• Bitcoin & The End Of US 'Super Imperialism'
  Bitcoin & The End Of US ‘Super Imperialism’

  Authored by Alex Gladstein via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  In 1972, one year after President Richard Nixon defaulted on the dollar and formally took the United States off of the gold standard for good, the financial historian and analyst Michael Hudson published “Super Imperialism,” a radical critique of the dollar-dominated world economy.

  The book is overlooked by today’s economic mainstream and puts forward a variety of provocative arguments that place it outside of the orthodoxy. However, for those seeking to understand how the dollar won the money wars of the past century, the book makes for essential reading.

  Hudson’s thesis comes from the left-leaning perspective — the title inspired by the German Marxist phrase “überimperialismus” — and yet thinkers of all political stripes, from progressives to libertarians, should find value in its approach and lessons.

  In “Super Imperialism,” Hudson — who has updated the book twice over the past 50 years, with a third edition published just last month — traces the evolution of the world financial system, where U.S. debt displaced gold as the ultimate world reserve currency and premium collateral for financial markets.

  

  How did the world shift from using asset money in the form of gold to balance international payments to using debt money in the form of American treasuries?

  How did, as Hudson puts it, “America’s ideal of implementing laissez-faire economic institutions, political democracy, and a dismantling of formal empires and colonial systems” turn into a system where the U.S. forced other nations to pay for its wars, defaulted on its debt, and exploited developing economies?

  For those seeking to answer the question of how the dollar became so dominant — even as it was intentionally devalued over and over again in the decades after World War I — then “Super Imperialism” has a fascinating, and at times, deeply troubling answer.

  Drawing on extensive historical source material, Hudson argues that the change from the gold standard to what he calls the “Treasury Bill Standard” happened over several decades, straddling the post-World War I era up through the 1970s.

  In short, the U.S. was able to convince other nations to save in dollars instead of in gold by guaranteeing that the dollars could be redeemed for gold. But eventually, U.S. officials rug-pulled the world, refusing to redeem billions of dollars that had been spent into the hands of foreign governments under the promise that they were as good as gold through fixed rate redemption.

  This deceit allowed the U.S. government to finance an ever-expanding military-industrial complex and inefficient welfare state without having to make the traditional trade offs a country or empire would make if its deficit grew too large. Instead, since U.S. policymakers figured out a way to bake American debt into the global monetary base, it never had to pay off its debt. Counterintuitively, Hudson says, America turned its Cold War debtor status into an “unprecedented element of strength rather than weakness.”

  As a result, the U.S. has been able to, in Hudson’s words, pursue domestic expansion and foreign diplomacy with no balance of payment concerns: “Imposing austerity on debtor countries, America as the world’s largest debtor economy acts uniquely without financial constraint.”

  A key narrative in Hudson’s 380-page book is the story of how the U.S. government systematically demonetized gold out of the international economic system. Curiously, he does not mention Executive Order 6102 — passed by President Roosevelt in 1933 to seize gold from the hands of the American public — but weaves a compelling narrative of how the U.S. government pulled the world away from the gold standard, culminating in the Nixon Shock of 1971.

  In Hudson’s view, leaving the gold standard was all about America’s desire to finance war abroad, particularly in Southeast Asia. He says the Vietnam War was “single-handedly” responsible for pushing the U.S. balance-of-payments negative and drastically drawing down America’s once staggering gold reserves.

  Ultimately, Hudson’s thesis argues that unlike classic European imperialism — driven by private sector profit motives — American super imperialism was driven by nation-state power motives. It was not steered by Wall Street, but by Washington. Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) did not primarily help the developing world, but rather harnessed its minerals and raw goods for America and forced its leaders to buy U.S. agricultural exports, preventing them from developing economic independence.

  There are, of course, several criticisms of Hudson’s narrative. It can be argued that dollar hegemony helped defeat the Soviet Union, pressuring its economy and paving the way for a more free world; usher in the age of technology, science, and information; push growth globally with surplus dollars; and isolate rogue regimes. Perhaps most compellingly, history seems to suggest the world “wanted” dollar hegemony, if one considers the rise of the eurodollar system, where even America’s enemies tried to accumulate dollars outside of the control of the Federal Reserve.

  Hudson was not without contemporary critics, either. A 1972 review in The Journal Of Economic History argued that “it would require an exceptionally naive understanding of politics to accept the underlying assertion that the United States government has been clever, efficient, totally unscrupulous, and consistently successful in exploiting developed and developing nations.”

  The reader can be the judge of that. But even with these criticisms in mind, Hudson’s work is important to consider. The undeniable bottom line is that by shifting the world economy from relying on gold to relying on American debt, the U.S. government implemented a system where it could spend in a way no other country could, in a way where it never had to pay back its promises, and where other countries financed its warfare and welfare state.

  “Never before,” Hudson writes, “has a bankrupt nation dared insist that its bankruptcy become the foundation of world economic policy.”

  In 1972, the physicist and futurist Herman Kahn said that Hudson’s work revealed how “the United States has run rings around Britain and every other empire-building nation in history. We’ve pulled off the greatest rip-off ever achieved.”

  Governments always dreamed of transforming their debt into the most valuable asset on earth. This essay explains how the U.S. succeeded in turning this dream into a reality, what the implications for the wider world were, how this era might be coming to a close, and why a Bitcoin standard might be next.

  I. THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICA AS A CREDITOR NATION

  European powers, tempted by the ability to print paper money to finance war operations, broke off the gold standard entirely during World War I. The metal’s restraint would have resulted in a much shorter conflict but the warring factions decided instead to prolong the violence by debasing their currencies.

  Between 1914 and 1918, German authorities suspended the convertibility of marks to gold and increased the money supply from 17.2 billion marks to 66.3 billion marks, while their British rivals increased their money supply from 1.1 billion pounds to 2.4 billion pounds. They expanded the German monetary base by six-fold and the British monetary base by nearly four-fold.

  While European powers went deeper and deeper into debt, America enriched itself by selling arms and other goods to the allies, all while avoiding conflict in its homeland. As Europe tore itself to shreds, American farms and industrial operations ran full steam. The world at large began to buy more from the U.S. than it sold back, creating a large American current account surplus.

  Post-war, U.S. officials broke with historical precedent and insisted that their European allies repay their war debts. Traditionally, this kind of support was considered a cost of war. At the same time, U.S. officials put up tariff barriers that prevented the allies from earning dollars through more exports to America.

  Hudson argues that the U.S. essentially starved Germany through protectionist policy as it was also unable to export goods to the U.S. market to pay back its loans. Britain and France had to use whatever German reparations they did receive to pay back America.

  The Federal Reserve, Hudson says, held down interest rates so as not to draw investment away from Britain, hoping in this way the English could pay back their war debt. But these low rates in turn helped spark a stock market bubble, discouraging capital outflows to Europe. Hudson argues this dynamic, especially after the Great Crash, created a global economic breakdown that helped trigger nationalism, isolationism, autarky, and depression, paving the way for World War II.

  Hudson summarizes America’s post-World War I global legacy as follows: the devastation of Germany, the collapse of the British Empire, and a stockpiling of gold. At home, President Roosevelt ended domestic convertibility of dollars for gold, made holding gold a felony, and devalued the dollar by 40%. At the same time, the U.S. received most of Europe’s “refugee gold” during the 1930s as the threat of renewed war with Germany led to capital flight from wealthy Europeans. Washington was accumulating gold in its own coffers, just as it was stripping the precious metal from the public.

  As World War II neared, Germany halted reparations payments, drying up the allied cash flow. Britain was unable to pay its debts, something it wouldn’t be able to fully do for another 80 years. Capital flight to the “safe” U.S. accelerated, combining with Roosevelt’s tariffs and export-boosting dollar devaluation to further enlarge America’s balance-of-payments position and gold stock. America became the world’s largest creditor nation.

  This advantage grew even more dramatic when the allies spent the rest of their gold to fight the Nazis. By the end of the 1940s, the U.S. held more than 70% of non-Soviet-central-bank-held gold, around 700 million ounces.

  In 1922, European powers had gathered in Genoa to discuss the reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe. One of the outcomes was an agreement to partially go back to the gold standard through a “gold exchange” system where central banks would hold currencies which could be exchanged for gold, instead of the metal itself, which was to be increasingly centralized in financial hubs like New York and London.

  In the later stages of World War II in 1944, the U.S. advanced this concept even further at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire. There, a proposal put forth by British delegate John Maynard Keynes to use an internationally-managed currency called the “bancor” was rejected. Instead, American diplomats — holding leverage over their British counterparts as a result of their gold advantage and the bailouts they had extended through Lend-Lease Act policies — created a new global trade system underpinned by dollars, which were promised to be backed by gold at the rate of $35 per ounce. The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade were created as U.S.-dominated institutions which would enforce the worldwide dollar system.

  Moving forward, U.S. foreign economic policy was very different from what it was after World War I, when Congress gave priority to domestic programs and America adopted a protectionist stance. U.S. policymakers theorized that America would need to remain a “major exporter to maintain full employment during the transition back to peacetime life” after World War II.

  “Foreign markets,” Hudson writes, “would have to replace the War Department as a source of demand for the products of American industry and agriculture.”

  This realization led the U.S. to determine it could not impose war debt on its allies like it did after World War I. A Cold War perspective began to take over: if the U.S. invested abroad, it could build up the allies and defeat the Soviets. The Treasury and the World Bank lent funds to Europe as part of the Marshall Plan so that it could rebuild and buy American goods.

  Hudson distinguishes the new U.S. imperial system from the old European imperial systems. He quotes Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, who said Bretton Woods institutions “tried to get away from the concept of control of international finance by private financiers who were not accountable to the people,” pulling power away from Wall Street to Washington. In dramatic contrast to “classic” imperialism, which was driven by corporate interests and straightforward military action, in the new “super imperialism” the U.S. government would “exploit the world via the international monetary system itself.” Hence why Hudson’s original title for his book was “Monetary Imperialism.”

  The other defining feature of super imperialism versus classic imperialism was that the former is based on a debtor position, while the latter was based on a creditor position. The American approach was to force foreign central banks to finance U.S. growth, whereas the British or French approach was to extract raw materials from colonies, sell them back finished goods, and exploit low wage or even slave labor.

  Classic imperialists, if they ran into enough debt, would have to impose domestic austerity or sell off their assets. Military adventurism had restraints. But Hudson argues that with super imperialism, America figured out not just how to avoid these limits but how to derive positive benefits from a massive balance-of-payments deficit. It forced foreign central banks to absorb the cost of U.S. military spending and domestic social programs which defended Americans and boosted their standards of living.

  Hudson points to the Korean War as the major event that shifted America’s considerable post-World War II balance-of-payments surplus into a deficit. He writes that the fight on the Korean peninsula was “financed essentially by the Federal Reserve’s monetizing the federal deficit, an effort that transferred the war’s cost onto some future generation, or more accurately from future taxpayers to future bondholders.”

  II. THE FAILURE OF BRETTON WOODS

  In the classic gold standard system of international trade, Hudson describes how things worked:

  “If trade and payments among countries were fairly evenly balanced, no gold actually changed hands: the currency claims going in one direction offset those going in the opposite direction. But when trade and payments were not exactly in balance, countries that bought or paid more than they sold or received found themselves with a balance-of-payments deficit, while nations that sold more than they bought enjoyed a surplus which they settled in gold… If a country lost gold its monetary base would be contracted, interest rates would rise, and foreign short-term funds would be attracted to balance international trade movements. If gold outflows persisted, the higher interest rates would deter new domestic investment and incomes would fall, thereby reducing the demand for imports until balance was restored in the country’s international payments.”

  Gold helped nations account with each other in a neutral and straightforward way. However, just as European powers discarded the restraining element of gold during World War I, Hudson says America did not like the restraint of gold either, and instead “worked to ‘demonetize’ the metal, driving it out of the world financial system — a geopolitical version of Gresham’s Law,” where bad money drives out the good. By pushing a transformation of a world where the premium reserve was gold to a world where the premium reserve was American debt, the U.S. hacked the system to drive out the good money.

  By 1957, U.S. gold reserves still outnumbered dollar reserves of foreign central banks three to one. But in 1958, the system saw its first cracks, as the Fed had to sell off more than $2 billion of gold to keep the Bretton Woods system afloat. The ability of the U.S. to hold the dollar at $35 per ounce of gold was being called into question. In one of his last acts in office, President Eisenhower banned Americans from owning gold anywhere in the world. But following the presidential victory of John F. Kennedy — who was predicted to pursue inflationist monetary policies — gold surged anyway, breaking $40 per ounce. It was not easy to demonetize gold in a world of increasing paper currency.

  American and European powers tried to band-aid the system by creating the London Gold Pool. Formed in 1961, the pool’s mission was to fix the gold price. Whenever market demand pushed up the price, central banks coordinated to sell part of their reserves. The pool came under relentless pressure in the 1960s, both from the dollar depreciating against the rising currencies of Japan and Europe and from the enormous expenditures of Great Society programs and the U.S. war in Vietnam.

  Some economists saw the failure of the Bretton Woods system as inevitable. Robert Triffin predicted that the dollar could not act as the international reserve currency with a current account surplus. In what is known as the “Triffin dilemma,” he theorized that countries worldwide would have a growing need for that “key currency,” and liabilities would necessarily expand beyond what the key country could hold in reserves, creating a larger and larger debt position. Eventually the debt position would grow so large so as to cause the currency to collapse, destroying the system.

  By 1964, this dynamic began to visibly kick in, as American foreign debt finally exceeded the Treasury’s gold stock. Hudson says that American overseas military spending was “the entire balance-of-payments deficit as the private sector and non-military government transactions remained in balance.”

  The London Gold Pool was held in place (buoyed by gold sales from the Soviet Union and South Africa) until 1968, when the arrangement collapsed and a new two-tiered system with a “government” price and a “market” price emerged.

  That same year, President Lyndon B. Johnson shocked the American public when he announced he would not run for another term, possibly in part because of the stress of the unraveling monetary system. Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968, and his administration did its part to convince other nations to stop converting dollars to gold.

  By the end of that year, the U.S. had drawn down its gold from 700 million to 300 million ounces. A few months later, Congress removed the 25% gold backing requirement for federal reserve notes, cutting one more link between the U.S. money supply and gold. Fifty economists had signed a letter warning against such an action, saying it would “open the way to a practically unlimited expansion of Federal Reserve notes… and a decline and even collapse in the value of our currency.”

  In 1969, with the end of Bretton Woods palpably close, the IMF introduced Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) or “paper gold.” These currency units were supposed to be equal to gold, but not redeemable for the metal. The move was celebrated in newspapers worldwide as creating a new currency that would “fill monetary needs but exist only on books.” In Hudson’s view, the IMF violated its founding charter by bailing out the U.S. with billions of SDRs.

  He says the SDR strategy was “akin to a tax levied upon payments surplus nations by the United States… it represented a transfer of goods and resources from civilian and government sectors of payments-surplus nations to payments deficit countries, a transfer for which no tangible quid pro quo was to be received by the nations who had refrained from embarking on the extravagance of war.”

  By 1971, short-term dollar liabilities to foreigners exceeded $50 billion, but gold holdings dipped below $10 billion. Mirroring the World War I behavior of Germany and Britain, the U.S. inflated its money supply to 18-times its gold reserves while it waged the Vietnam War.

  III. THE DEATH OF THE GOLD STANDARD AND THE RISE OF THE TREASURY BILL STANDARD

  As it became clear that the U.S. government could not possibly redeem extant dollars for gold, foreign countries found themselves in a trap. They could not sell off their U.S. treasuries or refuse to accept dollars, as this would collapse the dollar’s value in currency markets, advantaging U.S. exports and harming their own industries. This is the key mechanism that made the Treasury bill system work.

  As foreign central banks received dollars from their exporters and commercial banks, Hudson says they had “little choice but to lend these dollars to the U.S. government.” They also gave seigniorage privilege to the U.S. as foreign nations “earned” a negative interest rate on American paper promises most years between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, in effect paying Washington to hold their money on a real basis.

  “Instead of U.S. citizens and companies being taxed or U.S. capital markets being obliged to finance the rising federal deficit,” Hudson writes, “foreign economies were obliged to buy the new Treasury bonds… America’s Cold War spending thus became a tax on foreigners. It was their central banks who financed the costs of the war in Southeast Asia.”

  American officials, annoyed that the allies never paid them back for World War I, could now get their pound of flesh in another way.

  French diplomat Jacques Rueff gave his take on the mechanism behind the Treasury bill standard in his book, “The Monetary Sin Of The West”:

  “Having learned the secret of having a ‘deficit without tears,’ it was only human for the US to use that knowledge, thereby putting its balance of payments in a permanent state of deficit. Inflation would develop in the surplus countries as they increased their own currencies on the basis of the increased dollar reserves held by their central banks. The convertibility of the reserve currency, the dollar, would eventually be abolished owing to the gradual but unlimited accumulation of sight loans redeemable in US gold.”

  The French government was vividly aware of this, and persistently redeemed its dollars for gold during the Vietnam era, even sending a warship to Manhattan in August 1971 to collect what they were owed. A few days later, on August 15, 1971, President Nixon went on national television and formally announced the end of the dollar’s international convertibility to gold. The U.S. had defaulted on its debt, leaving tens of billions of dollars abroad, all of a sudden unbacked. By extension, every currency that was backed by dollars became pure fiat. Rueff was right, and the French were left with paper instead of precious metal.

  Nixon could have simply raised the price of gold, instead of defaulting entirely, but governments do not like admitting to their citizenry that they have been debasing the public’s money. It was much easier for his administration to break a promise to people thousands of miles away.

  As Hudson writes, “more than $50 billion of short-term liabilities to foreigners owed by the U.S. on public and private account could not be used as claims on America’s gold stock.” They could, of course, “be used to buy U.S. exports, to pay obligations to U.S. public and private creditors, or to invest in government corporate securities.”

  These liabilities were no longer liabilities of the U.S. Treasury. American debt had been baked into the global monetary base.

  “IOUs,” Hudson says, became “IOU-nothings.” The final piece of the strategy was to “roll the debt over” on an ongoing basis, ideally with interest rates below the rate of monetary inflation.

  Americans could now obtain foreign goods, services, companies, and other assets in exchange for mere pieces of paper: “It became possible for a single nation to export its inflation by settling its payment deficit with paper instead of gold… a rising world price level thus became in effect a derivative function of U.S. monetary policy,” Hudson writes.

  If you owe $5,000 to the bank, it’s your problem. If you owe $5 million, it’s theirs. President Nixon’s Treasury Secretary John Connolly riffed on that old adage, quipping at the time: “The dollar may be our currency, but now it’s your problem.”

  IV. SUPER IMPERIALISM IN ACTION: HOW THE U.S. MADE THE WORLD PAY FOR THE VIETNAM WAR

  As the U.S. deficit increased, government spending accelerated, and Americans — in a phenomenon hidden from the average citizen — watched as other nations paid “the cost of this spending spree” as foreign central banks, not taxes, financed the debt.

  The game which the Nixon administration was playing, Hudson writes, “was one of the most ambitious in the economic history of mankind … and was beyond the comprehension of the liberal senators of the United States… The simple device of not hindering the outflow of dollar assets had the effect of wiping out America’s foreign debt while seeming to increase it. At the same time, the simple utilization of the printing press — that is, new credit creation — widened the opportunities for penetrating foreign markets by taking over foreign companies.”

  He continues:

  “American consumers might choose to spend their incomes on foreign goods rather than to save. American business might choose to buy foreign companies or undertake new direct investment at home rather than buy government bonds, and the American government might finance a growing world military program, but this overseas consumption and spending would nonetheless be translated into savings and channeled back to the United States. Higher consumer expenditures on Volkswagens or on oil thus had the same effect as an increase in excise taxes on these products: they accrued to the U.S. Treasury in a kind of forced saving.” 

  By repudiating gold convertibility of the dollar, Hudson argues “America transformed a position of seeming weakness into one of unanticipated strength, that of a debtor over its creditors.”

  “What was so remarkable about dollar devaluation,” he writes, “is that far from signaling the end of American domination of its allies, it became the deliberate object of U.S. financial strategy, a means to enmesh foreign central banks further in the dollar-debt standard.”

  One vivid story about the power of the Treasury bill standard — and how it could force big geopolitical actors to do things against their will — is worth sharing. As Hudson tells it:

  “German industry had hired millions of immigrants from Turkey, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia and other Mediterranean countries. By 1971 some 3 percent of the entire Greek population was living in Germany producing cars and export goods… when Volkswagens and other goods were shipped to the United States… companies could exchange their dollar receipts for deutsche marks with the German central bank… but Germany’s central bank could only hold these dollar claims in the form of U.S. Treasury bills and bonds… It lost the equivalent of one-third the value of its dollar holdings during 1970-74 when the dollar fell by some 52 percent against the deutsche mark, largely because the domestic US inflation eroded 34 percent of the dollar’s domestic purchasing power.”

  In this way, Germany was forced to finance America’s wars in Southeast Asia and military support for Israel: two things it strongly opposed.

  Put another way by Hudson: “In the past, nations sought to run payments surpluses in order to build up their gold reserves. But now all they were building up was a line of credit to the U.S. Government to finance its programs at home and abroad, programs which these central banks had no voice in formulating, and which were in some cases designed to secure foreign policy ends not desired by their governments.”

  Hudson’s thesis was that America had forced other countries to pay for its wars regardless of whether they wanted to or not. Like a tribute system, but enforced without military occupation. “This was,” he writes, “something never before accomplished by any nation in history.”

  V. OPEC TO THE RESCUE

  Hudson wrote “Super Imperialism” in 1972, the year after the Nixon Shock. The world wondered at the time: What will happen next? Who will continue to buy all of this American debt? In his sequel, “Global Fracture,” published five years later, Hudson got to answer the question.

  The Treasury bill standard was a brilliant strategy for the U.S. government, but it came under heavy pressure in the early 1970s.

  Just two years after the Nixon Shock, in response to dollar devaluation and rising American grain prices, Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) nations led by Saudi Arabia quadrupled the dollar price of oil past $10 per barrel. Before the creation of OPEC, “the problem of the terms of trade shifting in favor of raw-materials exporters had been avoided by foreign control over their economies, both by the international minerals cartel and by colonial domination,” Hudson writes.

  But now that the oil states were sovereign, they controlled the massive inflow of savings accrued through the skyrocketing price of petroleum.

  This resulted in a “redistribution of global wealth on a scale that hadn’t been seen in living memory,” as economist David Lubin puts it.

  In 1974, the oil exporters had an account surplus of $70 billion, up from $7 billion the year before: an amount nearly 5% of US GDP. That year, the Saudi current account surplus was 51% of its GDP.

  The wealth of OPEC nations grew so fast that they could not spend it all on foreign goods and services.

  “What are the Arabs going to do with it all?” asked The Economist in early 1974.

  In “Global Fracture,” Hudson argues that it became essential for the U.S. “to convince OPEC governments to maintain petrodollars [meaning, a dollar earned by selling oil] in Treasury bills so as to absorb those which Europe and Japan were selling out of their international monetary reserves.”

  As detailed in the precursor to this essay — “Uncovering The Hidden Costs Of The Petrodollar” — Nixon’s new Treasury Secretary William Simon traveled to Saudi Arabia as part of an effort to convince the House of Saud to price oil in dollars and “recycle” them into U.S. government securities with their newfound wealth.

  On June 8, 1974, the U.S. and Saudi governments signed a military and economic pact. Secretary Simon asked the Saudis to buy up to $10 billion in treasuries. In return, the U.S. would guarantee security for the Gulf regimes and sell them massive amounts of weapons. The OPEC bond bonanza began.

  “As long as OPEC could be persuaded to hold its petrodollars in Treasury bills rather than investing them in capital goods to modernize its economies or in ownership of foreign industry,” Hudson says, “the level of world oil prices would not adversely affect the United States.”

  At the time, there was a public and much-discussed fear in America of Arab governments “taking over” U.S. companies. As part of the new U.S.-Saudi special relationship, American officials convinced the Saudis to reduce investments in the U.S. private sector and simply buy more debt.

  The Federal Reserve continued to inflate the money supply in 1974, contributing to the fastest domestic inflation since the Civil War. But the growing deficit was eaten up by the Saudis and other oil-exporters, who would recycle tens of billions of dollars of petrodollar earnings into U.S. treasuries over the following decade.

  “Foreign governments,” Hudson says, “financed the entire increase in publicly-held U.S. federal debt” between the end of WWII and the 1990s, and continued with the help of the petrodollar system to majorly support the debt all the way to the present day.

  At the same time, the U.S. government used the IMF to help “end the central role of gold that existed in the former world monetary system.” Amid double-digit inflation the institution sold off gold reserves in late 1974, to try and keep any possible upswing in gold down as a result of a new law in the United States that finally made it legal again for Americans to own gold.

  By 1975, other OPEC nations had followed Saudi Arabia’s lead in supporting the Treasury bill standard. The British pound sterling was finally phased out as a key currency, leaving, as Hudson writes, “no single national currency to compete with the dollar.”

  The legacy of the petrodollar system would live on for decades, forcing other countries to procure dollars when they needed oil, causing America to defend its Saudi partners when threatened with aggression from Saddam Hussein or Iran, discouraging U.S. officials from investigating Saudi Arabia’s role in the 9/11 attacks, supporting the devastating Saudi war in Yemen, selling billions of dollars of weapons to the Saudis, and making Aramco the second-most valuable company in the world today.

  VI. EXPLOITATION OF THE DEVELOPING WORLD

  The Treasury bill standard carried massive costs. It was not free. But these costs were not paid for by Washington, but were often borne by citizens in Middle Eastern countries and in poorer nations across the developing world.

  Even pre-Bretton Woods, gold reserves from regions like Latin America were sucked up by the U.S. As Hudson describes, European nations would first export goods to Latin America. Europe would take the gold — settled as the balance-of-payments adjusted — and use it to buy goods from the U.S. In this way, gold was “stripped” from the developing world, helping the U.S. gold stock reach its peak of nearly $24.8 billion (or 700 million ounces) in 1949.

  Originally designed to help rebuild Europe and Japan, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund became in the 1960s an “international welfare agency” for the world’s poorest nations, per The Heritage Foundation. But, according to Hudson, that was a cover for its true purpose: a tool through which the U.S. government would enforce economic dependency from non-Communist nations worldwide.

  The U.S. joined the World Bank and IMF only “on the condition that it was granted unique veto power… this meant that no economic rules could be imposed that U.S. diplomats judged did not serve American interests.”

  America began with 33% of the votes at the IMF and World Bank which — in a system that required an 80% majority vote for rulings — indeed gave it veto power. Britain initially had 25% of the votes, but given its subordinate role to the U.S. after the war, and its dependent position as a result of Lend-Lease policies, it would not object to Washington’s desires.

  A major goal of the U.S. post-WWII was to achieve full employment, and international economic policy was harnessed to help achieve that goal. The idea was to create foreign markets for American exports: raw materials would be imported cheaply from the developing world, and farm goods and manufactured goods would be exported back to those same nations, bringing the dollars back.

