, e.g., thousands of hours of body worn camera and Capitol CCTV footage, and tens of thousands of documents, including the results of thousands of searches of Stored Communications Act accounts and devices,” they added.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 07/10/2021 – 14:30