  Hudson says that U.S. congressional hearings regarding Bretton Woods agreements revealed “a fear of Latin American and other countries underselling U.S. farmers or displacing U.S. agricultural exports, instead of the hope that these countries might indeed evolve towards agricultural self-sufficiency.”

  The Bretton Woods institutions were designed with these fears in mind: “The United States proved unwilling to lower its tariffs on commodities that foreigners could produce less expensively than American farmers and manufacturers,” writes Hudson. “The International Trade Organization, which in principle was supposed to subject the U.S. economy to the same free trade principles that it demanded from foreign governments, was scuttled.”

  In a meta-version of how the French exploit Communauté Financière Africaine (CFA) nations in Africa today, the U.S. employed many double standards, did not comply with the most-favored-nation rule, and set up a system that forced developing countries to “sell their raw materials to U.S.-owned firms at prices substantially below those received by American producers for similar commodities.”

  Hudson spends a significant percentage of “Super Imperialism” making the case that this policy helped destroy economic potential and capital stock of many developing countries. The U.S., as he tells it, forced developing nations to export fruit, minerals, oil, sugar, and other raw goods instead of investing in domestic infrastructure and education — and forced them to buy American foodstuffs instead of grow their own.

  Post-1971, why did the Bretton Woods institutions continue to exist? They were created to enforce a system that had expired. The answer, from Hudson’s perspective, is that they were folded into this broader strategy, to get the (often dictatorial) leaders of developing economies to spend their earnings on food and weapons imports. This prevented internal development and internal revolution.

  In this way, “super imperial” financial and agricultural policy could, in effect, accomplish what classic imperial military policy used to accomplish. Hudson even claims that “Super Imperialism” the book was used as a “training manual” in Washington in the 1970s by diplomats seeking to learn how to “exploit other countries via their central banks.”

  In Hudson’s telling, U.S.-directed aid was not used for altruism, but for self interest. From 1948 to 1969, American receipts from foreign aid approximated 2.1 times its investments.

  “Not exactly an instrument of altruistic American generosity,” he writes. From 1966 to 1970, the World Bank “took in more funds from 20 of its less developed countries than it disbursed.”

  In 1971, Hudson says, the U.S. government stopped publishing data showing that foreign aid was generating a transfer of dollars from foreign countries to the U.S. He says he got a response from the government at the time, saying “we used to publish that data, but some joker published a report showing that the U.S. actually made money off the countries we were aiding.”

  Former grain-exporting regions of Latin America and Southeast Asia deteriorated to food-deficit status under “guidance” from the World Bank and IMF. Instead of developing, Hudson argues that these countries were retrogressing.

  Normally, developing countries would want to keep their mineral resources. They act as savings accounts, but these countries couldn’t build up capacity to use them, because they were focused on servicing debt to the U.S. and other advanced economies. The World Bank, Hudson argues, pushed them to “draw down” their natural resource savings to feed themselves, mirroring subsistence farming and leaving them in poverty. The final “logic” that World Bank leaders had in mind was that, in order to conform with the Treasury bill standard, “populations in these countries must decline in symmetry with the approaching exhaustion of their mineral deposits.”

  Hudson describes the full arc as such: Under super imperialism, world commerce has been directed not by the free market but by an “unprecedented intrusion of government planning, coordinated by the World Bank, IMF, and what has come to be called the Washington Consensus. Its objective is to supply the U.S. with enough oil, copper, and other raw materials to produce a chronic over-supply sufficient to hold down their world price. The exception of this rule is for grain and other agricultural products exported by the United States, in which case relatively high world prices are desired. If foreign countries still are able to run payments surpluses under these conditions, as have the oil-exporting countries, their governments are to use the process to buy U.S. arms or invest in long-term illiquid, preferably non-marketable U.S. treasury obligations.”

  This, as Allen Farrington would say, is not capitalism. Rather, it’s a story of global central planning and central bank imperialism.

  Most shockingly, the World Bank in the 1970s under Robert McNamara argued that population growth slowed down development, and advocated for growth to be “curtailed to match the modest rate of gain in food output which existing institutional and political constraints would permit.”

  Nations would need to “follow Malthusians policies” to get more aid. McNamara argued that “the population be fitted to existing food resources, not that food resources be expanded to the needs of existing or growing populations.”

  To stay in line with World Bank loans, the Indian government forcibly sterilized millions of people.

  As Hudson concludes: the World Bank focused the developing world “on service requirements rather than on the domestic needs and aspirations of their peoples. The result was a series of warped patterns of growth in country after country. Economic expansion was encouraged only in areas that generated the means of foreign debt service, so as to be in a position to borrow enough to finance more growth in areas that might generate yet further means of foreign debt service, and so on ad infinitum.

  “On an international scale, Joe Hill’s ‘We go to work to get the cash to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to get the cash to buy the food to get the strength to go to work to get the cash to buy the food…’ became reality. The World Bank was pauperizing the countries that it had been designed in theory to assist.”

  VII. FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE TREASURY BILL STANDARD

  By the 1980s, the U.S. had achieved, as Hudson writes, “what no earlier imperial system had put in place: a flexible form of global exploitation that controlled debtor countries by imposing the Washington Consensus via the IMF and World Bank, while the Treasury Bill standard obliged the payments-surplus nations of Europe and East Asia to extend forced loans to the U.S. government.”

  But threats still remained, including Japan. Hudson explains how in 1985 at the Louvre Accords, the U.S. government and IMF convinced the Japanese to increase their purchasing of American debt and revalue the yen upwards so that their cars and electronics became more expensive. This is how, he says, they disarmed the Japanese economic threat. The country “essentially went broke.”

  On the geopolitical level, super imperialism not only helped the U.S. defeat its Soviet rival — which could only exploit the economically-weak COMECON countries — but also kept any potential allies from getting too strong. On the financial level, the shift from the restraint of gold to the continuous expansion of American debt as the global monetary base had a staggering impact on the world.

  Despite the fact that today the U.S. has a much larger labor force and much higher productivity than it did in the 1970s, prices have not fallen and real wages have not increased. The “FIRE” sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) has, Hudson says, “appropriated almost all of the economic gains.” Industrial capitalism, he says, has evolved into finance capitalism.

  For decades, Japan, Germany, the U.K., and others were “powerless to use their economic strength for anything more than to become the major buyers of Treasury bonds to finance the U.S. federal budget deficit… [these] foreign central banks enabled America to cut its own tax rates (at least for the wealthy), freeing savings to be invested in the stock market and property boom,” according to Hudson.

  The past 50 years witnessed an explosion of financialization. Floating currency markets sparked a proliferation of derivatives used to hedge risk. Corporations all of a sudden had to invest resources in foreign exchange futures. In the oil and gold markets, there are hundreds or thousands of paper claims for each unit of raw material. It is not clear if this is a direct result of leaving the gold standard, but is certainly a prominent feature of the post-gold era.

  Hudson argues that U.S. policy pushes foreign economies to “supply the consumer goods and investment goods that the domestic U.S. economy no longer is supplying as it post-industrializes and becomes a bubble economy, while buying American farm surpluses and other surplus output. In the financial sphere, the role of foreign economies is to sustain America’s stock market and real estate bubble, producing capital gains and asset-price inflation even as the U.S. industrial economy is being hollowed out.”

  Over time, equities and real estate boomed as “American banks and other investors moved out of government bonds and into higher-yielding corporate bonds and mortgage loans.” Even though wages remained stagnant, prices of investments kept going up, and up, and up, in a velocity previously unseen in history.

  As financial analyst Lyn Alden has pointed out, the post-1971 fiat-based financial system has contributed to structural trade deficits for the U.S. Instead of drawing down gold reserves to maintain the system like it did during the Bretton Woods framework, America has drawn down and “sold off” its industrial base, where more and more of its stuff is made elsewhere, and more and more of its equity markets and real estate markets are owned by foreigners. The U.S., she argues, has extended its global power by sacrificing some of its domestic economic health. This sacrifice has mainly benefitted U.S. elites at the cost of blue-collar and middle-income workers. Dollar hegemony, then, might be good for American elites and diplomats and the wider empire, but not for the everyday citizen.

  Data from the work of political economists Shimson Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan highlights this transformation and shines a light on how wealth is moving to the haves from the have-nots: In the early 1950s, a typical dominant capital firm commanded a profit stream 5,000 times the income of an average worker; in the late 1990s, it was 25,000 times greater. In the early 1950s, the net profit of a Fortune 500 firm was 500 times the average; in the late 1990s, it was 7,000 times greater. Trends have accelerated since then: Over the past 15 years, the eight largest companies in the world grew from an average market capitalization of $263 billion to $1.68 trillion.

  Inflation, Bichler and Nitzan argue, became a “permanent feature” of the 20th century. Prices rose 50-times from 1900 to 2000 in the U.K. and U.S., and much more aggressively in developing countries. They use a staggering chart that shows consumer prices in the U.K. from 1271 to 2007 to make the point. The visual is depicted in log-scale, and shows steady prices all the way through the middle of the 16th century, when Europeans began exploring the Americas and expanding their gold supply. Then prices remain relatively steady again though the beginning of the 20th century. But then, at the time of World War I, they shoot up dramatically, cooling off a bit during the depression, only to go hyperbolic since the 1960s and 1970s as the gold standard fell apart and as the world shifted onto the Treasury bill standard.

  Bitchler and Nitzan disagree with those who say inflation has a “neutral” effect on society, arguing that inflation, especially stagflation, redistributes income from workers to capitalists, and from small businesses to large businesses. When inflation rises significantly, they argue that capitalists tend to gain, and workers tend to lose. This is typified by the staggering increase in net worth of America’s richest people during the otherwise very difficult last 18 months. The economy continues to expand, but for most people, growth has ended.

  Bichler and Nitzan’s meta point is that economic power tends to centralize, and when it cannot anymore through amalgamation (merger and acquisition activity), it turns to currency debasement. As Rueff said in 1972, “Given the option, money managers in a democracy will always choose inflation; only a gold standard deprives them of the option.”

  As the Federal Reserve continues to push interest rates down, Hudson notes that prices rise for real estate, bonds, and stocks, which are “worth whatever a bank will lend.” Writing more recently in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, he said “for the first time in history people were persuaded that the way to get rich was by running into debt, not by staying out of it. New borrowing against one’s home became almost the only way to maintain living standards in the face of this economic squeeze.”

  This analysis of individual actors neatly mirrors the global transformation of the world reserve currency over the past century: from a mechanism of saving and capital accumulation to a mechanism of one country taking over the world through its growing deficit.

  Hudson pauses to reflect on the grotesque irony of pension funds trying to make money by speculating. “The end game of finance capitalism,” he says, “will not be a pretty sight.”

  VIII. COUNTER-THEORIES AND CRITICISMS

  There is surely a case to be made for how the world benefited from the dollar system. This is, after all, the orthodox reading of history. With the dollar as the world reserve currency, everything as we know it grew from the rubble of World War II.

  One of the strongest counter-theories relates to the USSR, where it seems clear that the Treasury bill standard — and the unique ability for the U.S. to print money that could purchase oil — helped America defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

  To get an idea of what the implications are for liberal democracy’s victory over totalitarian communism, take a look at a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night. Compare the vibrant light of industry in the south with the total darkness of the north.

  So perhaps the Treasury bill standard deserves credit for this global victory. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, the U.S. did not hold another Bretton Woods to decentralize the power of holding the world’s reserve currency. If the argument is that we needed the Treasury bill standard to defeat the Soviets, then the failure to reform after their downfall is puzzling.

  A second powerful counter-theory is that the world shifted from gold to U.S. debt simply because gold could not do the job. Analysts like Jeff Snider assert that demand for U.S. debt is not necessarily part of some scheme but rather as a result of the world’s thirst for pristine collateral.

  In the late 1950s, as the U.S. enjoyed its last years with a current account surplus, something else major happened: the creation of the eurodollar. Originally borne out of an interest from the Soviets and their proxies to have dollar accounts that the American government could not confiscate, the idea was that banks in London and elsewhere would open dollar-denominated accounts to store earned U.S. dollars beyond the purview of the Federal Reserve.

  Sitting in banks like Moscow Narodny in London or Banque Commerciale pour L’Europe du Nord in Paris, these new “eurodollars” became a global market for collateralized borrowing, and the best collateral one could have in the system was a U.S. treasury.

  Eventually, and largely due to the changes in the monetary system post-1971, the eurodollar system exploded in size. It was unburdened by Regulation Q, which set a limit on interest rates on bank deposits in the U.S. Eurodollar banks, free from this restriction, could charge higher rates. The market grew from $160 billion in 1973 to $600 billion in 1980 — a time when the inflation-adjusted federal funds rate was negative. Today, there are many more eurodollars than there are actual dollars.

  To revisit the Triffin dilemma, the demand for “reserve” dollars worldwide would inevitably lead to a draining of U.S. domestic reserves and, subsequently, confidence in the system breaking down.

  How can a stockpile of gold back an ever-growing global reserve currency? Snider argues that the Bretton Woods system could never fulfill the role of a global reserve currency. But a dollar unbacked by gold could. And, the argument goes, we see the market’s desire for this most strongly in the growth of the eurodollar.

  If even America’s enemies wanted dollars, then how can we say that the system only came into dominance through U.S. design? Perhaps the design was simply so brilliant that it co-opted even America’s most hated rivals. And finally, in a world where gold had not been demonetized, would it have remained the pristine collateral for this system? We’ll never know.

  A final major challenge to Hudson’s work is found in the discourse arguing that the World Bank has helped increase living standards in the developing world. It is hard not to argue that most are better off in 2021 than in 1945. And cases like South Korea are provided to show how World Bank funding in the 1970s and 1980s were crucial for the country’s success.

  But how much of this relates to technology deflation and a general rise in productivity, as opposed to American aid and support? And how does this rise compare differentially to the rise in the West over the same period? Data suggests that, under World Bank guidance between 1970 and 2000, poorer countries grew more slowly than rich ones.

  One thing is clear: Bretton Woods institutions have not helped everyone equally. A 1996 report covering the World Bank’s first 50 years of operations found that “of the 66 less developed countries receiving money from the World Bank for more than 25 years, 37 are no better off today than they were before they received such loans.” And of these 37, most “are poorer today than they were before receiving aid from the Bank.”

  In the end, one can argue that the Treasury bill standard helped defeat Communism; that it’s what the global market wanted; and that it helped the developing world. But what cannot be argued is that the world left the era of asset money for debt money, and that as the ruler of this new system, the U.S. government gained special advantages over every other country, including the ability to dominate the world by forcing other countries to finance its operations.

  IX. THE END OF AN ERA?

  In Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s landmark 1795 essay “Toward Perpetual Peace,” he argues for six primary principles, one of which is that “no national debt shall be contracted in connection with the external affairs of the state”:

  “A credit system, if used by the powers as an instrument of aggression against one another, shows the power of money in its most dangerous form. For while the debts thereby incurred are always secure against present demands (because not all the creditors will demand payment at the same time), these debts go on growing indefinitely. This ingenious system, invented by a commercial people in the present century, provides a military fund which may exceed the resources of all the other states put together. It can only be exhausted by an eventual tax-deficit, which may be postponed for a considerable time by the commercial stimulus which industry and trade receive through the credit system. This ease in making war, coupled with the warlike inclination of those in power (which seems to be an integral feature of human nature), is thus a great obstacle in the way of perpetual peace.”

  Kant seemingly predicted dollar hegemony. With his thesis in mind, would a true gold standard have deterred the war in Vietnam? If anything, it seems certain that such a standard would have made the war at least much shorter. The same, obviously, can be said for World War I, the Napoleonic Wars, and other conflicts where the belligerents left the gold standard to fight.

  “The unique ability of the U.S. government,” Hudson says, “to borrow from foreign central banks rather than from its own citizens is one of the economic miracles of modern times.”

  But “miracle” is in the eye of the beholder. Was it a miracle for the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, or the Afghans?

  Nearly 50 years ago, Hudson writes that “the only way for America to remain a democracy is to forgo its foreign policy. Either its world strategy must become inward-looking or its political structure must become more centralized. Indeed since the start of the Vietnam War, the growth of foreign policy considerations has visibly worked to disenfranchise the American electorate by reducing the role of congress in national decision making.”

  This trend obviously has become much more magnified in recent history. In the past few years America has been at war in arguably as many as seven countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Niger), yet the average American knows little to nothing about these wars. In 2021, the U.S. spends more on its military than do the next 10 countries combined. Citizens have more or less been removed from the decision-making process, and one of the key reasons — perhaps the key reason — why these wars are able to be financed is through the Treasury bill standard.

  How much longer can this system last?

  In 1977, Hudson revisits the question on everyone’s mind in the early 1970s: “Will OPEC supplant Europe and Japan as America’s major creditors, using oil earnings to buy U.S. Treasury securities and thereby fund U.S. federal budget deficits? Or will Eastern Hemisphere countries subject the U.S. to a gold-based system of international finance in which renewed U.S. payment deficits will connote a loss of its international financial leverage?”

  We of course know the answer: OPEC did indeed fund the U.S. budget for the next decade. Eastern hemisphere countries then failed to subject the U.S. to a gold-based system, in which payments deficits marked loss of leverage. In fact, the Japanese and Chinese in turn kept buying American debt once the oil countries ran out of money in the 1980s.

  The system, however, is once again showing cracks.

  As of 2013, foreign central banks have been dishoarding their U.S. treasuries. As of today, the Federal Reserve is the majority purchaser of American debt. The world is witnessing a slow decline of the dollar as the dominant reserve currency, both in terms of percentage of foreign exchange reserves and in terms of percentage of trade. These still significantly outpace America’s actual contribution to global GDP — a legacy of the Treasury bill standard, for sure — but they are declining over time.

  De-dollarization toward a multi-polar world is gradually occurring. As Hudson says, “Today we are winding down the whole free lunch system of issuing dollars that will not be repaid.”

  X. BITCOIN VS. SUPER IMPERIALISM

  Writing in the late 1970s, Hudson predicts that “without a Eurocurrency, there is no alternative to the dollar, and without gold (or some other form of asset money yet to be accepted), there is no alternative to national currencies and debt-money serving international functions for which they have shown themselves to be ill-suited.”

  Thirty years later, in 2002, he writes that “today it would be necessary for Europe and Asia to design an artificial, politically created alternative to the dollar as an international store of value. This promises to be the crux of international political tensions for the next generation.”

  It’s a prescient comment, though it wasn’t Europe or Asia that designed an alternative to the dollar, but Satoshi Nakamoto. A new kind of asset money, bitcoin has a chance to unseat the super-imperial dollar structure to become the next world reserve currency.

  As Hudson writes, “One way to discourage governments from running payments deficits is to oblige them to finance these deficits with some kind of asset they would prefer to keep, yet can afford to part with when necessary. To date, no one has come up with a better solution than that which history has institutionalized over a period of about two thousand years: gold.”

  In January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto came up with a better solution. There are many differences between gold and bitcoin. Most importantly, for the purposes of this discussion, is the fact that bitcoin is easily self-custodied and thus confiscation-resistant.

  Gold was looted by colonial powers worldwide for hundreds of years, and, as discussed in this essay, was centralized mainly into the coffers of the U.S. government after World War I. Then, through shifting global monetary policy of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, gold was demonetized, first domestically in the U.S. and then internationally. By the 1980s, the U.S. government had “killed” gold as a money through centralization and through control of the derivatives markets. It was able to prevent self-custody, and manipulate the price down.

  Bitcoin, however, is notably easy to self-custody. Any of the billions of people on earth with a smartphone can, in minutes, download a free and open-source Bitcoin wallet, receive any amount of bitcoin, and back up the passphrase offline. This makes it much more likely that users will actually control their bitcoin, as opposed to gold investors, who often entered through a paper market or a claim, and not actual bars of gold. Verifying an inbound gold payment is impossible to do without melting the delivery bar down and assaying it. Rather than go through the trouble, people deferred to third parties. In Bitcoin, verifying payments is trivial.

  In addition, gold historically failed as a daily medium of exchange. Over time, markets preferred paper promises to pay gold — it was just easier, and so gold fell out of circulation, where it was more easily centralized and confiscated. Bitcoin is built differently, and could very well be a daily medium of exchange.

  In fact, as we see more and more people demand to be paid in bitcoin, we get a glimpse of a future where Thier’s law (found in dollarizing countries, where good money drives out the bad) is in full effect, where merchants would prefer bitcoin to fiat money. In that world, confiscation of bitcoin would be impossible. It may also prove hard to manipulate the spot price of bitcoin through derivatives. As BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes writes:

  “Bitcoin is not owned or stored by central, commercial, or bullion banks. It exists purely as electronic data, and, as such, naked shorts in the spot market will do nothing but ensure a messy destruction of the shorts’ capital as the price rises. The vast majority of people who own commodity forms of money are central banks who it is believed would rather not have a public scorecard of their profligacy. They can distort these markets because they control the supply. Because bitcoin grew from the grassroots, those who believe in Lord Satoshi are the largest holders outside of centralised exchanges. The path of bitcoin distribution is completely different to how all other monetary assets grew. Derivatives, like ETFs and futures, do not alter the ownership structure of the market to such a degree that it suppresses the price. You cannot create more bitcoin by digging deeper in the ground, by the stroke of a central banker’s keyboard, or by disingenuous accounting tricks. Therefore, even if the only ETF issued was a short bitcoin futures ETF, it would not be able to assert any real downward pressure for a long period of time because the institutions guaranteeing the soundness of the ETF would not be able to procure or obscure the supply at any price thanks to the diamond hands of the faithful.”

  If governments cannot kill bitcoin, and it continues its rise, then it stands a good chance to eventually be the next reserve currency. Will we have a world with bitcoin-backed fiat currencies, similar to the gold standard? Or will people actually use native Bitcoin itself — through the Lightning Network and smart contracts — to do all commerce and finance? Neither future is clear.

  But the possibility inspires. A world where governments are constrained from undemocratic forever wars because restraint has once again been imposed on them through a neutral global balance-of-payments system is a world worth looking forward to. Kant’s writings inspired democratic peace theory, and they may also inspire a future Bitcoin peace theory.

  Under a Bitcoin standard, citizens of democratic countries would more likely choose investing in domestic infrastructure as opposed to military adventurism. Foreigners would no longer be as easily forced to pay for any empire’s wars. There would be consequences even for the most powerful nation if it defaults on its debt.

  Developing countries could harness their natural resources and borrow money from markets to finance Bitcoin mining operations and become energy sovereign, instead of borrowing money from the World Bank to fall deeper into servitude and the geopolitical equivalent of subsistence farming.

  Finally, the massive inequalities of the past 50 years might also be slowed, as the ability of dominant capital to enrich itself in downturns through rent-seeking and easy monetary policy could be checked.

  In the end, if such a course for humanity is set, and Bitcoin does eventually win, it may not be clear what happened:

  Did Bitcoin defeat super imperialism?

  Or did super imperialism defeat itself?

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/15/2021 – 00:00

• Belarus Leader Asks Russia To Station Nuclear-Capable Missiles Near Poland & Ukraine
  Belarus Leader Asks Russia To Station Nuclear-Capable Missiles Near Poland & Ukraine

  With Belarus’ longtime strongman ruler Alexander Lukashenko in the international spotlight over this past week as tensions soar with Poland over the migrant border crisis, he’s been touting his close relationship with Putin while also threatening to shut off the Yamal natural gas pipeline to Europe – something which Putin warned against in fresh statements this weekend. 

  The threat to shut off energy supplies to Europe is something the Kremlin has distanced itself from, given especially it puts Russia in an awkward position at a moment the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is in the last hurdles of German regulatory approval. The Belarus matter can now be use by critics of NS2 to further their argument that Russia is being handed too much geopolitical and resource leverage over Europe’s energy independence. The fight over the Russia-to-Germany pipeline is not over.

  Despite Putin cautioning Minsk as the row with Europe rapidly escalates, Lukashenko is asking for more, as Reuters reports over the weekend: “Pesident of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko wants Russian nuclear-capable Iskander missile systems to deploy in the south and west of the country, he said in an interview with a Russian defense magazine published on Saturday.”

  

  “I need several divisions in the west and the south, let them stand (there),” Lukashenko was quoted as saying. Reuters summarized further of the hugely provocative request: 

  Lukashenko told National Defense magazine that he needed the Iskander mobile ballistic missile system, which has a range of up to 500 kilometers (311 miles) and can carry either conventional or nuclear warheads.

  Despite the Kremlin not commenting on the statements when pressed by Western reporters, there’s little doubt that it’s the most inconvenient moment possible to open up such a discussion as provocative as nuclear weapons – again given it appears Russia is trying to distance itself from some of Belarus’ leaders’ most outlandish statements. 

  It should be noted that Lukashenko floated the idea of deploying the nuke-capable systems “in the south and west” of Belarus. Crucially, the countries lying to the west of Belarus are EU members Poland and Lithuania, and to the south lies NATO-friendly Ukraine. 

  

  While Russia and Belarus remain part of a closely cooperative “union state” – such an action as Russia transferring such weaponry to Belarus would without doubt trigger a crisis on par with the 2014 Crimean crisis, and potentially leading to war with NATO. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 23:30

• Is The Yuan's 2015 Devaluation The Wrong Template To Look At Now
  Is The Yuan’s 2015 Devaluation The Wrong Template To Look At Now

  By Ye Xie, Bloomberg Markets Live commentator and reporter

  Three things we learned last week:

  1. The yuan’s relentless rise is fueling fear of a repeat of the 2015 debacle.

  With the trade-weighted yuan at the strongest in five years, there’s growing concern that the currency is becoming so expensive that it will eventually crash. “This is a repeat of what got the RMB in trouble in 2014,” Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, tweeted. “Back then, RMB was quasi-pegged to the dollar, which rose sharply, dragging RMB up with it. That episode ended with the surprise “step” RMB devaluation in Aug 2015.”

  
   
  The similarities between now and then are many. Like 2015, the economy is faltering amid a deleveraging campaign, just as the Fed moves to reduce policy accommodation. But concern over similarities may be overblown. The ongoing pandemic has been a boon for China’s balance of payments. It reinforced China’s role as a global factory, resulting in a record trade surplus. Meanwhile, traveling abroad has diminished, cutting off a dominant source of capital outflows. Instead of outflows like in 2015, money has been pouring into stocks and bonds, as well as via FDI. In short, a strong yuan has fundamental support, noted Morgan Stanley. (Their strategists recommend long yuan vs euro and the Indian rupee.)

  
   
  2. Beijing is stepping up efforts to calm the real-estate market.

  High-yield property bonds rebounded strongly late last week, amid reports of some easing of restrictions in the housing market. On Friday, the PBOC reiterated a pledge to foster the “steady and sound” development of the property market. The authorities are trying to stop the contagion from spreading to stronger companies. But developers still need to come up with money somewhere to repay the debt, and there’s still a lot coming due. The tide is going out and we’ll know who’s swimming naked.
   
  3. Inflation concerns pushed forward Fed rate-hike expectations.

  The U.S. 10-year TIPS breakeven rate surged to the highest since 2006, following a shocking CPI report that exceeded all economists’ estimates. Meanwhile real yields dropped to record lows. The set-up looks similar to the one before the Taper Tantrum in 2013 when the Fed’s abrupt hawkish pivot roiled global markets. In China, while PPI rose to the highest in 26 years, the pass-through to CPI remains limited, allowing some flexibility for the PBOC to ease policy, when needed.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 23:00

• "Certainly On My Mind" – NY Gov. Jokes About Banning Zoom To Get Workers Back In Offices 
  “Certainly On My Mind” – NY Gov. Jokes About Banning Zoom To Get Workers Back In Offices 

  New York Governor Kathy Hochul joked with ABC7 New York that she wouldn’t sanction Zoom to get people back to work in Manhattan as the latest employment survey found less than a third of workers are back in the office. 

  “…short of banning Zoom, which I’m not going to do – but it’s certainly something on my mind as we want people back downtown,“ Hochul joked with reporters.

  The scary part of which is that, as many have become increasingly aware of in the last two years, when a Democratic leader says they won’t do something… it usually means, at some point, they will (remember “two weeks to flatten the curve”, vaccine passports are a conspiracy theory, etc…). 

  The newly elected governor is desperate for workers to return to the borough as the Zoom-boom during the virus pandemic has kept many at home. In return, the local economy languishes as businesses, such as eateries, bars, and other street shops, suffer due to a decline of office workers. 

  “It is very safe here and we want people to come back. They’re missing the vitality, the energy and the innovation that is spurred by the connections of human beings,” Hochul said.

  Perhaps it’s time to stop the incessant and accelerating fearmongering about the virus then?

  According to Partnership for New York City, only 28% of Manhattan office workers were back in the city on an average workday in November. 

  “Of Manhattan’s one million office workers, 28% are back. And of those, only 8% are back full time,” said Kathryn Wylde, who heads Partnership for New York City.

  

  By Jan. 30, employers expect about half of workers will return to the office on an average weekday, with 57% in the office at least three days a week while 21% remain remote. 

  The highest average daily workplace attendance is real estate, with 77%, followed by financial services (27%) and law firms (27%).

  We have routinely commented on the slow return of workers. Kastle Systems, whose electronic access systems secure thousands of office buildings across NYC, shows an increasing number of workers returned to the office at the beginning of November. Since September, the index has risen nearly fourteen percentage points from 20% to about 34%. Overall, the index remains well below pre-pandemic levels. 

  

  Kastle’s numbers appear similar to Partnership for New York City’s survey data. Even though Hochul joked about banning Zoom, the governor has only one job: get re-elected. And will do so by any means possible as she must revive Manhattan’s economy. So don’t be surprised if she sanctions companies for not returning workers to office buildings or even goes after Zoom, as one third of companies surveyed said they expect to reduce their city office space requirements in the next five years.

  This means remote work is here to stay… and the politicians won’t like that at all!

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 22:30

• 'A World Gone Mad': Upscale LA Neighborhood Wrestles With Worsening Homeless Crisis
  ‘A World Gone Mad’: Upscale LA Neighborhood Wrestles With Worsening Homeless Crisis

  Authored by Jamie Joseph via The Epoch Times,

  Abbott Kinney Boulevard is a picture-perfect hidden gem in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, known for its boutique shops and locally-owned dining joints. The mile-long strip sings to the tune of upper-middle-class patrons who come to Venice Beach to soak in its peculiar rhythm. The neighborhood’s tight-knit community of homeowners who have lived in the area for decades are proud to reside in this unique nook of town.

  

  But over the last year, the community within this stretch of Venice grew even closer over a common frustration: the growing homeless encampments.

  The issue is not new to Los Angeles as a whole, which has more than 41,000 people living on its streets, according to the latest homeless count, with more than 66,000 homeless people countywide. A forecast by the Economic Roundtable estimates that number could reach nearly 90,000 by the year 2023.

  Venice has approximately 2,000 people living unhoused, making it the second largest congregant of homeless people in the city after Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

  Drugs, needles, trash, violence, fires, and encampments have become all too common to the Venice community. They say their pleas for help often fall on deaf ears when it comes to their city leaders, while tourists, homeowners, workers, and other homeless people have become victims to random assaults by a more violent crowd of transients.

  “It’s a world gone mad,” Venice resident Deborah Keaton told The Epoch Times. “It’s our own making too. I’m a liberal, a Democrat, and we voted for these measures that decriminalize a lot of this behavior, and so there’s no repercussions for these guys.”

  

  When Keaton steps outside her home on North Venice Blvd. between Abbott Kinney and Electric Ave., her reality is not the white-picket fence experience she bought into 30 years ago when she purchased her home. An encampment, including a handful of parked RVs, has popped up adjacent to her house, making hers the closest house to the neighborhood’s new hot spot for crime and drug dealing.

  The transients living inside the RVs play loud music all day and night, she said. She filed a police report against the apparent ringleader of the RV encampment, Brandon Washington, because she says he approached her gate and allegedly made threats against her family.

  “He rang the bell, and he was wasted, and he said to me: ‘I just need to know all the evil people, is your husband evil? Because I need to kill your husband,’” Keaton said. “It was scary.”

  She captured the entire interaction on her Ring doorbell camera.

  “There’s no repercussions for these guys, and they can’t be held and they know it. A lot of these guys have been arrested 400 times,” she said.

  Neighbors allege Washington—who often appears to be on drugs—has prostituted women in the RVs, in addition to dealing methamphetamine to other homeless people. Keaton said in the summer a woman was hiding in her backyard, because she said Washington was “pimping her out.”

  These stories have become all too common in Venice.

  Ansar El Muhammad, who goes by “Brother Stan” in Venice, knows the plight of Washington all too well. About 20 years ago, Washington was in Muhammad’s niece’s wedding. Both were born and raised in Venice and ran in the same circles.

  “Even though everybody is up in arms about this, these are human beings,” Muhammad told The Epoch Times. “Brandon’s a good guy, it’s the drugs that are doing that to him. So, I understand the neighbors’ perspective.”

  Muhammad has become somewhat of a neighborhood protector, taking matters into his own hands. He runs H.E.L.P.E.R Foundation, a gang intervention coalition serving the Venice and Mar Vista neighborhoods.

  Venice neighbors say they trust him so much they call him first when there’s a safety or noise issue. The homeless trust him, too, so he is able to keep the peace.

  Most of the vagrants in Venice are involved in some element of gang activity, even if they are not officially part of a set, he said. Drug addiction is also rampant among the homeless, making it more difficult for them to accept resources.

  “So, for my friend over here, what do I do? I build rapport, I have to wait for him to say ‘Stan, I’m ready,’” he said.

  

  Other outreach workers across the county have told The Epoch Times the same thing—contact must be repeatedly made before some people accept help.

  Pat, an unsheltered resident in Venice Beach, told The Epoch Times earlier this year there should be more solutions by city leaders to encourage special rehab programs that would “give people a sense of accountability.”

  “There’s got to be a way, a path forward from sleeping on the pavement to eventually having a place. But I think all of the energy to give that path forward should come from the person in that situation,” he said.

  Neighbors Criticize Local Policies

  The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Homeless Outreach and Services Team (LASD HOST) conducted a cleanup of the sidewalk surrounding the RVs on Sept. 8 and 9, but Keaton said they won’t enforce any measures that would force the RVs to move. She fears the trash will pile up again and attract additional criminal activity.

  “The LAPD says they can’t enforce it because it comes down from the mayor’s office, but according to the Sheriff’s Department, the LAPD are not supposed to take orders from the mayor’s office—but that’s the deal,” Keaton said.

  Venice Neighborhood Council Board member Soledad Ursua told The Epoch Times the RVs receive citations, but a homeless service provider in the area allegedly pays for the tickets.

  Ursua said the pandemic also changed the homeless situation by encouraging transients to move to new residential areas in the city near commercial areas.

  “This is different because there’s people who are totally selling drugs, they’re doing drugs, and it’s outside a residence,” Ursua said.

  “I’ve had to clean up human feces in my carport three times,” she added.

  During the summer, HOST conducted a massive cleanup and outreach effort on the Venice boardwalk. Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva deployed deputies to the area while media reports slammed city leaders for not addressing the issue. Encampment fires were at an all time high: more than 54 percent of all fires in Los Angeles were caused by encampments this year, the Los Angeles Fire Department reported.

  The neighborhood experienced a sharp uptick in crime during the summer, too, according to statistics provided to the Venice Neighborhood Council by LAPD Capt. Steve Embrich.

  Year-to-date numbers showed that robberies nearly tripled since the same period last year. Homeless-related robberies were up 260 percent, homeless-related assaults with a deadly weapon were up 118 percent, property crimes and area burglaries were up 85 percent, and grand theft auto was up 74 percent.

  “We’ve been inundated with calls, with concerns, with images from the news, from people picking up the phone, emailing, sending us letters, about what’s going on in Venice,” Villanueva told reporters during a press conference inside the Hall of Justice on June 23. “And that is a microcosm of what’s going on throughout the entire county of Los Angeles.”

  Los Angeles Councilmember Mike Bonin—who was also a local advocate for defunding the LAPD—countered Villanueva’s efforts and asked the Los Angeles Homeless and Poverty Committee to shift $5 million in budgeted aid to fund housing programs in his district. Those funds were sent to the St. Joseph Center to conduct outreach on the boardwalk.

  However, some tents have started popping back up on the boardwalk, with residents saying many homeless individuals have just been moved around.

  An unhoused member of the Venice community, Butch Say, believes most homeless people in Venice don’t want the help. Say, who described himself as a traveling nomad, told The Epoch Times during the boardwalk cleanup that most of them prefer to live on the street.

  “They go, ‘No, I love it out here. Nobody tells me what to do, and I run around in my underwear,” he said. “You know, whatever. They’re crazy. What can I say? It’s Venice.”

  Not a ‘Housing’ Problem

  While Los Angeles dealt with a homeless crisis prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, city restrictions may have exacerbated the problem. Curfew on tents in public were rolled back and sanitation crews were cut to mitigate the spread of the virus. Other city codes were suspended, too. As a result, many homeless people—mostly addicts—flocked to the beach.

  In a previous interview with The Epoch Times, local bar owner Luis Perez said Venice always had a quirky community of homeless individuals, but they were largely artists and entertainers. They weren’t addicts. He said he saw homeless individuals being bussed in and dropped off on the boardwalk.

  As state and city leaders peddle the state-sanctioned “housing first” model, which suggests the solution to homelessness lies within building more affordable housing units, Venice Beach natives have a different perspective.

  “A lot of them don’t want housing. See, this is the issue—they put all this money in here for housing, but there’s less than 5 percent of this population across the city that want it. They say ‘to hell with housing,’” Muhammad said. “You know why? Because they’re addicts.”

  

  On Nov. 10, Gov. Gavin Newsom visited West Los Angeles VA Medical Center. During the press conference, Newsom told reporters that $22 billion in funds is being invested to address “the issue of affordability, housing, and homelessness, to support these efforts all across the state of California.”

  “Yes, I see what you see, yes I’m mindful of what is happening, but I’m also more optimistic than I’ve ever been. We are seeing progress,” he said.

  But residents say they look around, and the problem seems to be getting worse.

  “I voted for Proposition HHH. I [would] be the first one to say I want a solution. And honestly, I would probably vote for another one if I thought the money was going to be correctly spent,” said Venice Neighborhood Council Board member Robert Thibodeau.

  “But the thing is, where’s the light on the ground solutions? Where’s the FEMA style response, the striking sort of immediate solutions that you would have with [Hurricane] Katrina, because to me, this is Katrina.”

  Local business owners—the heartbeat of Venice—have been speaking out, too. Klaus Moeller, co-owner of Ben & Jerry’s on the boardwalk, told The Epoch Times in an email during the summer that “this is not a local homeless problem.”

  “This is a problem about out-of-state transients and drug dealers/users moving in because they can act without repercussions,” he said.

  Moeller added his employees have been attacked by transients on the boardwalk.

  Neighbors also criticized Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond passed in 2016 by Angelenos to build 10,000 supportive housing units. As of February, the city controller discovered only 489 of the bond-funded units were ready for occupancy.

  Because of the lack of supportive housing, a number of tiny home villages have popped up across the county as lower-cost alternative for interim housing. However, some residents say they won’t make much of a difference.

  “They wouldn’t move indoors. It’s not a housing crisis—it’s an addiction crisis,” Los Angeles native and new Venice resident, Kate Linden, told The Epoch Times.

  Linden said she emails Lt. Geff Deedrick—who leads the HOST efforts—weekly letting him know what’s going on. But the HOST team can only come in when they are given orders.

  Previously, Lt. Deedrick told The Epoch Times: “The HOST team provides that guardian mentality, so you can have a safe space for those discussions, but that’s where the policy makers and executives and those things, we leave that to them; we deploy at the direction of the sheriff.”

  

  Residents Launch Recall Campaign

  Many Venice neighbors who originally voted in Councilmember Bonin to represent them in the 11th district, like Keaton, are pulling back their support. Earlier this year, a recall campaign was launched, and on Nov. 10, petitioners collected enough signatures to move forward in the recall election process.

  They blame Bonin for the increased homelessness and lack of enforcement on street camping that they say brings gang activity into the neighborhood. On Oct. 22, the Los Angeles City Council voted to ban encampments in 54 specified areas, with Bonin and Councilmember Nithya Raman the only two dissenting votes.

  Thibodeau said Bonin’s views are on the “radical fringe,” that aligns with special interest groups and far-left activists. Thibodeau, who identifies as a centrist, said he’s sent dozens of emails to Bonin’s office with no response.

  “The sad thing is lot of this has happened because of a higher level of tolerance in the community and a compassion in the community—we’ve been abused, because we’re compassionate people,” Thibodeau told The Epoch Times.

  “He will not enforce [camping restrictions] in his district. So, now what, he’s in charge of policing too?”

  During a city council meeting last month, Bonin voted not to enforce a ban on camping due to a lack of prior street engagement to notify the homeless. But according to city documents (pdf), the cost of signage and outreach would cost as much as $2 million.

  “There was an agreement about street engagements, and I think we need to live by that part as well,” Bonin said. “I am certain that a lot of work has been done, but it still isn’t to the level of what we committed to as a body. And I’m concerned about us losing the commitment to the street engagement strategy and not making sure that it is adequately resourced.”

  Adding to the residents’ frustrations, the LAPD has their hands tied due to the city’s catch-and-release policies. Homeless people who commit crimes are often back on the streets within hours if they refuse services.

  Thibodeau said he believes Bonin is transforming Venice into a “containment zone” by not enforcing any anti-camping ordinances. Meanwhile, Bonin is planning several large supportive housing developments in Venice Beach and Mar Vista.

  Bonin and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti also championed A Bridge Housing supportive units in Venice for $8 million that came out of Prop. HHH funds. Residents say most of the homeless who reside in the shelter are “dual residents,” meaning they have a bed in the shelter as well as a tent on the street.

  “There are no new planned facilities in Pacific Palisades. Brentwood happens to have the VA but nowhere else in Brentwood … so we’re making a Containment Zone here like Skid Row,” he said.

  As far as the sidewalk on N. Venice Boulevard taken over by RVs and tents, Thibodeau said, “Living next to this stuff is very draining.” He said he’s thinking about organizing street protests to address the issue.

  Councilmember Bonin’s office did not respond to a request for comment by press deadline.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 22:00

• Billionaire Late-Bloomers – It's Never Too Late To Join The 'Tres Comas' Club
  Billionaire Late-Bloomers – It’s Never Too Late To Join The ‘Tres Comas’ Club

  More often than not, individuals and media alike focus on the success stories of early bloomers.

  These early-age accomplishments of some of the richest people in the world are highlighted as marvels. The early achievements of hoodie-wearing CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel—who became billionaires at ages 23 and 25, respectively—come to mind.

  But, as Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach and Aran Ali detail below, there’s also the case to be made for the late bloomer. According to the Census Bureau, a 35-year-old is three times more likely to found a successful start-up than someone aged 22.

  The infographic above, from Virtual College, highlights 45 billionaires who had their breakthrough later in life, by the age of their respective breakthrough.

  

  Billionaires With Career Breakthroughs at or After Age 35

  Though these late successes span many different industries and countries, there are many consistent through lines.

  The 45 billionaires highlighted had an average age of 41 and an average net worth of $10 billion.

  

  Here are just a few highlights of late career breakthroughs:

  Jack Ma

  Ma is best known for co-founding Alibaba and becoming one of China’s wealthiest people, but his start came rather unexpectedly. After failing to secure jobs as a fresh graduate and starting his own translation company, Ma went on a business trip to the U.S. and discovered the internet (and a lack of Chinese websites). Over time, he connected Chinese companies with American coders to create websites, and soon saw room in the market for a business-to-business marketplace, which became Alibaba. The company secured millions in investment and would go on to become one of China’s leading forces in tech, all without Ma writing a single line of code.

  Amancio Ortega

  As the former CEO of fashion chain Zara and its parent company Inditex, Ortega is Europe’s third wealthiest person. That success came after opening the first Zara store in 1975 with his then-wife Rosalía Mera, with their store focusing on cheaper versions of high-end fashion. Ortega fine-tuned the design and manufacturing process to produce new trends more quickly, helping to pioneer the concept of “fast fashion,” and soon becoming a fashion powerhouse.

  Jim Simons

  Simons was once lauded as the world’s greatest investor, largely due to his outlandish returns of over 60% before fees. But he actually started in the academic field, acquiring a PhD in mathematics—he worked in many faculties, and even as a codebreaker for the NSA. Eventually, Simons utilized his mathematical knowledge on Wall Street, where he had his breakthrough in 1982 by starting his model-based hedge fund—Renaissance Technologies, and built a net worth of $24.6 billion.

  Dietrich Mateschitz

  One of the 60 richest people in the world, Austrian businessman Mateschitz got his start in marketing for Unilever and then cosmetics company Blendax. His breakthrough came on a business trip to Thailand, where the 40-year-old discovered that the local energy drink Krating Daeng helped his jet lag. Mateschitz and the drink’s creator, Chaleo Yoovidhya, each put up $500,000 to turn the drink into an exported energy brand, and Red Bull was born.

  James Dyson

  Before Dyson was a household name of vacuums, fans, and dryers, The UK’s James Dyson was an industrial engineer with many ideas for inventions. After getting frustrated with the bags of Hoover vacuum cleaners, Dyson had the idea for a bagless cyclone vacuum, and developed one after more than 5,000 prototypes over five years (and supported by his wife’s salary). At first he couldn’t find a manufacturer or success in the UK, so Dyson instead sold his vacuums in Japan and ended up winning the 1991 International Design Fair Prize there. Thirty years later, Dyson’s success led to a royal knighting and becoming the fourth richest person in the UK.

  Late Bloomers: The Rule Not The Exception

  It’s helpful to remember that these stories might be incredible and successful on a grand scale, but they are not entirely unique.

  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the majority of successful businesses have been founded by middle-aged people and the average age of a company’s founder at the time of founding is 41.9 years. Experience definitely pays dividends, and the saying that “life is a marathon, not a sprint” seems especially true for this list of late breakthrough billionaires.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 21:30

• China Macro Data Weakens Across The Board, Credit Impulse Contracts Most In 10 Years
  China Macro Data Weakens Across The Board, Credit Impulse Contracts Most In 10 Years

  After a slew of disappointing macro data in September (including the Q3 GDP slump), China’s economy (upon which we get the usual monthly avalanche of data tonight) was expected to continue to show signs of slowing growth as the PBOC has definitely erred on the side of caution recently (refraining from cutting banks’ reserve requirement ratio since a reduction in July, and has keeping policy interest rates steady since early last year).

  China’s credit impulse is anything but supportive, contracting at its most aggressive pace since April 2011…

  

  Ahead of tonight’s prints, the signals from business surveys are mixed (in other words, useless), with the private Caixin PMI showing both services and manufacturing rising, while Beijing’s official PMI showed declines in both segments of the economy…

  

  So what did the ‘hard’ data look like?

  • China Industrial Production YTD YoY +10.9% BEAT +10.8% Exp DOWN from +11.8% in September

  • China Retail Sales YTD YoY +14.9% BEAT +14.7% Exp DOWN from +16.4% in September

  • China Fixed Asset Investment YTD YoY +6.1% MISS +6.5% Exp DOWN from +7.3% in September

  • China Property Investment YTD YoY +7.2% MISS +7.8% Exp DOWN from +8.8% in September

  • China Surveyed Jobless Rate 4.9% MEET 4.9% Exp SAME as 4.9% in September

  So, as expected, all indicators are weaker from September to October but Industrial Production and Retail Sales managed very modest, and well-engineered, beats. On the investment side, it was a different story with big misses…

  

  Additionally, China New Home Prices fell 0.25% MoM, the second monthly contraction in a row and accelerating lower, with prices rising MoM in just 13 of the 70 cities (well down from the 27 cities that saw prices rise MoM in September).

  

  Given the mixed picture, it is definitely premature to call any lows here in China’s economy.

  So where do we go from here?

  As Bloomberg’s Chief China Markets Correspondent, Sofia Horta e Costa, notes, the central bank has little room for error.

  • If liquidity tightens too much, there could be a repeat of the credit squeeze a year ago at a time when the economy is already under pressure.

  • Too generous, and the PBOC may undo efforts to deleverage.

  Last year, the central bank left so much extra cash in the financial system that only a few months later, Chinese officials were clamping down on excessive leverage and warning of the risk of asset bubbles.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 21:07

• Was Rittenhouse's Possession Of The AR-15 Unlawful?
  Was Rittenhouse’s Possession Of The AR-15 Unlawful?

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  In covering the motions hearing last week in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, I noted a surprising comment from Judge Bruce Schroeder that he had “spent hours” with the Wisconsin gun law and could not state with certainty what it means in this case.

  The statement could effectively knock out the misdemeanor gun possession count — the one count that could still be in play for the jury after the prosecution’s case on the more serious offense appeared to collapse in court. A close examination of that provision reveals ample reason to question not just its meaning but its application to this case.

  

  The unlawful possession of the gun has been a prominent fact cited not only by the prosecutors but the press.

  At trial, however, prosecutor Thomas Binger at points seemed to be learning the governing law from Rittenhouse. For example, he pressed Rittenhouse on why he did not just purchase a handgun rather than an AR-15.  Rittenhouse replied he could not possess a hand gun at his age. Binger then asked in apparent disbelief that the law allowed him to have an AR-15 but not a handgun and Rittenhouse said yes.  Binger then moved on after seemingly drawing out a point for the defense.

  The exchange was all the more baffling because it drew attention to the fact that one of Binger’s alleged “victims” was an adult named Gaige Grosskreutz who also decided to bring a handgun to the protests and pointed his 9mm at the head of Rittenhouse when he was shot in the arm.

  However, the most damaging moment came outside of the presence of the jury when the judge drilled down on the law. He told the prosecutors “I have been wrestling with this statute with, I’d hate to count the hours I’ve put into it, I’m still trying to figure out what it says, what’s prohibited. I have a legal education.” He added that he failed to understand how an “ordinary citizen” could understand what is illegal.

  It is hard to understand how the count could be given to the jury without a clear understanding of what it means. It is also hard to instruct a jury on an ambiguous statute. Criminal laws are supposed to be interpreted narrowly.   It is called the “rule of lenity” and has been around in the English system for centuries. For example,  in 1547, the court was faced with a law making it a felony to steal  “Horses, Geldings or Mares.” Given the use of plural nouns, the court ruled that it did not apply to stealing just one horse.

  The problem with the Wisconsin statute is not a problem of pluralization but definition. It is not clear that the statute actually bars possession by Rittenhouse. Indeed, it may come down to the length of Rittenhouse’s weapon and the prosecutors never bothered to measure it and place it into evidence.

  In Wisconsin, minors cannot possess short-barreled rifles under Section 941.28. Putting aside the failure to put evidence into the record to claim such a short length, it does not appear to be the case here. Rittenhouse used a Smith & Wesson MP-15 with an advertised barrel length of 16 inches and the overall length is 36.9 inches. That is not a short barrel.

  Then there is the rest of the statute and ultimately the word “and.”  Under Section 948.60(2)(a) (“Possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18”), “[a]ny person under 18 years of age who possesses or goes armed with a dangerous weapon is guilty of a Class A misdemeanor.” That makes Rittenhouse guilty, right?

  Well, you then have to look at the subsection (c), which states that “This section applies only to a person under 18 years of age who possesses or is armed with a rifle or a shotgun if the person is in violation of s. 941.28 or is not in compliance with ss. 29.304 and 29.593.”

  Since there is no evidence that Rittenhouse violated Section 941.28, he presumably must be in violation of both sections 29.304 and 29.593.. The defense conceded Rittenhouse was in violation of Section 29.593, which requires certification for weapons. However, he is not in violation of section 29.304, entitled “Restrictions on hunting and use of firearms by persons under 16 years of age.” As the title indicates, the section makes it illegal for persons under 16 to use firearms. Rittenhouse was 17 at the time and the prosecution has not challenged that fact.

  If Rittenhouse were convicted on that count, it could face a serious challenge on appeal. Indeed, it is curious is why Schroeder would even submit the count to the jury if it is uncontested that Rittenhouse was 17. If that is the correct interpretation of the statute, there would be no way for a jury to reasonably convict Rittenhouse. It is akin to giving the jury a criminal count based on his use of force as a police officer when there is no evidence that he was a police officer.

  The defense also offered legislative history to support the narrower interpretation but the prosecution opposed such reliance on material beyond of the language itself. However, that language is difficult to square with the charge and the evidence in this case.

  Rittenhouse is obviously facing other counts. However, on that count, the question comes down to the “and.” To paraphrase Johnnie Cochran from the O.J. Simpson trial, if that clause “doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 21:00

• The Enormous Mental Health Impact Of COVID-19
  The Enormous Mental Health Impact Of COVID-19

  While only a miniscule percentage of humans on Earth have not been affected in some way by the Covid-19 pandemic, the ways in which people’s lives have been altered are as diverse as the severity of the effects themselves (with some having even seen positives to come out of the situation).

  However, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, one negative impact which has been felt to similar degrees around the world though is that on our mental health.

  Latest estimates from the OECD show that increases in the prevalence of depression or its symptoms have been observed in all of the countries in its remit that have available data.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  The largest increase has been in Mexico which went from 3 percent of adults pre-pandemic to 28 percent in 2020.

  Sweden has the highest level of the countries with data pre- and post-pandemic start at 30 percent.

  South Korea however has an estimated share of 37 percent, although there are no data points for a pre-pandemic comparison.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 20:30

• Medicare Premiums Set To Soar; Biden Admin Blames Drug Costs & COVID
  Medicare Premiums Set To Soar; Biden Admin Blames Drug Costs & COVID

  By Zachary Stieber of the Epoch Times,

  President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday announced it is raising Medicare premiums, a move it blamed in part on the cost of drugs.

  

  The Medicare Part B standard monthly premium will rise by nearly $22 to $170.10 next year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said.

  “The increase in the Part B premium for 2022 is continued evidence that rising drug costs threaten the affordability and sustainability of the Medicare program,” Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, administrator of the agency, said in a statement.

  “The Biden-Harris Administration is working to make drug prices more affordable and equitable for all Americans, and to advance drug pricing reform through competition, innovation, and transparency,” she added.

  The move also stemmed from the limiting of the monthly premium increase this year in the Continuing Appropriations Act and from “spending trends driven by COVID-19,” the agency said.

  “It also reflects the need to maintain a contingency reserve for unanticipated increases in health care spending, particularly certain drug costs.”

  One drug in particular was a major factor. Officials said the uncertainty surrounding the potential use of the Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm by people covered by Medicare meant they needed to store away a higher level of reserves. The agency in July began analyzing whether Medicare would cover the drug but has not yet finished the analysis.

  

  In addition to the monthly premium, the annual deductible will rise from $203 to $233. Also, Medicare Part A inpatient deductibles will jump $72 to $1,556 next year, and Medicare part A daily coinsurance and skilled nursing facility coinsurance will both increase at least $9.

  Officials pointed out that many Americans covered by Medicare will see a net increase in Social Security benefits. The Social Security Administration announced last month that recipients will get a 5.9 percent increase in benefits.

  However, the 14.5 percent jump in Medicare premiums—the highest since 2016—will eat up the entire adjustment for Social Security recipients with the lowest benefits, according to Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan seniors group.

  “Social Security recipients with higher benefits should be able to cover the $21.60 per month increase, but they may not wind up with as much left over as they were counting on,” Mary Johnson, a policy analyst for the group, said in a statement.

  Further, inflation is causing the cost of all variety of goods to rise, including core spending priorities like groceries.

  Medicare is a federal health insurance program for Americans 65 or older. Americans can start receiving Social Security as early as age 62, though they receive more if they wait until full retirement age.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 20:00

• All Of A Sudden The CDC Has Stopped Talking About Herd Immunity
  All Of A Sudden The CDC Has Stopped Talking About Herd Immunity

  In case you haven’t noticed, the CDC no longer looks as concerned with herd immunity as it once did. 

  In what should come as no surprise to anyone watching the Covid related narrative closely (or those who have been watching the herd immunity narrative from the get-go), the CDC has “set aside herd immunity as a national goal,” according to a new report from the LA Times.

  What used to be a relatively simple concept has now turned into something “very complicated”, according to Dr. Jefferson Jones, a medical officer on the CDC’s COVID-19 Epidemiology Task Force.

  “Thinking that we’ll be able to achieve some kind of threshold where there’ll be no more transmission of infections may not be possible,” he said to a panel that advises the CDC last week.

  While Jones says vaccines are effective against Covid, “even if vaccination were universal, the coronavirus would probably continue to spread,” the report says. 

  Ergo, herd immunity seems to now be off the table. “We would discourage” thinking in terms of “a strict goal,” Jones said. 

  Dr. Oliver Brooks, a member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices told the L.A. Times that “we do need to increase” the uptake of Covid shots. 

  Brooks admitted that the focus moving away from herd immunity “almost makes you less motivated to get more people vaccinated.”

  

  He also told the L.A. Times he was worried that if the CDC backs off its herd immunity target, it’ll prevent them from reaching their vaccine targets. 

  It marks the latest of many 180 degree changes of heart on issues related to Covid by the CDC. 

  “It’s a science-communications problem,” Brooks said, making sure to reiterate that the agency was still following “the science”. 

  “We said, based on our experience with other diseases, that when you get up to 70% to 80%, you often get herd immunity,” he said about Covid. “It has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, and it’s repeatedly challenged us. It’s impossible to predict what herd immunity will be in a new pathogen until you reach herd immunity.”

  He concluded: “We want clean, easy answers, and sometimes they exist. But on this one, we’re still learning.”

  Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, added that herd immunity was “never as simple as many Americans made it out to be”.

  Sure, Kathleen. Even Americans like Dr. Fauci?

  “Humans are not a herd,” Jamieson told the LA Times. 

  Raj Bhopal, a retired public health professor at the University of Edinburgh, added: “It’s very hard to convey uncertainty and remain authoritative. It’s a pity we can’t take the public along with us on that road of uncertainty.”

  Tell that to everyone that’s been listening to “the science” and the “official” narrative for the last 18 months. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 19:30

• Hedge Fund CIO: Here's Why Trading Often Destroys People, Slowly Devouring Them From Within
  Hedge Fund CIO: Here’s Why Trading Often Destroys People, Slowly Devouring Them From Within

  By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

  Losing money sucks. Lots of other things do too. Most of us hate being wrong. We go to extraordinary lengths to protect our egos. Which is absurd of course, but we are curious little creatures, taught as children to aim for 100% on each test, to win every ball game.

  At some point in a trading career, we either learn to deal with the humiliation of making mistakes or we fail. And the way karma works, the harder we deny our errors the more public the ultimate humiliation.

  

  Lots of investors target longer time horizons so that they make infrequent predictions, which means fewer possible mistakes to confront. Traders on the other hand, make lots of smaller bets, which guarantees frequent winners and losers. But for some odd reason, victories are less pleasurable than defeats are painful, so on balance, trading depletes us. Which is why it often destroys people, slowly devouring them from within.

  Survivors develop ways to inoculate themselves from the pain, humiliation, defeats, losses. Some train their minds to reverse decisions in an instant. They can appear confused, confusing, contradicting themselves in the same sentence. Such people are masters at self-preservation.

  The greatest traders and investors eventually build firms around themselves. Team efforts yield psychic benefits that help restore balance to the emotionally drained. Being surrounded by a group of fellow risk takers and business builders allows you to refocus your efforts when you feel you’re probably wrong. Uncertain. Or when you simply lack conviction.

  

  And a team gives you leverage to press hard when you feel you’re right and the risk reward is compelling. Because after years of focused effort, introspection, you gain a good feel for when you’re likely right or wrong.

  And you begin to see the same in others. Better yet, you can sometimes sense when others are wrong and stubbornly unwilling to yet admit it. Large groups of such people present the greatest trading opportunities. And as awful as it all sounds, the truth is, there is nobility in this struggle. Joy in the pursuit.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 19:00

• Gold 10x Upside: A Trade Idea From Goldman
  Gold 10x Upside: A Trade Idea From Goldman

  With gold having been left long ago at the station, abandoned by the “hard money” crowd which together with today’s youth has found a new fascination with “digital gold” i.e., cryptos, in a dynamic profiled recently by JPMorgan which said that “Institutions Are Rotating Out Of Gold Into Bitcoin As A Better Inflation Hedge“, even as inflation is soaring to levels not seen since the days of Paul Volcker’s hyperinflation, is gold about to have a new chance to shine? According to a recent burst of pro-gold articles, golden sentiment may be about to shift.

  As Bloomebrg writes today, “gold may outperform the S&P 500 Index about 20% as the threat of stagflation becomes real.” It elaborates:

  Concerns over peak economic growth are coinciding with rising inflation, which pushed the real yield on Treasuries to record lows. The high correlation between the real yield and gold suggests bullion is undervalued. Trading signals based on 20-week moving averages imply a potential breakout rally over the next year.

  One of the factors cited by Bloomberg is that gold has a strong inverse relationship with the U.S. real interest rate, which has resumed its slide into negative territory since March. Gold prices and the real yield have an r*square of 0.91 on the regression model over the last five years and the red asterisk below the red line signals gold prices are undervalued for the current level of yield.

  Separatley, Bloomberg takes us on a quick tour of Bollinger Band studies, which plot lines above and below a simple moving average at a specified number of standard deviations to identify periods of high and low volatility. The first chart shows the weekly candle is breaking out of the upper trading band.

  

  The next chart shows the bandwidth is about to widen from its lowest point since 2019 which created a so-called volatility squeeze. It suggests a significant increase in volatility ahead, potentially in favor of gold. And, as Bloomberg further notes, a trading strategy that follows the weekly crossover with a volatility squeeze has helped gold to beat S&P 500.

  

  There have been five cases where gold crossed above its 20-week moving average with bandwidth below 6 over the past two decades. On average, bullion outperformed S&P 500 by 19% over the next 52 weeks with no losing record. The sixth signal is still counting. As Bloomberg concludes, “if this pattern repeats, gold is well primed to outshine S&P 500 next year.”

  In addition to Bloomberg, in a Friday note, UBS strategist Wayne Gordon looked at the recent surge in the price of gold, which jumped $50/oz after the release of US inflation data, which helped it break above the barrier of $1,835. Looking ahead, UBS sees “risks for further strength in CPI in early 2022, which could stoke even stronger demand for gold” while “recent hawkish comments by some Fed officials caused a flattening of the US yield curve, only adding to gold’s shine.” As a result, UBS raised its end-March pricate target modestly from $1,700 to $1,800 while acknowledging that risks are “skewed to the upside in the short run, and moves above $1,900 should not be ruled out.”

  

  So, gold above $1,900, hardly a shocker since the yellow metal is already trading just $35 away.

  A far more convincing pitch for gold also on Friday came from none other than Goldman’s head of energy research Damien Courvalin who repeated the bank’s recent optimistic talking points on the yellow metal in an interview with Bloomberg in which he said that “gold is set to boom” far higher from its current price.

  Which actually brings us to the punchline: a trade idea for gold, also from Goldman, courtesy of the bank’s European strategist Bernhard Rzymelka who urges clients to “consider levered gold upside” which while attractive exposure in its own right is also cheap optionality on even  lower real yields.

  The trade idea is as follows: Buy Gold 6m expiry  $2130 binary call @ 10% offered

  • 10x maximum payout
  • Ref. $1830 spot, 26 Apr 22 expiry date
  • Risks to the downside limited to premium spent

  His four investment highlights:

  • The yellow metal looks ready to break higher on chart & follow the rally in US real yields
  • Our -1.10% target for 30y real yields equates to $2300 in Gold
  • Positioning in gold is light and looks ready to build higher
  • Implied volatility remains close to the 2 year lows  & has started to break higher today

  Charts below:

  Gold with upside to $2300 if real yields hit their -1.10% target. Options markets offer attractive upside over the next 3-6 months.

  

  Implied 6m volatility has started to break higher, suggesting it is an attractive buy if the downside momentum in real yields extends as expected… and gold starts catching up.

  

  Gold positioning by non-commercials has consolidated & looks ready to make new highs. At this point feel free to make fun of applying Elliott waves to CFTC positioning… but it should arguably reflect human psychology as much as the price chart itself. For the latter see below from the MarketStrats chart guru MacNeil Curry.

  

  What if… flows into inflation-protected bonds start extending into gold? At 0% real yield the yellow metal looks increasingly attractive versus TIPS at -0.60% and falling.

  

  Gold chart: On the brink of a breakout. A break of 1833 targets 1930, potentially 1947. Real yields are supportive of higher gold prices

  • On a medium term (multi-month) basis we have been bullish. The series of impulsive advances from the March/April lows and more recently from the Aug-08 and Sep-29 lows point to higher prices.
  • While the lack of  upside acceleration has been increasingly frustrating price and pattern still point higher.
  • Further supportive of higher gold prices is the strong inverse correlation btwn 10yr Real Yields and Gold (see chart 2) and the increasing likelihood that fact that 10yr Real Yields are set to make new all time lows (and resume their bull trend – see above)
  • Indeed, a move above 1833 (14m channel top in brown and almost 4m ascending triangle resistance in royal blue) would confirm the bullish potential, targeting 1930 (swing target) ahead of 1974 (measured moves)
  • Back through the Nov-03 low of 1760 warns of stalling, while a move below 1744 (Ascending Triangle support royal blue) would say that our bullish view is misplaced

  

  * * *

  Post scriptum 1: How will investors feel about an equity risk premium at 5.5% once real yields trade -1% all else equal?

  

  Post scriptum 2 from Rzymelka: “You are crazy. 30y bond yields can never rally if inflation (term) premium reprices this much higher.” Well.. in normal times that probably is true. But not after a major shock & policy response that jointly turbo charge BOTH the structural “savings glut” AND the cyclical “catch up recovery”. In fact, the former puts the latter on steroids^2. Sounds crazy. Is crazy. So lever up. This will probably be the best (and possibly final) party of our generation.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 18:30

• Morgan Stanley's 2022 Outlook: The Training Wheels Come Off
  Morgan Stanley’s 2022 Outlook: The Training Wheels Come Off

  By Andrew Sheets, Chief Cross-Asset Strategist for Morgan Stanley

  The 2022 Outlook: Normalizing but Not Normal, as the Training Wheels Come Off

  

  We’ll publish our year-ahead outlook later today. This is the 18th outlook I’ve had the pleasure to be a part of in Morgan Stanley Research. Each one is the result of a highly collaborative process across strategy and economics, and each has felt uniquely difficult at the time. 2022 is no different.

  In the global economy, my colleague Seth Carpenter and our global economics team think it is a story of ‘normalizing, but not normal’. Normalizing, because we think global growth continues to improve, led by strong consumer spending and capital investment. We forecast growth of 4.6%Y in both the US and euro area next year, and think China will also top expectations, albeit with improvement that may not be apparent for several more months. A robust capex cycle, driven by strong demand, rising labor costs and cheap capital, is an important way this recovery differs from the last.

  Another difference is inflation. We forecast DM inflation to peak in the coming months, then decline throughout 2022 as supply chains normalize and commodity price gains slow. Importantly, we see major regional differences to this story; one reason we like equities in Europe and Japan is that we think inflationary challenges there are much less daunting than elsewhere.

  As the recovery continues, monetary policy shifts. The Fed ends asset purchases by mid-2022, and the Bank of England and Bank of Canada start raising rates. EM policy continues to normalize, with ~70% of EM central banks tightening. We think moderating inflation and a sustained rise in labor force participation mean the first Fed hike is in early 2023, but these trends might not be immediately apparent.

  For markets, shifting policy means the training wheels are off, so to speak. After 20 months of unprecedented support from governments and central banks, this aid is winding down. Asset classes will need to rise and fall under their own power.

  In some places, this should be fine. From a strategy perspective, we continue to believe this is a (surprisingly) ‘normal’ cycle, albeit hotter and faster given the scale of the recession and the subsequent response. Our cycle indicator, a key part of our framework, is back above trend. And we think markets are facing many ‘normal’ mid-cycle problems: better growth colliding with higher inflation, shifting policy and more expensive valuations.

  Overall, we think that valuations and this stage of the cycle support equity over credit and duration. The equity case is significantly stronger in Europe and Japan than EM or the US, where the former enjoy more reasonable valuations, limited central bank tightening and less risk from higher taxes. Those same issues drive a below-consensus forecast for the S&P 500 (4,400 by end-2022). That ‘bearish’ forecast is still a historically high multiple (18x) on an optimistic 2023 EPS number (US$245).

  The ‘equity over spread’ theme extends to credit, where we attempt to re-run much of the 2004-05 playbook. Better growth and good corporate liquidity should keep default rates low. Along with rising rates, this supports loans over high yield over investment grade credit (the same hierarchy that reigned in 2004-05). Also in line with that period, we prefer securitized to corporate credit, and think the best risk/reward is down the capital structure (CMBX BBBs, CLO equity).

  For macro markets, my strategy colleagues see a year of two parts. As we forecast that the Fed will wait until 2023 to make its first hike, it may not be in a rush to signal this action right away. We remain positive on USD and expect US real yields to rise to start the year, factors that mean we suggest patience before buying EM assets. We forecast the US 10-year at 2.10% by end-2022.

  As a delay of the first hike becomes more likely, these factors should all shift. To generate alpha, we like owning CAD/CHF, which should benefit from policy divergence and our expectation of higher oil prices in 1H22.

  If that’s the story, what are the risks? A better version of our 2022 narrative is more aggressive stimulus by China, a quicker repair of supply chains and a faster jump in labor participation. This would lead markets to price our ‘no Fed hikes in 2022’ view sooner, and mean a stronger rally, especially in EM, than we forecast.

  To the downside, it’s all about inflation and real rates. The biggest surprise of 2021 was global real rates hitting new all-data lows as growth recovered, a boon to asset prices. Markets could reasonably assume these are the wrong financial conditions relative to the level of inflation, and that terminal rates should be higher. Our rate strategists like several trades that hedge such a risk: steepeners in US 2s5s and GBP 2s10s and short EUR 10y10y.

  Best wishes for the year ahead, and enjoy your Sunday.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 18:00

• In Lightning-Fast Real Estate Market, Buyers Forced To Risk Fallout From Snap Decisions
  In Lightning-Fast Real Estate Market, Buyers Forced To Risk Fallout From Snap Decisions

  With the average home sold between July 2020 and June 2021 sitting on the market for a median period of just one week before going under contract, American home buyers are being forced to make snap decisions in order to compete with the likes of Blackrock and (at least during this time period), robo-Zillow, if they hoped to land the home of their dreams – or simply profit from the red-hot real estate market.

  According to new data released Thursday by the National Association of Realtors, the one-week figure is the shortest ever going back to 1989, down from three weeks a year earlier, the Wall Street Journal reports.

  

  The combination of rapid turnover during a surge in pandemic-related home buying as people sought more space to hunker down, low mortgage-interest rates, and a constrained supply thanks to caution over showing homes during Covid-19, helps to explain how home prices also rose to multiyear highs. For sellers who did throw their homes on the market, online tools allowing for remote house tours and scheduling showings helped speed up the process, according to real-estate agents. A large proportion of cash buyers – including corporate investors, has also sped up the process.

  And despite the housing market having cooled slightly in recent months, buyers who want to participate still have a much shorter window of time to mull what, for most Americans, is possibly the largest purchase of their lives. What’s more, many buyers are waiving their rights to terminate a contract over low appraisals or unfavorable inspections, in order to present themselves as a more favorable buyer in a bidding war.

  “There’s no plotting of where the Christmas tree will be and measuring for a couch in that scenario,” said NAR VP of demographics and behavioral insights, Jessica Lautz. “You really are making that decision very fast.”

  

  Leah and Ian Evison moved from St. Paul, Minn., to Seattle in January to be closer to their daughter and her family. When they started house hunting in Seattle, they learned that houses typically went off the market within days of being listed, and showings were often limited to 30 minutes each.

  “It felt awful,” Ms. Evison said. “We wanted to move here so much that we were willing to do it, but it felt really ridiculous.”

  After two unsuccessful offers, the Evisons bought a three-bedroom house in March following a bidding war. -WSJ

  In the year ended in June, the median sales price of $305,000 (up from $272,500 the year prior) was the full asking price – the highest since NAR began tracking the data in 2002, per the report.

  Meanwhile in September, the hottest markets in terms of how fast homes sold were Indianapolis; Denver; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Seattle and Tacoma, Wash, according to Redfin.

  According to a September survey from the National Association of Home Builders, around 2/3 of prospective home buyers have been house-hunting for at least three months. Around 45% of those say they haven’t been successful because they were outbid by other buyers.

  That said, things are starting to cool down – with active listings in the four weeks ended Oct. 31 having fallen 22% from a year earlier, per Redfin data.

  “Instead of a house lasting three days on the market, it’s lasting seven days,” said Orlando, FL real-estate agent Harold Torres, who says that for buyers, “negotiation and any type of wiggle room is not really there yet.“

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 17:30

• Clock Just Hours From Midnight For Overwhelmed California Ports
  Clock Just Hours From Midnight For Overwhelmed California Ports

  By Greg Miller of FreightWaves,

  The flood of import containers into Southern California continues unabated — an all-time high 81 container ships were stuck offshore of Los Angeles and Long Beach on Tuesday. Waiting time at anchorage for Los Angeles is surging and is now more than double wait times in early September.

  The ports are scheduled to start charging a highly controversial excess dwell-time fee on Monday, a plan that some members of the National Shippers Advisory Council called “catastrophic,” “crazy” and “out of left field.”

  With just hours left until the fee is set to begin, there are still over 51,000 containers on the terminals that are past the plan’s dwell-time limits.

  

  If the fee plan is not delayed or modified, the aggregate cost to carriers — which would largely be passed on to importers — would start next Monday in the millions per day and escalate to tens of millions per day later in the week.

  There is ongoing speculation that the ports will back off and announce a reprieve, given declines in the number of excess-dwell containers in recent weeks and the enormous costs that would be passed along to U.S. importers.

  Asked about the level of fees that are set to start next week, a spokesperson for the Port of Los Angeles told American Shipper: “The Harbor Commission granted the executive director discretion regarding the program. More details and information will be coming on or before the 15th.”

  New anchorage record … again

  According to the Marine Exchange of Southern California, 111 container ships were in the port on Tuesday, a new high. Of those, 30 were at the Los Angeles/Long Beach berths, 32 at anchor and a record 49 “loitering” (in holding patterns).

  

  The offshore tally of 81 does not include an additional six noncontainer ships in the queue carrying boxes. The total capacity of all 87 ships offshore carrying containers was 576,720 twenty-foot equivalent units. Assuming ships are at capacity and an average customs value of $43,899 per import TEU (the average recorded by the Port of Los Angeles in 2020), the value of cargo floating offshore is around $25 billion.

  Meanwhile, the waiting time at anchorage continues to escalate. The Port of Los Angeles said that the average wait for anchorage to berth was an all-time-high 16.6 days as of Thursday. The wait time has trended sharply upward over the past week.

  

  Deadline nears for controversial fee plan

  On Oct. 25, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach announced a Biden administration-backed plan for emergency fees on containers dwelling too long at the terminals. Fees were initially set to start Nov. 1. That was delayed to Nov. 15. Fees were initially set to cover containers moving by truck that had dwelled for nine days or more and those moving by rail after three or more days. The ports then pushed the rail timeline back to six or more days.

  Port officials have repeatedly stated that they do not want to charge the fees and would reconsider if sufficient progress were made before Nov. 15. The hope was that the threat alone of the fees would preclude the need to assess them.

  There has indeed been considerable progress.

  At the Port of Long Beach, local (trucking) containers dwelling nine days or more fell from 28,558 on Nov. 1 to 20,534 on Tuesday, a decline of 28%. Intermodal (rail) containers dwelling six days or more fell from 1,643 to 573, a decline of 65%.

  The Port of Los Angeles told American Shipper that its intermodal dwell times were not available. For an estimate of local container dwell times, boxes in Los Angeles terminals for nine days or more fell from 42,277 on Nov. 1 to 30,210 on Nov. 10, a drop of 28%.

  

  If it happens, what might it cost?

  The fee would start at $100 per day and escalate $100 each day. So, for example, on the seventh day after the assessments began, if a container was still at the ports, the fee would be $2,800. Importantly, containers would not be charged for their excess dwell time accruing before Nov. 15. In other words, the charge for a local container that had been dwelling for 15 days as of Nov. 15 would be $100 (the same as one day past the eight-day limit), not $2,800 (seven days past the limit).

  Assuming on a back-of-the-envelope basis that the daily rate of decline for excess dwell-time containers remains the same as the Nov. 1-10 trend, the number of “late” containers in Los Angeles and Long Beach combined would fall to around 42,000 on Monday (not including Los Angeles’ late intermodal rail containers, so the actual number would be higher). The aggregate charge to all carriers combined would be $4.2 million on Monday in this scenario, plus charges for Los Angeles’ late intermodal boxes.

  After that, the fee scenario gets more speculative, because, for example, on day three of the program, there’s no way to predict how many late containers would be charged the one-day-late rate, the two-day-late rate or the three-day-late rate. For simplicity’s sake, assume they’re evenly spread (i.e., on day two, half are two days past deadline, half are one day past deadline).

  In such a scenario, the daily aggregate fee charged to carriers would escalate to $40 million on day seven. The cumulative fees for all ocean carriers at the end of the first week alone would be $144 million. Carriers have explicitly stated they will pass these costs along to shippers to the extent possible, raising the question of how politically sustainable the Biden-backed port fee plan would be even after a matter of days.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 17:00

• White House Rejects Intel Proposal To Add Semi Production Capacity In China
  White House Rejects Intel Proposal To Add Semi Production Capacity In China

  Days ago we wrote about how VC companies in the U.S. were making significant investments in Chinese semiconductor companies. 

  Shortly thereafter, it was reported that the White House had rejected a plan by Intel to bolster their chip production capacity in China, according to Bloomberg.

  Intel had proposed “using a factory in Chengdu, China, to manufacture silicon wafers,” the report said. It could have been online by 2022, but the White House, “strongly discouraged” the move. Intel likely had to listen since the company is seeking government support in helping expand its capacity for manufacturing semis in the U.S.

  Intel told Bloomberg it was now looking at “other solutions that will also help us meet high demand for the semiconductors essential to innovation and the economy.”

  

  The company continued: “Intel and the Biden administration share a goal to address the ongoing industrywide shortage of microchips, and we have explored a number of approaches with the U.S. government. Our focus is on the significant ongoing expansion of our existing semiconductor manufacturing operations and our plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in new wafer fabrication plants in the U.S. and Europe.”

  Recall, just days ago we wrote how U.S. firms were splurging on Chinese semi deals, drawing scrutiny from the White House.

  U.S. venture capital firms have been “ramping up investments” in Chinese semiconductor companies despite the obvious security conflicts, a report from the Wall Street Journal said. Cumulatively, U.S. firms have helped raise “billions” for Chinese chip startups, we noted. 

  There has been more than 58 deals in China’s semiconductor industry from 2017 to 2020, we wrote. Among the “active investors” was Intel, who had invested in a Chinese company called Primarius Technologies Co., which makes chip-design tools that the U.S. currently holds the lead in making. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 16:30

• Radical Rent Control Measure Blows Up In St. Paul In Less Than A Week
  Radical Rent Control Measure Blows Up In St. Paul In Less Than A Week

  Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

  Unlike almost every rent control law in the country, the ordinance passed by St. Paul voters includes no exemption for new construction…

  

  A radical rent control measures capping increases at 3% passed in St. Paul Minnesota.

  The payback was immediate. 

  Reason reports Developers Halt Projects, Mayor Demands Reform After St. Paul Voters Approve Radical Rent Control Ballot Initiative.

  In last Tuesday’s municipal election, 52 percent of voters approved Question 1, an ordinance that puts a hard annual 3 percent cap on rent increases. It makes no allowances for inflation or exemptions for vacant apartments and new construction that are typical in other rent control policies.

  The new ordinance doesn’t go into effect until May 2022. Nevertheless, several real estate companies with large projects in the works have already announced that they’re pulling their permit applications.

  That includes Ryan Companies. Local NBC affiliate KARE 11 reports that the company pulled applications for three buildings in its proposed 3,800-unit Highland Bridge project.

  Other developers are singing a similar tune.

  “We, like everybody else, are re-evaluating what—if any—future business activity we’ll be doing in St. Paul,” Jim Stolpestad, founder of development company Exeter, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

  The Star-Tribune reports that developers have also been calling Nicolle Goodman, the city’s director of planning and economic development, to say that they were placing hundreds of new units on hold in response to the passage of rent control.

  All of this could well encourage landlords to just get out of the rental market altogether and sell their properties to owner-occupiers. Rising home values in St. Paul, where prices have increased 12 percent in the last year, only make this option more attractive for landlords.

  This is what happened in San Francisco where an expansion of preexisting rent controls led to a 15 percent reduction in the supply of rental housing, according to one 2018 study. That study found that incumbent tenants benefited handsomely from the limits on rent increases but that their windfall came “at the great expense of welfare losses from future inhabitants.”

  Mayoral Lie

  Despite the insanity of doing something that’s tried and failed everywhere, St. Paul voters upped the ante by passing the most restrictive measure ever.

  Blame Mayor Melvin Carter. He backed the initiative and it only barely passed.

  Carter’s not so brilliant idea (lie) was he could amend the law after it passed.

  Whatever the outcome of this ballot question, our work will continue. Bold action on our housing and equity goals cannot wait. (2/2)

  — Melvin Carter (@melvincarter3) October 12, 2021

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

  But he can’t materially change the bill nor can the city council. 

  The problem for Carter, which he knew in advance, is the council cannot by law make “substantive” changes to the law. 

  The city council president admitted what Carter now wants to do is “substantive”.

  Rent Control Advocates Celebrate 

  Despite the clear housing disaster that awaits, Rent Control Advocates Celebrate. 

  “We didn’t wait for policymakers or funders. We leveraged the power of the people and direct democracy to do this for ourselves,” said Danielle Swift, an organizer with the Frogtown Neighborhood Association. “Text banking, phone banking, door-to-door, 100 percent grassroots organizing got it done.”

  Alarmed by overnight rent hikes for low-income tenants, organizations such as the Housing Justice Center, TakeAction Minnesota, the Alliance and the West Side Community Organization gathered signatures to get their own rent-control proposal on the Nov. 2 ballot by petition.

  Swift blamed “generations of economic exploitation and exclusion from homeownership” for marginalizing communities of color — some 82 percent of the city’s Black households rent, compared to 39 percent of white households. 

  “This policy will have a dramatic and immediate impact in advancing housing and racial justice in our city,” she said.

  Shortages Loom

  Judging from rent prices, there is already a severe shortage of housing in St. Paul.

  The most likely reason is fear of something like this or insurance and maintenance hikes in the wake of George Floyd riots.

  And now that the bill has passed many new development projects, some for thousands of units, were cancelled. 

  Small landlords will sell to live-in owners further reducing supply. 

  Finally, with 3% caps regardless of tax hikes, inflation or any other issues, landlords will not make capital improvements to their property.

  The overall quality of remaining rental units is sure to decline.

  *  *  *

  Like these reports? If so, please Subscribe to MishTalk Email Alerts.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 16:00

• Peloton Blocks Users From Using #LetsGoBrandon Hashtag
  Peloton Blocks Users From Using #LetsGoBrandon Hashtag

  “Let’s Go Brandon!” has become a political rallying cry among conservative-Trump-loving Americans to show their defiance against President Biden. The phrase has gone viral since Oct. 2’s NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama, after a reporter interviewing racecar driver Brandon Brown quickly spoke over the crowd who was chanting “F@ck Joe Biden!” She said, “You can hear the chants from the crowd. Let’s go Brandon!”

  The “Let’s Go, Brandon” movement is a unique public response that shows their discontent for the Biden administration. Billboards, bumper stickers, yard signs, rap songs, guns, memes, and trending hashtags continue to go viral. But one place that has banned the phrase is fitness equipment company Peloton. 

  According to PJ Media, Peloton members used the tag “#LetsGoBrandon” in their profile to connect with other like-minded users. Not too long after they tagged their profiles, Peloton immediately banned the use of it. 

  One user shared a screenshot of an alert from the fitness equipment company that said, “this tag does not meet our guidelines. Please contact Support if you believe this is an error.” 

  

  Peloton also banned the #StopTheSteal and #TrumpWon hashtags. The company did allow #ImpeachBiden, #WomenForTrump, and others. However, #BlackLivesMatter has almost 270,000 members, while #AllLivesMatter has been banned. 

  Peloton added profile tags during the virus pandemic to “provide a more robust way for our Members to connect through shared interests or identity,” according to Peloton, adding that tags will make “the in and out of class experience feel more personal and relevant.

  Peloton told the Washington Examiner that it has “a zero-tolerance policy against divisive, explicit, or other content that violates our policies.”

  “We welcome Members from all walks of life to represent themselves through their Tags or by having thoughtful conversations in our groups.”

  Users of the fitness bike told PJ Media they are tired of liberal left-wing propaganda being forced down their throats. “We can’t have a ‘Let’s Go Brandon’?” said one user. 

  “For a company who claims to be so inclusive, they sure do alienate a big portion of its members,” another user said. “Attempting to silence our voices will not silence us. It will only grow our will to speak louder.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 11/14/2021 – 15:30

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• Smith: Leftists Support Tyranny, Conservatives Do Not; It's Time To Separate
  Smith: Leftists Support Tyranny, Conservatives Do Not; It’s Time To Separate

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  One of the great semantic debates of the past decade has been the ongoing attempt to muddle the definition of “Left vs Right” in the American political sphere. For example, a lot of people who are new to the liberty movement (people who became active during or after the Trump campaign in 2016) have heard of the “false left/right paradigm”, but they have no clue what it actually means. If you think it means there are no legitimate political sides in this fight and that the entire conflict is theatrical or manipulated, then you are misinformed.

  

  The false left/right paradigm specifically refers to the fake division at the VERY TOP of the political pyramid among elitists in government. There are certainly Republicans that are conservative in their rhetoric but not conservative in their actions or policies, and they tend to support or side with politicians on the left regularly when it comes to big government spending and big government power (just look to the Republicans that voted in favor of Joe Biden’s recent infrastructure bill).

  Democrats and leftists don’t have to pretend. They base their entire platform on collectivism and centralization. This is no secret. The only theater is in their motives. Top Democrats claim they are fighting for the “greater good” of the masses when they are actually elevating and benefiting a tiny minority of wealthy elites. They do not care at all about the lives of their constituents.

  Things change dramatically when we start talking about the bottom of the pyramid among regular people. The political spectrum is not as broad and nuanced as some people would have us believe and the sides are much easier to discern. There are exceptions to every rule and to every group, but to say the groups do not exist is an act of denial.

  There are also people who call themselves “moderates” because they think this makes them more impartial and more open-minded. They don’t want to appear as if they are moving to one “extreme” end of the spectrum or the other. But, ultimately, there are only two sides in this fight: Either you are in favor of intensive government dominance of people’s lives, or you are not. And, the vast majority of people in favor of government tyranny herald from the left side of the political spectrum. They revel in the totalitarianism, even when they don’t necessarily benefit from it.

  Yes, it’s time to stop pretending as if there is a “gray area” here and call the situation as it really is. The political left is obsessed with control over how people live, act and even how they think. Issues like Critical Race Theory, BLM, big tech censorship, the covid lockdowns and vax mandates have really clarified things to the point that if you can’t see the enormous difference between leftists and conservatives then you are being willfully ignorant.

  In my latest articles I have been exploring the theme of the political left and their habit of wearing masks to hide their true natures. Many of them will support socialist, collectivist and globalist policies while also claiming they support freedom at the same time. Yet, when they are actually faced with real world decisions in terms of unilateral authoritarianism, the true character of the average leftist is revealed and it’s an ugly thing to behold.

  Lets just use the covid and vaccines mandates as one litmus test for a moment – Poll after poll after poll indicates that an overwhelming number of Democrats (around 80%) applaud the mandates and continue to defend them even after almost 2 years of failures and a lack of scientific honesty. For these people the covid controls are purely political and they often argue in their favor as a vehicle to attack conservatives rather than “saving lives”. The fact is, without their enthusiastic support the draconian mandates would not exist in the US.

  Now, some people will point out that polls also show that around a quarter of Republicans support some form of vax mandates, but here’s the difference: Republicans and conservatives are actually willing to engage in honest debate over the scientific and social merits of the mandates. The vast majority of Democrats and leftists are absolutely not interested. They view any opposition as an act of treason, and any debate as thought crime committed by “cranks” and “conspiracy theorists”.

  This is a rather convenient tactic to take because leftists will never actually have to defend their own assumptions and beliefs in a public forum on fair ground; they can simply say that all evidence that is being presented is “meaningless” because it is being presented by treasonous enemies. Everything they do no matter how destructive or oppressive is thus justified by the assertion that conservatives represent an insurgency against “democracy” rather than honest Americans with honest concerns.

  It should also be noted that the minimal republican support for the mandates has been steadily dropping as new information is released which contradicts the mainstream narrative on vaccine effectiveness, and as Joe Biden continues to use the vaccines as a means to gain power over private businesses. Yet, support among democrats is as high as ever.

  In the past few years I have seen leftists en masse defend the indoctrination of American children with CRT, which teaches white kids that they are all inherently evil oppressors and black and brown kids that they are all perpetual victims that cannot help themselves. When they get called out, leftists then claim that CRT “doesn’t exist” or does not represent what conservatives say it represents. All you have to do is read their own books to see that this is a lie.

  If you are willing to slog through the insanity of the book ‘Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement’, you will see that everything conservatives warn about when it comes to CRT is true. It is edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, widely viewed as a co-founder of critical race theory and “intersectionality.” It is also a book that you will find used as a teaching aid in most social science classes in most colleges.

  I have seen leftists support BLM riots and the destruction of private property across the nation while calling them “peaceful protests”. I have also seen BLM take hundreds of millions of dollars from the very corporations and globalist institutions they claim they hate.

  I have seen leftists defend Big Tech censorship of any person or group that disagrees with the woke narrative, to the point that conservatives now have to constantly self-edit key words and phrases just so algorithms do not automatically derail their accounts, and so that leftists cannot false flag their commentaries as “hate speech” or “medical misinformation.”

  I have seen leftists avidly support covid lockdowns and the arbitrary destruction of hundreds of thousands of businesses as “non-essential”. I have seen them aggressively defend mask mandates despite the fact that red states which removed mask mandates had the same infection rates or even lower rates. Now I am witnessing their fevered joy as they help push forced experimental vaccination through federal and state mandates, using the threat of joblessness to intimidate those who do not comply.

  In the meantime, we have seen conservatives become the overwhelming majority of people in direct opposition to all of these totalitarian activities. And still today I continue to see people try to argue that there are no sides, and that conservatives are “just as bad” as leftists. These people either do not understand what a conservative is, or they are deliberately misrepresenting reality because they have an agenda.

  The bottom line is that proof is seen in action: Red states are free, blue states are enslaved. There’s no way around that.

  The debate is over, at least in terms of left vs. right. The differences are stark and painfully obvious. Places with majority conservative populations are still fighting the mandates while places with a majority of leftists are perpetuating tyranny. It cannot be denied. It cannot be argued. This is reality. In this day and age if you want to be free you make sure you are surrounded by conservatives, or you become a conservative.

  There is not a single blue state in the country that is not on the war path to enforce Biden’s vax mandates. There is not a single blue city in the country that is not trying to subversively teach CRT in schools. And, there is not a single blue region in the country that is not obsessed with wokism and globalism. The truth is, America has split into two completely different cultures with two completely different social objectives.

  To be sure, there are some nuances in terms of geography. Blue states, for example, are often checkered with red counties that do not like the policies of the state government, but this does not change the reality of the overall political divide. I have also noted that most Europeans and people in the UK and Australia have no concept at all of what a conservative actually is. They think a conservative is a corporatist. They have been indoctrinated by their predominantly socialist and leftist systems to treat “conservative” as a four letter word. The people in these nations that oppose the leftist agenda will commonly refer to themselves as “traditional liberals”, but really, they are just conservatives that are afraid to call themselves conservatives.

  I am speaking specifically on the American dynamic, however, and in this country the two sides are sharply defined.

  I think that there is also a subsection of the population that does not want to admit a separation of the US is in progress even though it is a fact. They want to believe the false left/right paradigm applies to the regular population because they don’t want to accept the inevitability of the breakup of our country. They want to believe that if we just deal with the elites at the top of the pyramid that the division at the bottom will simply disappear. This is naive.

  There are principles and ideals which are mutually exclusive; they cannot exist within the same society at the same time. There are moments in history when tribes form and cults rise, and generally these groups grow from either a desire to control others or a desire to remain free. We are living in such times.

  The political left, according to every metric and statistic, is an antithesis to conservative principles of small government, decentralization, personal liberty, free markets, family values, etc. This does not mean all conservatives agree on every aspect of society. We don’t all share the same religious fervor, or adherence to the same denomination. We don’t all have the same ideas on what constitutes “merit”, and the things we value in terms of character traits and life choices vary. We definitely don’t all agree on solutions to the problems and enemies we face everyday, which is why organizing resistance to the mandates has taken so much time and energy. That said, we ALL agree that the leftist agenda is poison and that it is not something we can continue to live with.

  I have heard it argued that if the US is broken into two parts that this will weaken us to threats from the outside. Many conservatives don’t like to accept notions of secession or the left/right paradigm because they fear foreign aggression from places like China, for instance. I would point out that this thinking lacks a sense of priority. We have to deal with the leftists/socialists/communists in our own house first before we can deal with communist on the other side of the world.

  Keeping this defunct marriage between leftist culture and conservative culture going just for the sake of appearances is the most destructive policy we can have in the long run. My thinking is this: If we break up there are two possible results – We go our own separate ways peacefully and the conservative states will continue to succeed economically and socially because we will have freedom, while leftist states will continue to sink into debt and will continue to bleed citizens due to oppression. Or, we separate and the leftists try to stop us using force, and we go to war. And make no mistake, they will ultimately lose such a war.

  The latter is not the most pleasant option but in either case freedom remains in the world. It is time to stop treating separation and division as integrally bad. Sometimes it is healthy and necessary. The old phrase “divide and conquer” is a misnomer for our particular situation. Often, nations and cultures are conquered from within because they refuse to separate from the riff-raff and define their moral boundaries. The right to divide is actually one of the most powerful forms of liberty there is, and it is one of the greatest protections against the leftist authoritarian movements in our midst.

  *  *  *

  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
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 23:30

• From Amazon To Zoom: What Happens In An Internet Minute In 2021
  From Amazon To Zoom: What Happens In An Internet Minute In 2021

  In our everyday lives, not much may happen in a minute. But, as Visual Capitalist’s Aran Ali details below, when gauging the depth of internet activity occurring all at once, it can be extraordinary. Today, around five billion internet users exist across the globe.

  This annual infographic from Domo captures just how much activity is going on in any given minute, and the amount of data being generated by users. To put it mildly, there’s a lot.

  

  The Internet Minute

  At the heart of the world’s digital activity are the everyday services and applications that have become staples in our lives. Collectively, these produce unimaginable quantities of user activity and associated data.

  Here are just some of the key figures of what happens in a minute:

  • Amazon customers spend $283,000

  • 12 million people send an iMessage

  • 6 million people shop online

  • Instacart users spend $67,000

  • Slack users send 148,000 messages

  • Microsoft Teams connects 100,000 users

  • YouTube users stream 694,000 videos

  • Facebook Live receives 44 million views

  • Instagram users share 65,000 photos

  • Tiktok users watch 167 million videos

  As these facts show, Big Tech companies have quite the influence over our lives. That influence is becoming difficult to ignore, and draws increasing media and political attention. And some see this attention as a plausible explanation for why Facebook changed their name—to dissociate from their old one in the process.

  One tangible measure of this influence is the massive amount of revenue Big Tech companies bring in. To get a better sense of this, we can look at Big Tech’s revenue generating capabilities on a per-minute basis as well:

  

   

  Much of the revenue that these elite trillion-dollar stocks generate can be traced back to all the activity on their various networks and platforms.

  In other words, the 5.7 million Google searches that occur every minute is the key to their $433,014 in per minute sales.

  The Internet Minute Over The Years

  With the amount of data and information in the digital universe effectively doubling every two years, it’s fair to say the internet minute has gone through some changes over the years. Here are just some areas that have experienced impressive growth:

  • In 2016, Snapchat users 527k photos per minute, compared to 2 million in 2021

  • In 2017, Twitter saw 452k Tweets per minute, compared to 575k in 2021

  • In 2018, $862,823 was spent online shopping, while 2 million people were shopping per minute in 2021

  • In 2019, 4.5 million videos on YouTube were being viewed every minute, while in 2021 users were streaming 694k hours

  • In 2020, Netflix users streamed 404k hours per minute, growing to 452k hours in 2021

  Here’s a look at the services that have been featured in the various iterations of this graphic over the years:

  

  Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube are the only three brands to be featured every single year.

  Internet Growth Perspectives

  The Internet Minute wheel also helps to put the internet’s rapid rate of adoption into perspective. For instance, in 1993, there were only 14 million internet users across the globe. But today, there are over 14 million just in Chile.

  That said, the total addressable market still has some room left. By some measures, the complete number of internet users grew by 500 million in 2021, a roughly 11% jump from 4.5 billion users in 2020. This comes out to an astonishing 950 new users on a per minute basis.

  What’s more, in the long term, with the appropriate infrastructure in place, certain areas within emerging markets can experience buoyant growth in the number of connected citizens. Here’s where the next billion internet users may come from, based on the largest disconnected populations.

  

   

  With this growth trajectory in mind, we can expect future figures to become even more astonishing. But the human mind is known to be bad at interpreting large numbers, so in future editions, the internet minute figures may need to be stripped down to the internet second.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 23:00

• Jan. 6 Defendants Taken Out Of Cells On Stretchers: Court Filing
  Jan. 6 Defendants Taken Out Of Cells On Stretchers: Court Filing

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  Multiple Jan. 6 defendants were taken out of their cells on stretchers on Thursday, according to a court filing.

  

  The situation started when one of the defendants refused to wear a mask, family members of Kelly Meggs, who is being held in the D.C. Jail, told Meggs lawyer.

  Prison guards began spraying a chemical substance described as “some kind of mace or pepper spray, according to a filing in federal court.

  “They sprayed mace or some type of gas at an inmate and kept missing so it went into an intake that fed into other cells and the lady with the key left because she didn’t like the gas, so the inmates in the cells who were being fed the gas from that intake were locked in for like 15 minutes while it was going into their rooms and they couldn’t see/breathe,” the family told Jonathon Moseley, the lawyer.

  More than one of the defendants was taken out on stretchers to medical bays.

  Julie Kelly, a writer for the American Greatness, reported on Wednesday that prison guards filled an area of the jail with chemical spray and three detainees had to be taken out on stretchers.

  Moseley and the D.C. Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.

  The lawyer said his client was not in one of the cells that the gas was cycled into by the ventilation system. He urged the court to explore with the Bureau of Prisons and Congress whether any federal funds are already or can be allocated to repair and upgrade the D.C. Jail facilities.

  Neither prosecutors nor the judge has yet responded to the filing.

  The jail has been under heightened scrutiny in recent months due to its holding of dozens of people accused of participating in the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

  One defendant, Christopher Worrell, was released from pretrial custody last week because U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth became troubled by the lack of proper medical care he received from the jail.

  The U.S. Marshals Service showed up unannounced at the facilities in mid-October. Officials deemed the part holding Jan. 6 detainees suitable but found conditions in another part that “do not meet the minimum standards of confinement,” the agency said in a recent statement.

  Lamont Ruffin, the acting U.S. Marshal for Washington, told Quincy Booth, director of the D.C. Department of Corrections, in a letter that he personally went to the jail and saw “evidence of systemic failures.”

  Prison guards routinely shut off water to cells as punishment and multiple cells had “large amounts of standing human sewage (urine and feces) in the toilets,” inspectors found. Additionally, guards were observed antagonizing detainees and hot meals were observed being served “cold and congealed.”

  Jail officials were ordered to transfer around 400 detainees, or 36 percent of the inmates in the Central Treatment Facility, one of the facilities that makes up the D.C. Jail, to a prison in another state.

  Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), after months of attempts, were able to tour the facilities last week. Greene said she witnessed terrible conditions, including Jan. 6 detainees receiving “very poor food” and “virtually no medical care.”

  “I want to be very clear that we will deal with those deficiencies so that we have a safe jail until such time that the District is able to build a new one,” Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat who helped the members secure access, told The Epoch Times in an email.

  Avis Buchanan, director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, said in a statement it has called out the treatment of detainees at the D.C. Jail for years.

  “The inhumane conditions have included long-term solitary confinement for people with no disciplinary issues, lack of running water, full illumination of cells for 24-hours per day resulting in sleep deprivation, cells soiled with feces and blood, lack of air conditioning during the summer, and heat during the winter, lack of proper medical care, failure to provide mental health treatment, and physical and mental abuse by correctional officers of people in their custody,” Buchanan said.

  Councilman Charles Allen, the Democrat chairman of the D.C. City Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, described the situation as “a crisis” during a remote hearing this week.

  “I do not use that term lightly. The District of Columbia has a moral and constitutional duty to provide humane and dignified conditions of confinement and to do so immediately. And that’s not happening here,” he added.

  D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, a Democrat, acknowledged during the hearing that concerns about the conditions in the jail “received little attention until they were raised, of course, by mostly white defendants accused of perpetrating the Jan. 6” breach, adding, “That’s not because people weren’t complaining.”

  Chris Geldart, a deputy mayor, told councilmembers that there are “systemic issues” at the jail and the issues raised by U.S. Marshals were being addressed, but also claimed that the problems were “not so pervasive that [the jail] has become uninhabitable.”

  Geldart also confirmed that Marshals were blocked from re-entering the facilities about a week after the inspection, pinning the decision on the warden.

  The D.C. Department of Corrections and the U.S. Marshals Service on Nov. 10 entered into a memorandum of understanding that outlines plans to improve conditions at the jail. Each party is forbidden from issuing press releases or speaking to the media about the agreement without consent from the other party.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 22:30

• "Revolution In Warfare" – Israel Unveils New Scorpius Electronic Warfare System
  “Revolution In Warfare” – Israel Unveils New Scorpius Electronic Warfare System

  Israel has recognized that the modern battlefield will not be entirely fought on air, sea, and space. To better prepare for new domains of warfare, Israel has developed a revolutionary weapon for electromagnetic warfare. 

  Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the country’s top aerospace and aviation manufacturer, has developed the Scorpius family of systems that scans a sphere of the operating environment for targets and deploys a narrowly focused beam to interfere with multiple threats across the electromagnetic spectrum. The high-tech weapon is categorized under “soft protection” because it doesn’t cause physical harm. Instead, it disrupts the operation of electromagnetic systems, such as radar, electronic sensors, navigation, and data communications.

  

  Gideon Fustick, Marketing VP EW Group at IAI, told Forbes, “We call it [Scorpius family of systems] ‘soft protection.’ It’s an offensive weapon that doesn’t send out missiles. It’s not a hard-kill system,” adding that “it is very effective in engaging and disabling enemy systems.” 

  Fustick describes the new weapon as having a tremendous advantage over legacy electromagnetic warfare weapons because it can shoot targeted beams without interfering with unintended targets. He called this a “revolution in warfare.”

  “The enemy is trying to use the electromagnetic domain for all these activities,” he said. “We are also trying to use them. And we’re each trying to deny the other side from the use of the electromagnetic domain.” Planes, drones, missiles, and other weapons of war operate using electromagnetic magnetic sensors to navigate and communicate – by denying the enemy access to the electromagnetic domain. It can severely impair their warfare capability.

  “It’s the first system that can really detect anything in the sky and address multiple targets in different directions and different frequencies simultaneously,” Fustick added, noting that previous electronic warfare technology was not able to engage multiple targets at once. 

  

  Fustick said the Scorpius has already been exported to “several prominent customers” as the race to dominate the electromagnetic warfare domain heats up. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 22:00

• Taibbi: As America Braces For The Rittenhouse-Verdict Unrest, Profits Soar
  Taibbi: As America Braces For The Rittenhouse-Verdict Unrest, Profits Soar

  By Matt Taibbi, published via SubStack

  The Mayhem Watch is on. Closing arguments in the trial of “Kenosha Shooter” Kyle Rittenhouse are expected Monday, and after weeks of hype, the country is primed to explode again. Wisconsin governor Tony Evers announced 500 National Guard troops will be on hand for potential post-verdict “unrest,” which seems almost guaranteed, no matter the result.

  As with all major news stories lately, the Rittenhouse case saw idiosyncrasies wash away as coverage accumulated, with pundits pounding the trial into yet another generalized referendum on American culture war. Prestige media made Rittenhouse a stand-in for the Proud Boys, January 6th, school board protests, anti-mask protests, QAnon, Blue Lives Matter, Trump, “Domestic Terrorism,” fascism, school shooters, and every other naughty thing, with everyone from then-candidate Joe Biden to The Intercept blithely declaring him a white supremacist. The efforts to cast Rittenhouse as a symbol of racism and white rage have been awesome in quantity and transparently, intentionally provoking, with even leading papers like the New York Times standardizing a practice of underscoring Rittenhouse’s race (“white teenager”) while leaving the identities of those shot out of coverage. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that his old outlet, The Intercept, noted Rittenhouse’s race 20 times in one piece while keeping schtum about the color of those shot. This has gone on for so long, we’ve seen a foreign newspaper misreport that the two people killed in the case were black. In the public consciousness, they might as well have been.

  Because Rittenhouse from the day of the shooting was made a symbol of Fox-watching, Trump-loving conservatives, he was also quickly adopted in red media as a hero, which “he surely wasn’t,” as Andrew Sullivan put it. This turbo-charged the freakout even more, as Rittenhouse’s defenders turned his case into a referendum on everything from media coverage of last summer’s protests of Black Lives Matter to the performance (or non-performance, as it were) of police during the George Floyd/Jacob Blake demonstrations, to a dozen other things that made public passions rise in the last year.

  Rittenhouse in other words became a symbol of so many things to so many people that the specifics of his legal case have ceased to be relevant. There seems to be no such thing as an editorialist who has negative feelings about, say, Rittenhouse posing with Proud Boys, yet also believes that incident can’t be evidence since it happened after the shooting. Everyone picks a side and stays there. Pundits are telling us that any opinion on how the jury should rule can only be understood as a reflection of racial attitudes. “If you’re defending Kyle Rittenhouse, you might be a white supremacist. Just sayin,” is how Tweeter-with-beard and sometimes-journalist David Leavitt puts it.

  Meanwhile:

  On the day the Rittenhouse trial began, the financial data firm FactSet released an eyebrow-raising report about the Covid-19 economy.

  The firm noted that companies in the S&P 500 were set to post a net 12.9% profit in the third quarter of 2021. They pointed out this was the second-highest result since the firm began tracking the number in 2008.

  The only better result? The previous quarter, i.e. Q2 2021, when net profits sat at 13.1% overall. These results track with the true great story of the pandemic era, which not-so-mysteriously hasn’t made the news much, while Americans have been tearing each other’s faces off over issues like race and vaccination policy: the massive widening of our already-obscene wealth gap.

  Remember last year’s long summer of riots, that period that saw the whole world arguing over the definition of “mostly peaceful,” and saw Rittenhouse go charging into the streets of Kenosha? During that long stretch of unrest, corporate America, which had been headed for a depression in March of 2020, was soaring above the fray on an apparently endless, and endlessly escalating, ride to record profits. Take a look at this graph from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, and focus on the Jeff-Bezos-rocket-like ascent beginning in the second quarter of 2020:

  

  Corporate profits in the second quarter of 2020 sat at $1.58 trillion. One year later, that number was $2.69 trillion, a roughly 71% increase. How many stories have you read in the last year telling you about how well the top end of the income distribution has been doing, while the rest of the country seemed to be falling apart?

  Compared with how often you heard pundits rage about the “insurrection,” how regularly did you hear that billionaire wealth has risen 70% or $2.1 trillion since the pandemic began? How much did you hear about last year’s accelerated payments to defense contractors, who immediately poured the “rescue” cash into a buyback orgy, or about the record underwriting revenues for banks in 2020, or the “embarrassment of profits” for health carriers in the same year, or the huge rises in revenue for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, all during a period of massive net job losses? The economic news at the top hasn’t just been good, it’s been record-setting good, during a time of severe cultural crisis.

  Twenty or thirty years ago, the Big Lie was usually a patriotic fairy tale designed to cast America in a glow of beneficence. Nurtured in think-tanks, stumped by politicians, and amplified by Hollywood producers and media talking heads, these whoppers were everywhere: America would have won in Vietnam if not for the media, poverty didn’t exist (or at least, wasn’t shown on television), only the Soviets cuddled with dictators or toppled legitimate governments, etc. The concept wasn’t hard to understand: leaders were promoting unifying myths to keep the population satiated, dumb, and focused on their primary roles as workers and shoppers.

  In the Trump era, all this has been turned upside down. There’s actually more depraved, dishonest propaganda than before, but the new legends are explicitly anti-unifying and anti-patriotic. The people who run this country seem less invested than ever in maintaining anything like social cohesion, maybe because they mostly live in wealth archipelagoes that might as well be separate nations (if they even live in America at all).

  All sense of noblesse oblige is gone. The logic of our kleptocratic economy has gone beyond even the “Greed is Good” mantra of the fictional Gordon Gekko, who preached that pure self-interest would make America more efficient, better-run, less corrupt. Even on Wall Street, nobody believes that anymore. America is a sinking ship, and its CEO class is trying to salvage the wreck in advance, extracting every last dime before Battlefield Earth breaks out.

  It’s only in this context that these endless cycles of hyper-divisive propaganda make sense. It’s time to start wondering if maybe it’s not a coincidence that politicians and pundits alike are pushing us closer and closer to actual civil war at exactly the moment when corporate wealth extraction is reaching its highest-ever levels of efficiency. Keeping the volk at each other’s throats instead of pitchforking the aristocrats is an old game, one that’s now gone digital and works better than ever. That might be worth remembering after the coming verdict, and ahead of whatever other hyper-publicized panic comes down the pipeline next.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 21:30

• Traffic Deaths Are Surging Despite Less Miles Being Traveled
  Traffic Deaths Are Surging Despite Less Miles Being Traveled

  New data is out about traffic fatalities in 2020 and, despite the lockdowns from Covid, the numbers are shocking. 

  Deaths on the road were higher during 2020 than any other year dating back to 2007 – during a year where less people were driving, Bloomberg reported this week. 

  Even more alarming is the fact that 2021 could wind up being worse, as the government estimates that 20,160 have died from crashes in the first half of 2021 – a stunning 18.4% increase from 2020. 

  Transportation Secretary “Mayor Pete” said in October, when the numbers were released: “This is a crisis. We cannot and should not accept these fatalities as simply a part of everyday life in America.”

  Meanwhile, the NHTSA is allowing Tesla to beta test its latest version of its “Full Self Driving” on public roads seemingly without interruption. 

  

  The deaths were initially blamed on reckless driving on empty roads, but that explanation fell short in explaining this year’s numbers, since people are returning to the roads. 

  Pam Shadel Fischer, senior director for external engagement at the Governors Highway Safety Association commented: “This is our other national pandemic—traffic crashes.”

  Experts “don’t know what’s causing the surge,” the report says. Guesses include more people speeding and less people wearing seatbelts, the NHTSA said. Vehicles are also “getting bigger” and lawmakers are making it “legal to go faster”, Bloomberg wrote. 

  Regulators used to simply believe that less driving meant less accidents and more driving would mean more accidents. Beth Osborne, director of the advocacy group Transportation for America, said: “At least one of our assumptions has been proven wildly wrong.” 

  

  She continued: “If I see a very wide-open road, my natural inclination is to drive fast. Highways are designed specifically to allow for fast driving. What we’ve done is take that highway design and apply it to roadways that serve local developments, where there are lots of conflicts.”

  David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, added: “We know from research we’ve done that a greater amount of horsepower equals higher speeds traveled, and we know higher speeds traveled leads to a higher number of crashes with higher severity.”

  No word on whether or not Mayor Pete was seen driving away in his Model 3 after his late October press conference on the issue…

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 21:00

• Australia Says It's "Inconceivable" Not To Join US In Defending Taiwan
  Australia Says It’s “Inconceivable” Not To Join US In Defending Taiwan

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com, 

  Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton said Saturday that it would be “inconceivable” for Australia not to join the US if it takes action to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.

  “It would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action,” Dutton told The Australian. His comments came after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that the US and its allies would take “action” if China moved to take Taiwan by force.

  

  He added, “And, again, I think we should be very frank and honest about that, look at all of the facts and circumstances without precommitting, and maybe there are circumstances where we wouldn’t take up that option, [but] I can’t conceive of those circumstances.”

  The US doesn’t have an obligation to defend Taiwan, but the Biden administration has been sending mixed messages to Beijing over the issue. Last month, President Biden said the US has a “commitment” to intervene if China invades Taiwan, and the White House was quick to clarify that his comments did not mean a change in policy.

  Australia has joined the US in its campaign against China and recently signed a new military pact with Washington and London meant to counter Beijing, known as AUKUS. Canberra will get access to nuclear submarine technology out of the deal, although the submarines aren’t expected to be ready until the late 2030s.

  Taiwan sees a friend in Australia and celebrated the signing of AUKUS. Last month, Taiwan’s foreign minister told Australian media that the island wants help from Canberra to prepare for war.

  ‘Inconceivable’ for Australia not to join US to defend Taiwan, says its defence minister https://t.co/8mpYwLJUhp

  — ST Foreign Desk (@STForeignDesk) November 13, 2021

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

  “We would like to engage in security or intelligence exchanges with other like-minded partners, Australia included, so Taiwan is better prepared to deal with the war situation,” Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 20:30

• Were These The 'Richest' People In Human History?
  Were These The ‘Richest’ People In Human History?

  When we think of wealth today, we often think of the massive personal fortunes of business magnates like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Warren Buffett. However, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins details below, it is only since the Industrial Revolution that measuring wealth by one’s bank account has been a norm for the world’s richest.

  For most of recorded human history, in fact, the lines around wealth were quite blurred. Leaders like Augustus Caesar or Emperor Shenzong had absolute control of their empires – while bankers like Jakob Fogger and Cosimo de Medici were often found pulling the strings from behind.

  This infographic we created with Texas Precious Metals focuses on the richest people in history up until the Industrial Revolution, and it highlights key facts and anecdotes on how they created their wealth.

  

  Is This List of People Definitive?

  While it is certainly fun to speculate on the wealth of people from centuries past, putting together this list is exceptionally difficult and certainly not definitive.

  Here’s why:

  Firstly, much wealth in early periods is tied to land (Genghis Khan) or entire empires (Augustus, Akbar), which makes calculations extremely subjective. What is most of Asia’s land worth in the year 1219? What separates personal fortune from the riches of an empire that one has full control of? There are a wide variety of answers to these questions, and they all influence the figures chosen to be represented.

  Secondly, records kept from Ancient eras are scarce, exaggerated, or based on legends and oral histories. Think of King Solomon or Mansa Musa—these are characters described as immeasurably rich, so trying to put their wealth in modern context is fun, but certainly not guaranteed to be historically accurate.

  Lastly, wealth and conversion rates can be approached in different ways as well. Take Crassus in the Roman Republic, who had a peak fortune of “200 million sesterces”. Well, that’s a problem for us in modernity, because that stash could be worth anywhere from $200 million to $169.8 billion, depending on how calculations are done.

  So, enjoy this list of the wealthiest historical figures, but keep in mind that it is mostly for fun—and that the list of the richest people in history may change depending on who you ask!

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 20:00

• Why Wokeism Is A Religion
  Why Wokeism Is A Religion

  Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Substack,

  Introducing the Taxonomy of Woke Religion

  Over the last year, a growing number of progressives and liberals have pointed to police killings of unarmed black men, rising carbon emissions and extreme weather events, and the killing of trans people as proof that the United States has failed to take action on racism, climate change, and transphobia. Others have pointed to the war on drugs, the criminalization of homelessness, and mass incarceration as evidence that little has changed in the U.S. over the last 30 years. 

  

  And yet, on each of those issues, the U.S. has made significant progress.

  Police killings of African Americans in our 58 largest cities declined from 217 per year in the 1970s to 157 per year in the 2010s. Between 2011 and 2020, carbon emissions declined 14 percent in the U.S., more than in any other nation, while just 300 people died from natural disasters, a more than 90 percent decline over the past century. Public acceptance of trans people is higher than ever. The total US prison and jail population peaked in 2008 and has declined significantly ever since. Just 4 percent of state prisoners, who are 87 percent of the total prison population, are in for nonviolent drug possession; just 14 percent are in for any nonviolent drug offense. And many large cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have effectively decriminalized public camping by homeless people. 

  Progressives respond that these gains obscure broad inequalities, and are under threat. Black Americans are killed at between two to three times the rate of white Americans, according to a Washington Post analysis of police killings between 2015 and 2020. Carbon emissions are once again rising as the U.S. emerges from the covid pandemic, and scientists believe global warming is contributing to extreme weather events. In 2020, Human Rights Campaign found that at least 44 transgender and non-gender conforming people were killed, which is the most since it started tracking fatalities in 2013, and already that number has reached 45 this year. Drug prohibition remains in effect, homeless people are still being arrested, and the U.S. continues to have one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world.

  But those numbers, too, obscure important realities. There are no racial differences in police killings when accounting for whether or not the suspect was armed or a threat (“justified” vs “unjustified” shooting). While carbon emissions will rise in 2021 there is every reason to believe they will continue to decline in the future, so long as natural gas continues to replace coal, and nuclear plants continue operating. While climate change may be contributing to extreme weather events, neither the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change nor another other scientific body predicts it will outpace rising resilience to cause an increase in deaths from natural disasters. Researchers do not know if trans people are being killed disproportionately in comparison to cis-gender people, if trans homicides are rising, or if trans people are being killed for being trans, rather than for some other reason. Twenty-six states have decriminalized marijuana, and California and Oregon have decriminalized and legalized, respectively, the possession of all drugs. Progressive District Attorneys in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other major cities have scaled back prosecutions against people for breaking many laws related to homelessness including public camping, public drug use, and theft.

  And yet many Americans would be surprised to learn any of the above information; some would reject it outright as false. Consider that, despite the decline in police killings of African Americans, the share of the public which said police violence is a serious or extremely serious problem rose from 32 to 45 percent between 2015 and 2020. Despite the decline in carbon emissions, 47 percent of the public agreed with the statement, “Carbon emissions have risen in the United States over the last 10 years,” and just 16 percent disagreed. Meanwhile, 46 percent of Americans agree with the statement, “Deaths from natural disasters will increase in the future due to climate change” and just 16 percent disagreed, despite the absence of any scientific scenario supporting such fears. And despite the lack of good evidence, mainstream news media widely reported that the killing of trans people is on the rise.

  The gulf between reality and perception is alarming for reasons that go beyond the importance of having an informed electorate for a healthy liberal democracy. Distrust of the police appears to have contributed to the nearly 30% rise in homicides after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests last year, both by embolding criminals and causing a pull-back of police. A growing body of research finds that news media coverage of climate change is contributing to rising levels of anxiety and depression among children. And there is good reason to fear that misinformation about the killing of trans and non-gender conforming individuals contributes to anxiety and depression among trans and gender dysphoric youth.

  Social Media, NGOs, and the Death of God

  

  Why is that? Why does there exist such a massive divide between perception and reality on so many important issues?

  Part of the reason appears to stem from the rise of social media and corresponding changes to news media over the last decade. Social media fuels rising and unwarranted certainty, dogmatism, and intolerance of viewpoint diversity and disconfirmatory information. Social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram reward users for sharing information popular with peers, particularly extreme views, and punish users for expressing unpopular, more moderate, and less emotional opinions. This cycle is self-reinforcing. Audiences seek out views that reinforce their own. Experts seek conclusions, and journalists write stories, which affirm the predispositions of their audiences. It may be for these reasons that much of the news media have failed to inform their audiences that there are no racial differences in police killings, that emissions are declining, and that claims of rising trans killings are unscientific.

  Another reason may be due to the influence of well-funded advocacy organizations to shape public perceptions, particularly in combination with social media. Organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Campaign, and Drug Policy Alliance have misled journalists, policymakers, and the public, about police killings, drug policy, and trans killings, often by simply leaving out crucial contextual information. The same has been true for climate activists, including those operating as experts and journalists, who withhold information about declining deaths from natural disasters, the cost of disasters relative to GDP growth, and declining U.S. emissions. 

  But neither of these explanations fully captures the religious quality of so much of the progressive discourse on issues relating to race, climate, trans, crime, drugs, homelessness, and the related issue of mental illness. A growing number of liberal, heterodoxical, and conservative thinkers alike use the word “woke” to describe the religiosity of so many progressive causes today. In his new book, Woke Racism, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that Wokeism should, literally, be considered a religion.

  As evidence for his argument McWhorter points to commonly held myths, like the debunked claim that the American War of Independence was fought to maintain slavery, or that racial disparities in educational performance are due to racist teachers. He points to Woke religious fervor in seeking to censor, fire, and otherwise punish heretics for holding taboo views. And McWhorter suggests that, because Wokeism meets specific psychological and spiritual needs for meaning, belonging, and status, pointing out its supernatural elements is likely to have little impact among the Woke.

  But just because an ideology is dogmatic and self-righteous does not necessarily make it a religion, and so it is fair to ask whether Wokeism is anything more than a new belief system. There is no obviously mythological or supernatural element to Woke ideology, and its adherents rarely, if ever, justify their statements with reference to a god, or higher power. But a deeper look at Wokeism does, indeed, reveal a whole series of mythological and supernatural beliefs, including the idea that white people today are responsible for the racist actions of white people in the past; that climate change risks making humans extinct; and that a person can change their sex by simply identifying as the opposite sex.

  Woke Religion: A Taxonomy

  

  While reading McWhorter’s new book, I was surprised to discover many similarities between woke racism and apocalyptic environmentalism, which in Apocalypse Never I describe as a religion. Each offers an original sin as the cause of present-day evils (e.g., slavery, the industrial revolution). Each has guilty devils (e.g., white people, “climate deniers,” etc.) sacred victims (e.g., black people, poor islanders, etc.) and what McWhorter calls “The Elect,” or people self-appointed to crusade against evil (e.g., BLM activists, Greta Thunberg, etc.). And each have a set of taboos (e.g., saying “All lives matter,” criticizing renewables, etc.) and purifying rituals (e.g., kneeling/apologizing, buying carbon offsets, etc).

  I also saw parallels between woke racism, apocalyptic environmentalism, and victimology, which in San Fransicko I describe as a religion complete with the metaphysical (essentialist) view that people can be categorized as victims or oppressors, by nature of their identity or experience. 

  I reached out to a new friend, Peter Boghossian, a philosopher who recently resigned his post at Portland State University in response to Wokeist repression, and other experts in different Woke movements, and together we constructed a Woke Religion Taxonomy (below). It includes seven issue areas (Racism, Climate Change, Trans, Crime, Mental Illness, Drugs, and Homelessness) covered by Woke Racism, Apocalypse Never, San Fransicko, Peter’s research, and the writings of other critics of Wokeism. And it cuts across ten religious categories (Original Sin, Guilty Devils, Myths, Sacred Victims, The Elect, Supernatural Beliefs, Taboo Facts, Taboo Speech, Purifying Rituals, Purifying Speech). We were surprised by how straightforward it was to fill in each category, and by the fascinating similarities and differences between them. 

  We decided to publish the Woke Religion Taxonomy because it was helpful to our own understanding of Wokeism as a religion, and we felt it might help others. The Taxonomy identifies common myths and supernatural beliefs and helps explain why so many people continue to hold them, despite overwhelming evidence that they are false. We are under no illusion that the Taxonomy will reduce the power that Wokeism holds over true believers. But we also believe it will help orient those who are confused by its irrationalism, and are seeking an accessible overview. Finally, we are publishing it because we recognize that we might be wrong, either about matters of fact or classification, and hope it will encourage a healthy discussion and debate. As such, we have published it with the caveat that it is “Version 1.0” with the expectation that we will revise it in the future.

  Both Peter and I would like to stress that we have published the Taxonomy in service of the liberal and democratic project of social and environmental progress, which we believe to be under threat from Wokeism. We believe the U.S. is well-positioned to reduce police killings, crime, and carbon emissions; protect the lives and the mental health of trans, non-gender conforming, and cis-gender people; and better treat of the mentally ill and drug addicted. But doing so will require that Wokeism weaken its grip over the American psyche.

  As Peter writes, “bigotry and racial discrimination are real and they have no place in society. Yes, there is ongoing racism. Yes, there is ongoing homophobia. Yes, there is ongoing hatred of trans people. These are morally abhorrent and we all need to work together to bring about their end. The woke religion, however, is not the way to stop these moral horrors. It is making our shared problems more difficult to solve.”

  

  Click image for huge legible version.

  *  *  *

  Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,”Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress. He is author of just launched book San Fransicko (Harper Collins) and the best-selling book, Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins June 30, 2020). Subscribe To Michael’s substack here

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 19:30

• As Housing Market Boom Drags On, Just 13% Of Gen Z Say Owning A Home Is "Extremely Important"
  As Housing Market Boom Drags On, Just 13% Of Gen Z Say Owning A Home Is “Extremely Important”

  When it comes to the housing market, millennials and Gen Z have something in common: both generations came of age during particularly turbulent times for housing markets. Millennials faced the housing market, when the supposedly “impossible” – the real estate would move down – in reality, game to pass. A decade later, housing prices are back at all-time highs, and only 13% of would-be millennial homeowners is “extremely attainable.” 

  Combining survey views on attainability and important, we find that just 9% of Gen Z view homeownership as both “extremely important” and “extremely attainable.” This is significantly less than the comparable rates for young millennials (16%) and older millennials (17%).

  Despite a generally positive outlook on homeownership, it’s not a goal that many Gen Z renters are actively working toward. Just 16% say that it’s currently their top financial priority, well below the shares that are prioritizing personal savings and investments (35%) and paying down debt (27%).

  The survey further highlighted the growing gap between Gen Zers with parents, and those without. Oftentimes, gathering enough money for a downpayment, it advanced.

  56 percent of Gen Z respondents say that they expect help from family with a future down payment. Among those with high confidence of down payment assistance, over 56 percent feel that homeownership is extremely attainable, but for those who do not expect any assistance, just 17 percent consider homeownership extremely attainable.

  Finally, as more officers return to the office, others see emote work as likely to shape future housing choices for Gen Z, but among Gen Z respondents, just 17% view remote work as an extremely desirable working arrangement, compared to nearly one-third of millennials.

  Roughly one-third of Gen Zers said that being in a low-cost housing market is the most important factor determining where they would like live.

  Although for-sale homes remain in high demand, the homeownership rate in the United States has been gradually declining for generations. Despite being in their prime homebuying years, a growing pool of millennials are continuing to rent, sidelined from the for-sale market by a lack of affordability.

  A growing pool of millennials are continuing to rent, sidelined from the for-sale market by a lack of affordability. know. The big question now: Will the Gen Zers follow suit? Comparisons of Gen Z and millennials tend to focus on their differences,

  Perhaps a reflection of their youthful idealism, Gen Z sees housing as more important long tierm.

  

  77% of Gen Z renters say that they consider homeownership at least somewhat attainable within the next ten years. While lower than the share who view homeownership as important. Gen Zers are still young, many don’t yet see homeownership as a critical financial goal.

  

  Still, only the wealthiest Millennials and Gen Z who have parents to help them pay their down payments can really afford a home. 

  It’s just another example of how family wealth and an inheritance will give millions of Americans a financial leg up. 

  

  While others who invested early in Tesla, BTC and Ethereum will look to use that as their “seed corn” for a life.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 19:00

• FDA Recalls Millions Of At-Home COVID-19 Tests Over False Positives
  FDA Recalls Millions Of At-Home COVID-19 Tests Over False Positives

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) confirmed Thursday it is recalling some 2 million Ellume at-home COVID-19 testing because they can produce “false positives” due to a manufacturing defect.

  

  The firm first informed the federal regulatory agency about the defect in some lots in October. But on Wednesday, the FDA said it identified additional lots that were affected by the manufacturing defect, made between Feb. 24, 2021, and Aug. 11, 2021.

  To date, about 35 false positives from the COVID-19 tests were reported to the FDA. No deaths have been reported related to the test, according to the agency.

  A “false positive” indicates that an individual has contracted the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, when they actually do not.

  The FDA noted that false positives could lead to “delayed diagnosis or treatment for the actual cause of the person’s illness, which could be another life-threatening disease that is not COVID-19” or receiving “unnecessary COVID-19 treatment from a health care provider,” which may “result in side effects.”

  Another problem, the FDA noted, is isolation, including monitoring household or close contacts for symptoms, limiting contact with family or friends, and missing school or work.”

  Underscoring the severity of the issue, the FDA said it “identified this as a Class I recall, the most serious type of recall … use of these tests may cause serious adverse health consequences or death.”

  The antigen test detects proteins from the CCP virus from a nasal sample, and it’s available without a prescription for use by people aged 2 years and older. It also comes with an analyzer that connects with a smartphone app to show users to perform the test and understand the test results.

  Ellume has recalled 2,212,335 tests in the United States to date. Earlier this year, the Australia-based firm announced it had about 200,000 of its tests.

  The Biden administration had signed a $231 million deal with Ellume, which received approval to produce its tests under the Trump administration last year.

  In October, Dr. Sean Parsons, Ellume’s chief executive, announced that the firm had created more safeguards to stop the problem from occurring again.

  “I’m very sorry that this has happened,” he told the New York Times at the time.

  “We’re all about chasing accuracy, and to have these false positives is disappointing.”

  And a spokesperson said that the “root cause” of the issue was identified. The company is already shipping new products inside the United States, the spokesperson added to the NY Times.

  The Epoch Times has contacted Ellume for comment.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 18:30

• California Fraudsters Get Rich Off Unemployment Benefits
  California Fraudsters Get Rich Off Unemployment Benefits

  By Adam Andrzejeswki, CEO of OpenTheBooks.com; first published at RealClearPolicy

  California has shelled out at least $20 billion in fraudulent unemployment benefits since the beginning of the pandemic, 11 percent of all benefits paid in the Golden State.

  That is more than the 2021 budgets of Delaware, Maine and Montana combined.

  

  The $20 billion given to criminals who fraudulently collected benefits comes out of the more than $178 billion in unemployment benefits since the start of the pandemic, The Los Angeles Times reported.

  State officials have blamed that on Congress’ quick expansion of unemployment benefits that allowed people to get weekly checks without safeguards to stop people who weren’t eligible.

  California state officials approved at least $810 million in benefits in the names of people who were in prison, including dozens of infamous killers on death row, the LA Times reported, and even $21,000 in benefits were sent to an address in Roseville under the name and Social Security number of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

  Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration said — finally — the fraud pipeline in California has been closed as the state has implemented new identity verification software that, along with other preventative measures, stopped an estimated $120 billion in fraud attempts.

  With $20 billion gone to fraud, it’s about time California officials take some action and slow the flow of taxpayer money going to criminals.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 17:35

• "Its Entirely Feasible That Herd Immunity Has Been Reached In The Current Environment"
  “Its Entirely Feasible That Herd Immunity Has Been Reached In The Current Environment”

  As Covid cases are starting to climb aggressively again in a few European countries – with both Austria and the Netherlands imposing fresh lockdowns – DB’s Jim Reid writes that “here in the UK, where there has been much attention internationally, we have possibly moved into a new phase of the battle against the virus.”

  According to the credit strategist, while cases have been fairly high since the summer, from around the time of the European football championships and the lifting of restrictions on July 19th, the UK has not seen the exponential rise that could overwhelm the health service that many have warned about for months. Furthermore, evidence from the ONS suggests over 90% of adults have antibodies, whilst 80% of the 12+ population have had two vaccine doses now.

  Instead of rising exponentially, new cases have been going through mini-waves, likely due to unvaccinated school children returning in September, the colder weather and then the on and off of half-term. After trending down for the last 2 and a half weeks new cases are starting to pick up again, but with booster jab momentum starting to accelerate after a slow start (a huge 532k yesterday), high antibody levels and some evidence that around 80% of 5-14yr olds  have been infected (the highest of any age group), its entirely feasible that herd immunity has been reached in the current environment and that new case levels will continue to be range bound.

  Indeed, new admissions to hospitals are trending 20-25% of the level they were in January of this year even though cases have been at similar levels; fatalities are 10-15% of these peak levels.

  

  And while the credit strategist notes that we may be faced with waning immunity that changes this equation in the quarters ahead, it is also possible that the virus (outside of a surprise new mutation) has less impact on a continually jabbed or covid exposed population. Meanwhile, new medicines in the pipeline like the Merck and Pfizer anti-viral pills should only help further.

  As Reid concludes, “there is certainly lots of criticism you could lay at the door of UK for how they’ve handled the pandemic but it is currently showing one template out of Covid. It could have enough immunity through vaccines and infections to get through this winter better than others and without further restrictions.” And while the strategist concedes that these are famous last words, it is certainly the case that most of the scare stories of the last few months have not materialized in the UK which gives other heavily countries hope too.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 17:10

• America Facing "Potentially Fatal Overdose Of Government": Rep. Davidson
  America Facing “Potentially Fatal Overdose Of Government”: Rep. Davidson

  Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

  As House Democrats continue trying to muster enough votes to pass President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said that the massive social spending bill—along with other Democrat-led policies—represent a “potentially fatal overdose of government” that could stifle free enterprise and push inflation higher.

  

  Davidson, who serves co-chairman of the Congressional Sound Money Caucus, told NTD News in an interview that the Biden administration’s big-ticket spending proposals risk exacerbating inflation, which is running at a near 31-year high.

  “The only debate on Capitol Hill is how much more gas to throw on the fire,” Davidson said.

  “It gets bigger, and that’s the Democrats’ agenda—they want to throw more on with Build Back Better,” he said, adding that “it’s going to dump a lot of extra spending into the economy and it has a big impact” on inflation.

  “Whether you’re talking about the American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure bill or Build Back Better—all part of this Bernie Sanders’ agenda,” Davidson said, alluding to the Vermont senator’s various left-leaning or far-left policy positions, including proposing to cut the wealth of billionaires by half over 15 years and initially putting forward a $6 trillion budget proposal that he said was “probably too little.”

  “It is hostile to the American way of life and free enterprise. We’re confronting a potentially fatal overdose of government. We need more freedom and less government—and we need to embrace sound money,” Davidson said.

  President Joe Biden has argued that his Build Back Better plan will ease inflationary pressures, including on the labor cost side by getting more Americans back into the workforce by reducing child and elder care costs. And more directly, his plan would lower costs for families by providing more affordable health coverage and prescription drugs, he said.

  In a similar vein, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CNBC in late October that the Build Back Better agenda would have an anti-inflationary impact by smoothing some supply-side dislocations and footing the bill for some costs facing American families.

  “It will boost the economy’s potential to grow, the economy’s supply potential, which tends to push inflation down, not up,” she told the outlet.

  “For many American families experiencing inflation, seeing the prices of gas and other things that they buy rise, what this package will do is lower some of the most important costs, what they pay for health care, for child care. It’s anti-inflationary in that sense as well,” Yellen added.

  Yellen also said she continues to see inflation as a temporary supply-side-driven phenomenon that will normalize next year.

  Davidson challenged the “transitory” inflation framing, noting that the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned from around $4 trillion in the months prior to the outbreak of the pandemic to over $8 trillion.

  “When you create that much cash into the economy, of course it shows up,” he said, adding that, initially, people were “happy” to see their financial assets grow in value, “but then you start seeing it in retail prices, and that’s what we’re seeing today.”

  “This is not going to be transitory.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 16:45

• Glasgow Climate Summit Ends In Tears, Failure, And Kicking-The-Can On Commitments
  Glasgow Climate Summit Ends In Tears, Failure, And Kicking-The-Can On Commitments

  The least-green climate summit in history ended in a huge win for coal – after India and China forced last minute language changes into the final text of the Glasgow Climate Pact to “Phase down” instead of “phase out” unabated coal power.

  

  The language changes were introduced on Saturday night during the last half-hour of the final session, when India swooped with the demand, as well as adding a clause which reads “while providing targeted support to the poorest and the most vulnerable.”

  Specifically, the 197-nation pact would see parties commit to “escalating efforts to phase down unabated coal power and phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies while providing targeted support to the poorest and the most vulnerable in line with national circumstances and recognising the need for support towards a just transition.”

  Previously, the text read: “including accelerating efforts towards the phaseout of unabated coal power and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, recognising the need for support towards a just transition.”

  So – India and China just kicked the door back open on what was already going to be a near-impossible task to eliminate coal, and Western nations are now committed to ‘targeted support’ in the form of taxpayer dollars for poorer nations.

  

  And while the beneficiaries of said changes took a victory lap, India said (with a straight face) that it would “call upon parties to escalate development and deployment” of green technologies and a transition towards lower energy use – while China issued an even less specific support for the call “according to what India, China, South Africa and Bolivia delegates, and like-minded countries and other developing countries, expressed [as] concerns.”

  If ever Greta should be pissed over ’empty words,’ now’s the time!

  

  Tears of failure

  In response to the last minute changes, COP26 president Alok Sharma offered his apologies, saying he was “deeply sorry” for how the event wrapped up.

  “May I just say to all delegates I apologise for the way this process has unfolded and I am deeply sorry,” he told the crowd, adding “I also understand the deep disappointment but I think as you have noted, it’s also vital that we protect this package.”

  #COP26 President Sharma is in tears. He says on stage he is “deeply sorry” for how the process has worked out in the end.

  — Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) November 13, 2021

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

  #COP26 President Alok Sharma tearfully discusses the event and the resulting agreement:

  “I apologize for the way this process has unfolded..I also understand the deep disappointment, but…it is also vital that we protect this package…”

  Then he cries.pic.twitter.com/m23qYqu6xw

  — Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath) November 13, 2021

  Switzerland was pissed – expressing its “profound disappointment as a result of intransparent process,” adding “We do not need to phase down coal but to phase out coal.”

  The Swiss representative said the last-minute change to the wording on phasing out fossil fuel use would make it harder to reach the COP26 goal.

  “This will not bring us closer to 1.5 but make it more difficult to reach it.”

  Frans Timmermans, the EU envoy, said he was disappointed with the new phrasing: “The longer you take to phase out coal, the more burden you put on the natural environment and the more burden you put on your economy.” –FT

  US climate envoy John Kerry simply ‘had to go along with it.’

  Hearing John Kerry told delegates here he does not like the new language suggested by India, but had to go along with it.

  — Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) November 13, 2021

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

  Commitment to signal maximum virtue

  Aside from fancy pens, we’re guessing, COP26 attendees return to their countries with a most serious task – kick the can down the road for now, then come back next year with plans to strengthen their 2030 emissions reductions targets. Rich nations have the added bonus to “at least double” the amount of money they give developing countries in exchange for adapting to climate change.

  As always, there are no specifics underpinning a commitment to transfer gobs of money from rich nations to poor.

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

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 16:20

• "Non-Binary" Assistant Professor Calls For "Stigma" Of Pedophilia To Be 'Delegitimized'
  “Non-Binary” Assistant Professor Calls For “Stigma” Of Pedophilia To Be ‘Delegitimized’

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  A “non-binary” associate professor at Old Dominion University has called for the “stigma” of pedophilia to be ‘delegitimized’.

  

  Yes, really.

  The Prostasia Foundation, a registered 503c which has called for child-like sex dolls to be legalized, posted an interview with Allyn Walker, a female-to-male transgender, who outlined her views on “minor attraction.”

  Walker, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, is the author of a book called ‘A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity’.

  In the interview, Walker insists that the term “minor attracted people” should be used in preference to ‘pedophile’ because pedophiles’ feelings might be hurt otherwise.

  “I think we believe societally, that stigma against MAPs serves to protect children because we don’t fully understand the differences between MAPs and sex offenders. Again, we have this confusion between the attraction and a criminal behavior.” https://t.co/62YZGg9tbY pic.twitter.com/pPwEOjJUCo

  — Prostasia Foundation (@ProstasiaInc) November 9, 2021

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

  She also highlights how, “MAP advocacy groups like B4U-Act have advocated for use of the term, and they’ve advocated for it primarily because it’s less stigmatizing than other terms like pedophile.”

  “4W has previously covered the group B4U-Act, which was founded by convicted multi-child rapist Michael Melsheimer for the explicit purposes of normalizing pedophilia and distracting from prevention efforts,” writes Anna Slatz. “In Melsheimer’s own words, he wanted to ensure B4U-Act was never associated with the “prevention of offending.”

  During the interview, Walker suggested that pedophilia is merely another form of sexual attraction and should be tolerated.

  “Sexuality can be fluid, and there are many MAPs who have a range of attractions to both children and adults,” she said.

  Walker also suggested that stigma against pedophiles is a “huge problem” and that she “empathizes” with how pedos are treated.

  “Although I’m not a MAP, myself, I am queer, and so I too, have been through experiences and realized that I have attractions many people wouldn’t understand, and that some people find to be immoral. And those experiences have really shaped who I’ve become. And so I sort of empathize with those experiences, and I wanted to learn more,” said Walker.

  And these people are working inside universities.

  We truly live in hell.

  *  *  *

  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. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Get early access, exclusive content and behinds the scenes stuff by following me on Locals.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 15:30

• Nearly 300K Non-Existent 'Ghost Soldiers' Is Why Afghan Government Collapsed So Quickly: Ex-Finance Minister
  Nearly 300K Non-Existent ‘Ghost Soldiers’ Is Why Afghan Government Collapsed So Quickly: Ex-Finance Minister

  Former Afghani finance minister, Khalid Payenda, says that most of the 300,000 Afghan troops never existed, and were in fact “ghost” solders who were fabricated by corrupt officials who then pocketed their wages, according to the BBC.

  

  So – corrupt Afghan officials lied about their fighting force, while US President Joe Biden was pressuring former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani to lie about the US pullout and say that the Taliban wasn’t winning “whether it is true or not.” Ghani refused to lie, and the rest is history – the Taliban spread throughout the country like wildfire and toppled the government within a matter of days.

  “The way the accountability was done, you would ask the chief in that province how many people you have and based on that you could calculate salaries and ration expenses and they would always be inflated,” the former finance minister told BBC‘s Ed Butler.

  The former minister said the numbers may have been inflated by more than six times, and included “desertions [and] martyrs who were never accounted for because some of the commanders would keep their bank cards” and withdraw their salaries, he alleged.

  There have long been questions over Afghan troop numbers.

  A 2016 report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar) claimed that “neither the United States nor its Afghan allies know how many Afghan soldiers and police actually exist, how many are in fact available for duty, or, by extension, the true nature of their operational capabilities”. -BBC

  More recently, Sigar expressed “serious concerns about the corrosive effects of corruption… and the questionable accuracy of data on the actual strength of the force.”

  Ex-finance minister Payenda, meanwhile, said the ‘ghost’ soldiers were often not paid on time, while leaders of government-backed militias frequently ‘double-dipped’ by taking both a government wage, and accepting bribes from the Taliban to give up without a fight.

  “The whole feeling was, we cannot change this. This is how the parliament works, this is how the governors work. Everybody would say the stream is murky from the very top, meaning the very top is involved in this,” he said, adding that while he didn’t think former President Ghani was “financially corrupt,” that there were definitely accusations of corruption within the finance ministry.

  In closing, Payenda said that the West was “part of” some of the failures within the country, and that the United States and NATO’s involvement was a “great opportunity lost.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 15:00

• Look Out Below: Why A Rug-Pull Flash-Crash Makes Perfect Sense
  Look Out Below: Why A Rug-Pull Flash-Crash Makes Perfect Sense

  Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

  It makes perfect financial sense to crash the market and no sense to reward the retail options marks by pushing it higher.

  An extraordinary opportunity to scoop up mega-millions in profits has arisen, and grabbing all this free money makes perfect financial sense. Now the question is: will those who have the means to grab the dough have the guts to do so?

  Here’s the opportunity: retail punters have gone wild for call options, churning $2.6 trillion in mostly short-term calls–bets on gains now, not later. This expansion of retail options exposure is unprecedented not just in its volume but in its concentration in short-term bets (options that expire in a few days) and in mega-cap tech companies that are commanding rich premiums for options.

  Goldman Stunned By The Record $2.6 Trillion In Option Notional Traded Last Friday

  The options market is like every other market only more so. The price of an option–a bet that a stock, ETF or index will go up or down before the option expires–is sensitive to the volatility of the underlying equity, the demand of other punters for options and the premium being demanded for time: the farther out the expiration date, the higher the cost of the option.

  Recall that anyone with 100 shares of the underlying equity can write/originate an option. Each option controls 100 shares, so a call option that is listed at $1 costs the buyer of the call $100.

  This is very sweet leverage if the market goes your way. You get all the gains of the 100 shares for a cost considerably less than buying the 100 shares outright. No wonder retail punters are going crazy for this cheap leverage to maximize gains in “can’t lose” trades.

  Options have one funny trait: they can expire worthless and the punter loses the entire bet. Each option has an expiration date and a strike price–the price of the underlying equity that’s the pivot point for the bet: calls gain value if the equity’s price moves above the strike price and puts gain value if the equity’s price falls below the strike price.

  The entity that sold the option gets to keep the money if it expires without any value. If you have 100 shares of Engulf & Devour and you sell me a call for $500 at a strike price of $100, if Engulf & Devour closes below $100 at expiration, you keep the $500 as pure profit and I lose the entire bet.

  It would be extraordinarily profitable to sell a huge number of calls–bets on a move higher– and then pull the rug out by crashing the market just as all those options expire. It would criminally foolish not to crash the market and scoop up all that free money.

  Here’s what makes the opportunity so extraordinary: the options universe is extremely lopsided. Bearish bets have dried up as the market has melted higher month after month; short bets are at record lows and the put-call ratio reflects the same capitulation of Bears and Bulls’ supreme confidence in near-term gains.

  This means a crash will cost very little in terms of puts gaining value because there are so few puts out there and reap enormous gains as the vast majority of call options will expire worthless, leaving those who wrote the calls immensely wealthier.

  In previous eras with lower retail option volume and a less lopsided options market, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to flash-crash the market to scoop up retail calls. But a trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

  Buyers of “can’t lose” calls may be unaware that the tail can wag the dog. Mega-cap tech companies appear invulnerable to declines, but they are now the 800-pound gorillas in all the indices (Dow-30, S&P500, Nasdaq) and a boatload of ETFs. So triggering a mass sell-off in an index play such as SPY will trigger a sell-off in all the components of that index, including the invulnerable mega-cap tech names.

  The opportunity here is amplified by the dominance of computer trading algorithms. Once a crash begins, the algos will trend-follow and liquidate exposure to lower risk. This sets up a self-reinforcing chain of selling as every drop triggers more sell programs.

  Volumes are so low that it won’t take that big of a leveraged sell order to start the rug-pull.

  Add up the extraordinary size of retail options bets, the lopsided Bullish bias in calls and the short-duration of the calls and you have an unprecedented opportunity to scoop mega-millions of dollars by doing a rug-pull of the market via selling leveraged indices instruments.

  Retail call buyers are basically begging the big players to take their money via a flash-crash, and the players would be insanely incompetent not to take the money laying on the table. It has all the moving parts of a perfect con: convince the retail punters that they can’t lose by buying calls, jack up the premium they’re paying to own that beautiful leverage for a few days or weeks, lead them on with little rallies, “proving” they can’t lose and encouraging them to buy more high-priced calls, crush volatility to show the futility of buying puts and persuade the punters they have no need for any hedge, as the market can only loft higher because the Fed, etc.

  Then bang, pull the rug out and crash the market limit down for a few days. It’s a gorgeous set-up, literally picture-perfect. It makes perfect financial sense to crash the market and no sense to reward the retail options marks by pushing it higher. Let’s see who gets to be the Roadrunner and who ends up as Wile E. Coyote.

  

  *  *  *

  If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

  My new book is available! A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet 20% and 15% discounts (Kindle $7, print $17, audiobook now available $17.46)

  Read excerpts of the book for free (PDF).

  The Story Behind the Book and the Introduction.

  Recent Videos/Podcasts:

  Keiser Report | The Tragedy of the Treadmill (25:30)

  My COVID-19 Pandemic Posts

  My recent books:

  A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

  Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
  (Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

  Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

  The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

  Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).
   

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 14:30

• US Food Banks Struggle To Feed Hungry Amid 'Perfect Storm' Of Food Inflation 
  US Food Banks Struggle To Feed Hungry Amid ‘Perfect Storm’ Of Food Inflation 

  America’s largest food bank struggles to feed people amid a perfect storm of surging food prices and supply chain woes. 

  Katie Fitzgerald, COO of Feeding America, a nonprofit organization that operates more than 200 food banks across the country, told AP News that her network of food banks is already stretched thin due to the unprecedented demand spurred by the virus pandemic downturn in the economy last year. She warned that it has become more difficult for her organization to absorb food inflation, resulting in fewer families being fed this holiday season. 

  Supply chain disruptions, lower inventory, higher transportation and fuel costs, and labor shortages make matters worse for food banks that millions of people rely on. She said her organization has already swapped out smaller-sized food products or entirely substituted some to stretch the dollar further. 

  Fitzgerald said soaring food inflation is an “insult to injury” for families who depend on food banks. 

  Michael Altfest, the San Francisco Bay Area director, the Alameda County Community Food Bank in Oakland, said the food bank spends an additional $60k on food per month and is spending $1 million a month to distribute 4.5 million pounds of food. 

  Altfest said in pre-COVID times. The food bank was spending a quarter of the money to distribute 2.5 million pounds of food. He pointed out prices for canned green beans and peaches are up 9%, canned tuna and frozen tilapia up more than 6%, 5-pound frozen chickens rose 13%, and oatmeal jumped 17%. 

  New people are showing up every week at the Shiloh Mercy House food pantry in east Oakland despite President Biden promoting his economic success and “build back better” plan. 

  Soaring food inflation is hurting families: “And a lot of people are just saying they can’t afford food,” Jason Bautista, the charity’s event manager, said. 

  This comes as consumer prices on Wednesday rose to their highest level in decades. Prices for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs rose 11.9%, with the sub-index for beef increasing 20.1% and the index for pork rising 14.1%, its most significant 12-month increase since the period ending December 1990. 

  

  Oakland resident Sonia Lujan-Perez, 45, pays $2,200 in monthly rent and has no money left to feed her family. She frequents local food banks because food prices have skyrocketed over the past year. 

  Lujan-Perez said the food bank “is wonderful for me because I will save a lot of money.” This Christmas would be “rough” for her two children because she won’t afford gifts. 

  Biden’s next political nightmare has already arrived: food inflation. Real wage gains are being wiped out as the cost of everything soars. The souring mood for the president is showing up in polling data. 

  

  The Biden administration attempted to counter rising food inflation for the working poor by announcing an increase in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to more than 40 million beneficiaries in August. This means the average monthly benefit increased more than $36 per person, but even that has failed to satisfy the stomachs of millions of hangry Americans. 

  There’s also another problem. Bryan Nichols, vice president of sales for Transnational Foods, which delivers to 100 food banks associated with Feeding America, said sourcing canned food from Asia has become more complex as shortages due to port congestion have materialized. He also said importing canned food from overseas has become incredibly expensive because shipping containers rates have gone from “$4,000 to $18,000” in less than a year. 

  In Southern Colorado, Care and Share Food Bank’s CEO Lynne Telford explains the cost of food products is going through the roof. 

  Telford said, “the cost for a truckload of peanut butter —40,000 pounds has soared 80% from June 2019 to $51,000 in August. Mac and cheese is up 19% from a year ago, and the wholesale cost of ground beef has increased 5% in three months.”  

  She said her organization is spending more money to make up for the lack of donations, and her other fear is that there won’t be enough food for the holidays. 

  “The other thing is that we’re not getting enough holiday food, like stuffing and cranberry sauce. So we have to supplement with other kinds of food, which you know, makes us sad,” said Telford, whose food bank fed more than 200,000 people last year. 

  The data from food banks underscores what many poor working Americans already know. Some of the highest inflation in decades is crushing their budgets as they can barely afford to survive. Such pain in the wallet is making them hangry, coming off a demoralizing pandemic, threatening Biden and the Democrats ahead of midterms next year. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 11/13/2021 – 14:00

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• How Soros' Secret Network Used Ukraine To Cover For Hillary, Hunter, & Target Donald Trump
  How Soros’ Secret Network Used Ukraine To Cover For Hillary, Hunter, & Target Donald Trump

  Via The National Pulse,

  The following is an excerpt from Matt Palumbo’s forthcoming book The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros.

  Pre-order a copy before it’s banned. 

  

  (emphasis ours)

  The Soros Circle: AntAC

  In 2014, Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) and its grantees were active supporters in the creation of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) of Ukraine, a powerful NGO. Through the end of 2018, 17 percent of AntAC’s funding was coming from Soros’s group.

  AntAC is run by Daria Kaleniuk, an American-educated lawyer. White House logs show Kaleniuk visited on December 9, 2015, reportedly meeting with Eric Ciaramella, the CIA employee many suspect is the anonymous whistleblower that sparked Trump’s first impeachment, the source of which was a faultless phone call with Ukraine’s president.

  AntAC was responsible for creating the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), a law enforcement group separate from the prosecutor general’s office that was tasked with handling the biggest corruption cases. It has investigatory powers but cannot indict suspects. Only when it passes its findings to prosecutors does a subject of its inquiry become part of a criminal case. The agency was established in 2014 at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after its predecessor, the National Anti-Corruption Committee, was deemed a failure. Western governments funded NABU, which also enjoyed the backing of the FBI. Like all the Orwellian names of groups Soros had a part in, NABU acts independently in name only.

  With the Obama DOJ’s launch of the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, aimed at battling large-scale public corruption in foreign states, the State Department, DOJ, and FBI began outsourcing some of their own work to AntAC.

  In February 2015, Viktor Shokin was appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine, and was soon scrutinized for helping the owner of the energy company Burisma. Shokin had helped owner Mykola Zlochevsky regain control of $23 million that was frozen by British authorities. Burisma was made famous by Hunter Biden’s involvement in the company, and Zlochevsky was the one who struck the deal to appoint Hunter to the company’s board of directors in 2014 at a reported salary of $83,333 per month.

  AntAC’s stance on Shokin was made clear; it tweeted on December 2015 that “One of the major goals of #AntAC for 2016 is to force #Shokin to resign.”

  Shokin attempted to begin a probe into Burisma that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

  This never materialized because Joe Biden (then Vice President) threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan to Ukraine unless Skokin was removed as prosecutor general. Biden even bragged about it on video to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, stating that when he attended a meeting with Ukraine’s president and prime minister, he said, “‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

  Biden insisted the U.S. wanted Shokin removed over corruption concerns shared by the European Union. But in tapes released by Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, Biden and Poroshenko reveal that the Ukrainian president admitted to doing Biden’s bidding. The quid pro quo is proven.

  “Despite the fact that (Shokin) didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially asked him…to resign.”

  In another recording from March 22, 2016, the two allegedly discussed who would be appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine, and then who would be their eventual replacement. Former prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko was mentioned. The White House issued a press release confirming the pair talked again on this date.

  At the end of the call, Biden said, “I’m a man of my word. And now that the new prosecutor general is in place, we’re ready to move forward to signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee.”

  Derkach would later be punished for allegedly exposing Biden’s call with Poroshenko.

  After the audio was made public, Poroshenko’s successor Volodymyr Zelensky called for an investigation into the recordings, and the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing the audio as “unsupported information” part of a campaign to “discredit U.S. officials.” They also accused Derkach, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, of being a “Russian agent.” 

  The sanctions came less than a year after Derkach met with Rudy Giuliani in Kiev, which reports at the time said was to discuss possible misuse of U.S. tax dollars by Ukraine’s government.

  …

  A few months later, Yuriy Lutsenko was named prosecutor general and met with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Lutsenko recalls being stunned when the ambassador gave him a list of people who shouldn’t be prosecuted. The list included a founder of AntAC, and two members of Ukrainian Parliament who supported AntAC’s anticorruption agenda (while benefitting from corruption themselves).

  As John Solomon puts it, the implied message to Lutsenko was clear: “Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an American presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama.”

  So what was motivating George Kent and Ambassador Yovanovitch to influence investigations in Ukraine of all places?

  The fact that Ukraine dealt with an organization created with the backing of the Obama administration, State Department, FBI, and George Soros.

  An investigation into AntAC could expose a whole chest of secrets – the least of which being that they’re not all concerned with corruption like they claim…

  …

  The hunt for any information that could possibly damage President Trump or anyone connected to him was now on.

  Read the rest of the excerpt here at The National Pulse…

  

  Be sure to get the book by clicking here. 

  It’s also on Amazon.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 23:40

• Ranked: The Most Prescribed Drugs In The U.S.
  Ranked: The Most Prescribed Drugs In The U.S.

  Every day, millions of people in the U.S. take prescribed drugs to help them live their lives.

  As our understanding of medicine has evolved, we’ve been able to develop drugs to aid with some of the most common medical conditions – from pain and blood pressure drugs to asthma medication, thyroid treatments, and antidepressants.

  But which drug is prescribed the most and how frequently? As VisualCapitalist’s Omri Wallach details below, sorting the annual prescribed medicines data by the total number of patients highlights how important and prevalent some drugs are in America.

  

  This graphic uses prescribed medicines data from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, released in 2021 for the 2019 calendar year. It also uses supporting drug and health information from MedlinePlus.

  The most prescribed drug, atorvastatin (sold under brand Lipitor), was prescribed to 24.5 million people in the U.S. in 2019, or 7.5% of the population. It was one of many statin medications listed, which are used to prevent cardiovascular disease and treat abnormal lipid levels.

  In fact, a majority of the most prescribed drugs in the U.S. are used to treat high blood pressure or symptoms of it. That’s because 108 million or nearly half of adults in the U.S. have hypertension or high blood pressure.

  

  Other common prescriptions include antibiotics like amoxicillin and azithromycin, used to treat bacterial infections, as well as levothyroxine, which was used by 19.7 million Americans to treat thyroid hormone deficiency.

  Asthma medication albuterol (usually prescribed through an inhaler) rounded out the top five prescribed drugs with the most patients, followed closely by Type 2 diabetes medication glucophage.

  The Top Medical Conditions Treated by Prescription Drugs

  The prevalence of cardiovascular-related medication becomes clear when combining the total patients for each type of medication.

  The total number of patients with prescribed medication for blood pressure or cholesterol combined for 33% of the U.S. population.

  Compared to that, medication for pain or inflammation were the most frequent on the top 30 list with five occurrences, but were only prescribed to 13.6% of people. That includes hydrocodone (known by the brand name Vicodin) and tramadol (known by the brand name Ultram), two opioid medications.

  

  Most of the top 30 prescribed medications for specific conditions saw patients total less than 6% of the U.S. population. They include thyroid issues, gastrointestinal conditions, and mental conditions treated by antidepressants (including panic disorder, anxiety disorders, and PTSD).

  But it’s important to remember that some patients have multiple prescriptions for serious conditions with multiple symptoms, or comorbid conditions—when more than one disease or condition is present at the same time.

  Drug Spending in the U.S.

  A prescribed drug’s total number of patients doesn’t necessarily reflect how important it is, or how expensive it is for the end user. Levothyroxine is the fourth-most prescribed drug by total patients, but the second-most prescribed drug by total prescriptions with 102.6 million in 2019 at an average cost of $25.10 per prescription.

  More specialized medication like fluticasone had significantly less total prescriptions with 27.9 million, but an average cost of $97.68 per prescription. Prices are influenced by a drug’s demand, whether or not it’s patented or available in generic form, and a country’s healthcare system. As far as OECD countries go, the U.S. ranks as the most costly almost across the board.

  Since the current rankings look at the U.S. pre-COVID, next year’s prescription data will be illuminating as to the state of American health (and healthcare).

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 23:20

• BLM Leader Warns There Will Be "Bloodshed" In NYC If Mayor-Elect Toughens Police Reform
  BLM Leader Warns There Will Be “Bloodshed” In NYC If Mayor-Elect Toughens Police Reform

  Authored by Christopher Burroughs via The Epoch Times,

  A Black Lives Matter leader has claimed there will be “bloodshed” if newly elected New York City Mayor Eric Adams stands by his plan to toughen police reforms to counter the city’s surge in violent crime.

  

  New York City BLM co-founder Hawk Newsome discussed the issue with Adams during an event on Wednesday at Brooklyn Borough Hall that was livestreamed on Instagram.

  Adams, a former NYPD captain, said during the event that he will reinstate the undercover anti-crime unit ended during police protests last year.

  The new mayor won in November after a victory during a crowded June primary, running as a moderate who would be tough on crime, winning against several prominent progressives.

  “There’s one thing that we do agree on, that we need to change conditions that people are living in, historical conditions. And the conditions have not changed,” Adams said during the meeting.

  Newsome made his strongest comments to reporters outside of the building.

  “If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing then we’re going to take to the streets again,” Newsome said to media after the meeting.

  “There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed,” he added.

  Adams ran in part on the campaign promise to return a revised version of the anti-crime unit that was responsible for a citywide crackdown on violent crime, illegal drugs, and firearm arrests.

  The original unit was ended during the summer of 2020 when it was reported that an alleged disproportionate number of arrests involved black individuals.

  The anti-crime unit was also under scrutiny due to former officer Daniel Pantaleo, who had been part of the anti-crime unit when he put Eric Garner into a chokehold leading to his death.

  Garner’s reported last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a popular slogan at BLM protests.

  Adams has already begun plans to address other issues in his new administration as well, including the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

  The mayor-elect shared on Nov. 5 what he meant when he said he wanted to “revisit” the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for workers.

  “We need to revisit how we’re going to address the vaccine mandates,” Adams said during a cable TV appearance on Wednesday.

  Adams said he would encourage Mayor Bill de Blasio to talk with unions as the parties attempted to reach an agreement on how applications for exemptions and other details were handled.

  “Here’s an opportunity for him to bring about a resolution and when I inherit this situation, I’m going to bring about a resolution,” he added.

  The comments left some expressing optimism that Adams would ease the mandate, which is among the harshest in the nation.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 23:00

• "Cyber Marines" Will Win The War Of Tomorrow On Digital Battlefield 
  “Cyber Marines” Will Win The War Of Tomorrow On Digital Battlefield 

  As the great power competition between the US and China rages, both superpowers are rapidly modernizing their militaries. Announced this week, a high-ranking US military official has said a new type of soldier, called ‘cyber Marines,’ could soon be deployed onto the modern battlefield to gain a competitive edge against opponents, according to Defense News. 

  Colonel Brian Russell, the commander of the II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group (II MEFIG), told the audience at C4ISRNET’s CyberCon that “cyber Marines” could one day be deployed to the battlefield or a hybrid conflict to “adjust the software on sensors and systems in real-time.” 

  

  Russell explained the ability for military personnel to “reprogram” equipment on the frontlines would ensure operational advantages. He said cyber Marines will help reshape the battlefield, indicating these elite groups of soldiers “could influence the local population, take out enemy networks, disrupt the enemy’s kill chain, and much more.” 

  “Whether you like it or not, or realize it or not, all of our Marines are involved in this information environment, and we need to prepare them for that reality. 

  “The best thing I can do as a commander in support of retention is to give them mission: let them operate in the cyber domain, let them perform those influence functions, let them do what they came in to do,” Russell stated.

  He cited a recent report by Commandant Gen. David Berger, who said new elite cyber Marines would be able to operate in forward positions and win the daily reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance battle.

  Berger’s essay read: 

  “In a 21st-century reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance battle, an adaptive adversary will try to change signatures and adjust sensors to defeat the collection efforts of the United States and its partners, and to overcome their deception efforts.

  “Marines on the front lines may have to write computer code to adjust the software on sensors and systems in real-time,” he continued. “The examples are many, but the implications are clear. Developing future Marines who will operate as SIF demands as much focused attention as any other aspect of the stand-in concept — perhaps more.”

  Cyber marines will be a great addition to regular forces as the modern battlefield becomes more digitized. The emerging threat of non-kinetic weapons on the battlefield is the task cyber marines will tackle to win the war of tomorrow. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 22:40

• Fauci Warned About Coronaviruses In 2003 – But Didn't Act On It
  Fauci Warned About Coronaviruses In 2003 – But Didn’t Act On It

  By Kirk Allen and John Kraft of RealClearPolicy,

  Few would argue the United States, or any country for that matter, was prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, even though, starting in 2003, the U.S. devoted $5.6 billion to fund Project Bioshield, running through 2013, and another $2.8 billion of funding through 2018. Project Bioshield was designed to prepare the United States against a bio attack, including provisions for the stockpiling and distribution of vaccines.

  

  Though Covid-19 was a new virus, congressional testimony from 2003 paints a concerning picture about what we knew – and when – about the family of viruses from which it originated.

  “I am particularly interested in learning how Project BioShield would assist in addressing the current public health emergency created by the epidemic known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS],” said Tom Davis, chairman of the Committee on Government Reform. “More than 2,000 suspected cases of this mysterious disease have been reported in 17 nations, including the United States, with 78 fatalities. So far, there is no effective treatment or vaccine to combat this deadly syndrome.”

  Among those testifying to the committee in 2003 was Dr. Anthony Fauci, then and now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci told the committee:

  SARS, standing for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, has now spread through several countries, at least 17 countries. There are over 2,200 cases, and about 80 deaths. There have now been 100 cases in the United States in 27 states. This is a new disease. It is what we refer to as an emerging microbe, an emerging infectious disease. The data from the CDC and from other laboratories indicate that the corona virus, which is an interesting group – it is a very common virus. It is what causes about 10 to 20 percent of the common colds. There are two groups of corona viruses. This is likely a member of a new third group. It has not been definitively demonstrated that this is the, or the only, cause of SARS, but the evidence is mounting every day from a variety of approaches that we are taking.

  According to testimony in 2003, Fauci confirmed SARS was an emerging infectious disease of which data indicated it was tied to the coronavirus, the cause of 10-20 percent of common colds.

  “It has the capability of being a very severe syndrome,” Fauci continues. “The death rate in this is 3.5 percent, which may sound small, but when you think about the possibility of infecting hundreds of millions of people, this can turn out to be a major public health threat. In fact, in parts of the world it already is leading to such draconian measures as quarantines and isolation in several countries.”

  Fauci continues: “The CDC has done a magnificent job thus far,” Fauci said in 2003, “and we know that they will continue to, in not only identifying and tracking but essentially now moving ahead in collaboration with the NIH and a variety of other agencies, the FDA, in developing diagnostic therapeutics and on our way to a vaccine.”

  How is it that in 2003, Fauci claimed the CDC, in collaboration with the NIH, was doing a magnificent job and would work toward therapeutics and an eventual vaccine – and yet this country was basically blindsided, with few known therapeutics and no vaccine, 17 years later? The medical advice that became the norm and remains the norm in many parts of the United States is, if you become infected with COVID-19, stay home, and wait to see if you get sicker. Looking back on Fauci’s words, it appears our health officials missed the mark on a grand scale.

  Even more concerning: in 2003, it was disclosed that monoclonal antibodies have changed the way we treat everything from heart disease to cancer – yet such treatments were not being pushed like they are now.

  Fauci’s words throughout the 2003 hearing are troubling in light of where we are today with COVID-19.

  “So, in summary, Mr. Chairman, it is a serious threat,” Fauci said then of SARS. “We must take it very seriously. We don’t feel there is a need to panic at this point, but we must continue to do the very stringent public health measures that we are approaching, as well as the research that is going into it.”

  Congressman Henry Waxman asks Fauci: “Is there a potential for dual-use where the research of biodefense may well lead us to research breakthroughs for other diseases?”

  “I think it is not only a potential, Mr. Waxman, I think it is inevitable that there will be an important contribution to the research that we put into emerging and reemerging diseases to inform us about biodefense research, and it is without a doubt that the research that goes into biodefense will help us with naturally occurring,” Fauci responds. “Because as a matter of fact, as we have discussed before, as you know we feel that deliberately released microbes is just another form of emerging and reemerging disease. Instead of occurring naturally, it is done with malice and deliberately, but the end result can be the same.”

  While Fauci has been extremely reluctant to admit that gain-of-function research was taking place with American tax dollars and that China was responsible for the release of the COVID-19 virus, his 2003 testimony makes clear that he felt deliberately released microbes were just another form of emerging and reemerging disease.

  The bottom line: the United States was not prepared for COVID-19, and the draconian measures to handle it that have been pushed by Fauci from March 2020 on have not resulted in declining mortality numbers – in fact, the trend we are seeing is more deaths in the last 10 months than in all of 2020.

  As it is clear that he has known for years the serious threat the United States and the world faced from coronaviruses, and it appears he did very little in the last 17 years to address the very concerns he raised about them in his testimony in 2003, Dr. Fauci should resign – in disgrace.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 22:20

• Watch: Sikorsky's S-97 Raider Flies 247 Knots As Flight Envelope Expands 
  Watch: Sikorsky’s S-97 Raider Flies 247 Knots As Flight Envelope Expands 

  Sikorsky S-97 Raider is a one-of-a-kind helicopter part of the US Army’s Future Vertical Lift Program.

  The S-97 Raider prototype is part of Sikorsky’s entry into the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft competition for the Army to replace the aging UH-60 Black Hawk and Apache attack helicopters in the coming years. 

  

  The latest video from Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin Company, posted on Lockheed Martin’s YouTube channel, shows the S-97 Raider traveling at 247 knots, or about 284 mph. For some context, most helicopters fly at an average speed of around 160 mph. 

  According to Lockheed’s website, the S-97 Raider can fly “twice as far and twice as fast as the Black Hawk.” A development timeline shows the new helicopters will begin service at the end of this decade. That will be the moment when the Black Hawks are phased out. 

  

  We have documented multiple test flights of the next-generation helicopter over the last several years. 

  • Watch: Sikorsky-Boeing Conduct First Flight Of This Very Unusual Helicopter
  • Watch Next-Gen Sikorsky-Boeing Helicopter Conduct “Rigorous Flight Test At High Speeds”

  It seems like every flight. Test pilots are pushing the S-97 Raider harder and harder to understand its operational and combat limitations. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 22:00

• Medical Research Rapidly Adopts "Systemic Racism" As Truth, Risking Scientific Credibility, Part 1
  Medical Research Rapidly Adopts “Systemic Racism” As Truth, Risking Scientific Credibility, Part 1

  By John Murawski of RealClearInvestigations, Part 1 of 2

  Rejection used to be common for medical sociologist Thomas LaVeist when he tried to get his research published on the effects of racism on the health of black people. “Now,” said the 60-year-old dean of Tulane University’s School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine, “I have those same journals asking me to write articles for them.”

  LaVeist’s experience illustrates the dramatic transformation in medical research, accelerating in the past few years. While few would dispute that black Americans are more prone to chronic health problems and have shorter life expectancies than whites, the medical community generally sought answers in biology, genetics and lifestyle. Research, like LaVeist’s, that focused on racism was frowned upon as lacking rigor or relevance, an amateurish detour from serious intellectual inquiry.

  

  Today medical journal editors are clamoring for a racial lens and apologizing for what they call their past moral blindness. In recent years, and especially since Black Lives Matter protests erupted last year, systemic racism has been transformed from a fringe theory to a canonical truth.

  Medical researchers are now able to offer a sweeping socio-political explanation for racial health disparities by citing the hundreds of peer-reviewed articles authored by LaVeist and a host of others, thus conferring upon the study of systemic racism the imprimatur of scholarly authority and even settled science.

  This year, top officials at the National Institutes of Health issued an apology to all who have suffered from structural racism in biomedical research. The NIH, the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research, announced that it is dedicating $90 million to the study of health disparities and structural racism, engaging in more than 60 diversity and inclusion initiatives, and committing “every tool at our disposal to remediate the chronic problem of structural racism.”

  In an August special issue dedicated to racial health disparities, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association stated that systemic racism is a scientific fact beyond dispute, and disagreeing on this point is “wrong,” “misguided” and “uninformed.” Systemic racism is a reality to be assumed in medical research rather than a sociological hypothesis to be tested by skeptical researchers. 

  Deemed incontestable, systemic racism provides the political rationale for “dismantling” — in the words of no less an authority than the National Institutes of Health — the social institutions and cultural standards that, according to the framework’s advocates, were constructed and are maintained to uphold white supremacy. 

  The consequences of ignoring this new prime directive for racially focused research were made abundantly clear this year when the top two editors of JAMA were pressured to resign after the organization ran a podcast that questioned whether systemic racism explains health disparities between blacks and other Americans.

  “When JAMA sends a call for paper on structural racism, when the NIH director sends out an apology letter for racism in the NIH and when the CDC for the first time uses the term ‘racism,’ these are highest-level determinants of what research will be done in coming years in this country,” said Shervin Assari, an associate professor of family medicine and urban public health at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, one of four historically black medical schools in the nation.

  

  “This is the first time the NIH has issued a call for research on structural racism. This is the first time JAMA fires an editor who said something wrong about racism,” said Assari, who has published more than 350 papers on race, social determinants and health equity. “Now NIH is paying good money to the best researchers in this country who are competing to understand how structural racism works, rather than if it exists.”

  Systemic racism, generally unseen but known by its perceived effects, doesn’t directly cause diabetes, hypertension or depression, but it purportedly creates the living conditions in which chronic conditions opportunistically thrive, advocates say. Such living conditions include unsafe neighborhoods, aggressive policing, substandard schools, discriminatory workplaces, inferior medical care and the resulting stress, despair and self-destructive behavior, the theory states. 

  To institutionalize its new policy, JAMA is revising its peer review standards and diversifying its ranks to advance health care equity, a term that refers to narrowing or even eliminating racial health disparities in chronic conditions and life expectancies. Similar steps are being adopted throughout the medical profession — by the cluster-hiring of minority applicants, hiring of diversity and equity officers, and training staff on “white privilege,” implicit bias, microaggressions, and allyship.

  A lead editorial in the August special issue, co-signed by 15 people, including JAMA’s newly installed executive editor and executive managing editor, along with other JAMA leaders, said all medical journals are morally obligated to assume systemic racism as a fact and document this fact in their research.

  “At this point in the arc of medicine and scientific publication,” JAMA stated, “it is crucial for all journals to fulfill renewed editorial and journal missions that include a heightened and appropriate emphasis on equity and publication of information that addresses structural racism with the goal of overcoming its effects in medicine and health care.”

  This rapid turn of events has blindsided traditional doctors, who are put off by the intense focus on race and the strong rhetoric.

  “The spectacle of the gatekeepers of medical publications announcing a political blueprint that medical authors must follow — or else — is pretty breathtaking,” Thomas Huddle, who retired this year as professor at the medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said by email.

  

  “The medical gatekeepers are in the grip of a moral panic,” said Huddle, who has published on medical ethics and edited several medical journals. “The JAMA convulsion over the podcast was positively Maoist in its fervor for achieving moral correctness and purging the impure.”

  It’s an open secret that some find the systemic explanation to be nothing more than leftist polemic, while others are skeptical it convincingly explains everything it claims to explain. These skeptics worry about the career implications of publicly dissenting from the new orthodoxy, but it’s not inconceivable that blaming an entire national culture for racial disparities will prompt independent scholars and conservative think tanks to produce opposing research that explores black-on-black murder, racial disparities in IQ testing and other taboo subjects. 

  The dramatic transformation sweeping through the health care profession is not happening in a vacuum. It mirrors social justice movements committed to exposing structural racism that allegedly pervades education, criminal justice, the arts, hard sciences and other domains of U.S. society. Activists in those fields, as well as medicine, talk of dismantling white supremacy and other “structures” that operate by means of race-neutral laws and colorblind norms that cause racial and gender power imbalances and harm non-white groups.

  Skeptical physicians say that medical journal editors are essentially replacing the scientific method with a political ideology, namely critical race theory, and leaving little room for alternative explanations — such as personal agency or cultural differences.

  “There’s a tremendous amount of groupthink,” said Stanley Goldfarb, a former dean for curriculum who taught about kidney disease at the University of Pennsylvania medical school before retiring this summer. “If you don’t agree with all that, you’re a bad person.”

  “This is an argument that you’re not allowed to have — that’s the problem here,” said Goldfarb, who has served on the editorial boards of three medical journals and was editor-in-chief of a nephrology journal.

  Racial health disparities underlie the four-year gap in black-white life expectancy in the United States. The factors that contribute to this disparity include chronic conditions, unintentional injuries, suicide and homicide, which is the leading cause of death for black males aged 44 and younger. Scholars committed to the systemic racism explanation blame the disproportionately high crime rates in poor black neighborhoods on discrimination, substandard schools and other manifestations of systemic racism. 

  The body of research into racial health disparities has broken into the mainstream after establishing credibility through the time-honored system of academic citations and referrals. Since LaVeist began his work in the 1990s, a small stream of articles has swelled into a critical mass that now allows medical researchers to assume systemic racism as a proven fact and cite the evidence in footnotes, as established knowledge, instead of arguing the case each time.

  “When the weight of the evidence becomes so overwhelming that we reach consensus, we no longer continue to question whether or not [it is true],” LaVeist said. “We don’t question gravity anymore because the consensus is that gravity is a thing.”

  One of the JAMA articles in the August special issue found that the major health care spending disparity is that whites spend more on dental, pharmaceutical, and outpatient care, while blacks spend more on emergency room and inpatient hospital care, suggesting that black people are more likely to be uninsured and otherwise lack access to routine medical care.

  Instead of detailing the precise reasons that may explain this gap, the authors invoke previous articles: “There are many mechanisms that have already been identified that explain how structural racism shapes health and healthcare.”

  In a phone interview, the lead author, Joseph Dieleman, associate professor of health metric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said: “These are taken as a given by us. These are not to be debated, or being tested, in our analysis.” 

  Health Affairs, dubbed by a Washington Post columnist as “the bible of health policy,” is redoubling its focus on systemic racism, anti-racism, and equity, not only in its published content but also in attending to the racial makeup of its published authors and reviewers.

  “We acknowledge that the dominant voices in our work are those with power and privilege,” Editor-in-Chief Alan Weil wrote in January. “Even as we have dramatically increased the volume of our content focused on equity, the narrative has primarily been written by those in power. We vow to change this.”

  Weil, who was trained in critical legal theory, a precursor to critical race theory, as a Harvard law student in the 1980s, said in a phone interview that the concepts of merit and quality are often used to maintain power and privilege, and these structures must be examined for bias.

  “We’re just talking about — forgive the language that is used by the believers — interrogating ourselves,” Weil said.

  Systemic racism, a core tenet of critical race theory, doesn’t have a settled definition but it has broad applicability. One of the peculiar features of systemic racism is that the mechanism is not evident to those who are not initiated into the theory, but ubiquitous to its acolytes.

  For best-selling and award-winning author Ibram X. Kendi, whose writings are considered essential reading at some medical schools, any disparity can signify racism. The concept can refer to all manner of disparate outcomes —  in murder rates, arrest rates, life expectancies, education levels, school discipline, household income, standardized tests scores and grades — even in the fact that black people are nowhere to be seen in the corridor portraits of medical school dignitaries and are underrepresented in symphony orchestras.

  

  “There is no ‘official’ definition of structural racism,” states a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine.  “All definitions make clear that racism is not simply the result of private prejudices held by individuals, but is also produced and reproduced by laws, rules, and practices, sanctioned and even implemented by various levels of government, and embedded in the economic system as well as in cultural and societal norms.”

  One line of attack against the status quo is the movement to eliminate long-accepted practices to promote merit and excellence that, according to activists, operate as colorblind mechanisms to produce unequal outcomes: gifted and talented programs, gifted schools, and admissions tests for elite high schools, as well as standardized test scores for university admission. In medicine, the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination test is changing from a graded score to pass/fail to help minority students, while Northwestern University and its Feinberg School of Medicine are promoting diversity by eliminating a six-decade-old Honors Program in Medical Education.

  Still, the concept provides special challenges for medicine. Unlike bacteria, for instance, systemic racism is an invisible force that can only be measured indirectly, by its perceived effects. Nevertheless, LaVeist is convinced that systemic racism is the best explanation for racial health disparities because the correlation of race and health is consistent across numerous studies for multiple chronic conditions.

  “We cannot make direct causal inferences. The best we can do is look at plausible causality,” LaVeist said. “What we have is a case where once you’ve ruled out all of the plausible explanations, the only thing left is systemic racism.”

  LaVeist and Weil agree that health and other disparities can have other causes than systemic racism, and good scholarship should be cognizant of other potential variables. LaVeist said that without allowing for other factors, people of color would have no free will, but it is important to note that African American culture is also shaped by white racism.

  One of LaVeist’s early co-authored papers that was rejected by several journals before finding a publisher concluded that black people who experience rudeness at the hands of white people have longer life expectancies if they blame systemic racism, or some other external factor, for being treated disrespectfully.

  An implication of the study: Even if the rude behavior by the white person isn’t caused by racism or an external factor, it’s strategically beneficial for black people to attribute the rudeness to someone else’s racism, boorishness or insensitivity, rather than blaming themselves.

  “Yes — racism, or some other external attribution,” LaVeist said. “If you make an external attribution, that is going to be healthier than you thinking, ‘Oh they’re right, I am a bad person, I deserve to be mistreated.’”

  Assari specializes in the study of “diminished returns” in quality of life and health that black people and other marginalized groups experience as they gain education and income in U.S. society. His research contends that black people reap fewer benefits — such as income and health — as they rise in education, compared to white people, which he attributes to structural racism. He has written half of the 300-some academic papers on that subject cited by the National Library of Medicine.

  He makes connections that would not be self-evident to someone who lacks training in his specialty. One of his recent papers, published in the Journal of Health Economics, says that Americans are less likely to smoke as their income level rises. But that rule doesn’t hold for high-income Chinese Americans, who are more likely to smoke as they generate more income.  So Assari postulates that upwardly mobile Chinese Americans resort to nicotine as a means of coping with the anti-Asian bias they encounter in this country’s elite institutions.  

  Yet, he also said that even though the anti-racist movement seems invincible now, overweening claims about systemic racism will eventually invite scholarly criticism, especially if equity policies and interventions now being implemented fail to deliver results.

  “I think there will be a very strong backlash against critical race theory very soon,” Assari said. “I don’t think it is sustainable. And it is falsifiable. So there would be an anti-CRT movement among other group of social scientists.”

  Nevertheless, Assari said systemic racism is a reliable theoretical framework because it parsimoniously explains the marginalization of many racial groups.

  “This is one model which explains many of our observations,” Assari said.

  “A theory is [reliable] when an observation or assumption holds regardless of the context, setting, place, population, design, sample. It is replicated many times across a diverse group of settings, age groups, resources, and outcomes.”

  LaVeist said segregation, much of it rooted in historical practices such as redlining and Jim Crow, is the primary driver of disparities. Poor neighborhoods are generally more polluted, closer to highways and industrial zones, and have less access to quality restaurants, grocery stores, public schools, and green spaces. Such environments tend to breed despair, which leads to crime and an overly aggressive police response.

  The constant stress of dealing with these hassles and micro-aggressions wears on the body, research into health disparities says, echoing arguments made by critical race theorists in the 1980s. One medical paper, published in The Lancet in 2017 and cited more than 1,500 times as of November, says that residential segregation is the foundation of structural racism, and notes that “growing research is linking interpersonal racism to various biomarkers of disease and well-being, including allostatic load, inflammatory markers, and hormonal dysregulation.”

  There are those who say the medical establishment is not going far enough in this research direction.

  The STAT News health information website reported in September that anti-racism and equity have become so trendy that “white scholars are colonizing research on health disparities.” According to the STAT investigation, white researchers are caught up in “a gold rush mentality” and “rushing to scoop up grants and publish papers.” The white scholars are replicating work done by black researchers without giving sufficient credit, a new form of exploitation practiced by “health equity tourists” and “opportunistic scientific carpetbaggers.”

  One of the worst offenders: JAMA’s August special issue on health disparities. “Not one of the five research papers published in the issue included a Black lead or corresponding author, and just one lead author was Hispanic,” STAT reported.

  Weil sympathizes with these concerns and said Health Affairs is creating a mentorship program to help scholars of color get their papers published in the journal. Weil, who said about 5% of submitted papers are accepted for publication at Health Affairs, is confident that dismantling power and privilege won’t necessitate compromising standards of excellence, and he considers such criticisms to be “generally false and intentionally inflammatory.”

  “Equitable representation should be the outcome of an equitable process, not the jerry-rigged result of a change of standards for one group — that is not where we want to be,” Weil said. “So if the fix here is an equitable outcome by lowering standards for a certain group, our readers will notice, and that’s not the end point I’m looking for.”

  Weil’s biggest concern is not that the anti-racist movement in medical research will go too far, but that the momentum and resolve will fizzle out.

  “I think it’s very hard to tell where you are on a swinging pendulum when you’re in the middle of it,” he said. “I am much more concerned that this will become a rote exercise where everyone genuflects to anti-racism but does nothing about it, than I am that this is an overcorrection.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 21:40

• Biden Education Dept Forgiving $2 Billion In Student Loans For Up To 30,000 Borrowers
  Biden Education Dept Forgiving $2 Billion In Student Loans For Up To 30,000 Borrowers

  Up to 30,000 student loan borrowers will have a cumulative $2 billion in debt forgiven by the Biden Education Department, after a series of major changes to the troubled Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program were announced.

  

  In a Thursday tweet, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced that “30K+ borrowers will get an estimated $3B forgiven.” Of that, “Roughly 10K have already had $715M discharged” with another 20,000 to follow.

  Here are the details:
  ▪️ 30K+ borrowers will get an estimated $2B forgiven.
  ▪️ Roughly 10K have already had $715M discharged.
  ▪️ 20K will receive emails in the coming weeks.

  Check your inboxes!

  — Secretary Miguel Cardona (@SecCardona) November 11, 2021

  “This is fantastic news for those who will have their debts cancelled and demonstrates how the Biden administration has the power to make life better for all people with student debt,” Mike Pierce, executive director at the Student Borrower Protection Center, told Yahoo Finance. “With payments currently set to restart in less than 90 days, there is much more work to be done for our public servants and all Americans with student loan debt.”

  Created by Congress in 2007, the PSLF program supplies taxpayer dollars for government and non-profit employees – including teachers, nurses, service members, first responders and other public service workers with federally-backed student loans to apply for forgiveness after providing proof of 120 monthly payments under a qualified repayment plan.

  ED’s policy change in October was previously expected to result in 22,000 student loan borrowers with consolidated loans — which were previously ineligible to be counted towards loan forgiveness — becoming “immediately eligible” for $1.74 billion in forgiveness. –Yahoo Finance

  “The temporary waivers announced by the Department of Education have been an actual life changing event for many of the borrowers we work with,” Betsy Mayotte, president of The Institute of Student Loan Advisors, told Yahoo Finance, adding that she’s received dozens of notes from borrowers who “woke up this week to find that their balance is finally zero.”

  According to the report, citing the National Education Association, 45% of educators took out an average of $55,800 in student loans to attend college. Of them, 14% with an unpaid loan balance are carrying $105,000 or more.

  When it comes to service members, the NEA found last year that while 200,000 service members hold a cumulative $3 billion in student loan debt, just 17,534 had submitted the proper paperwork to seek forgiveness – while around 40% of those applicants were actually on track for debt relief.

  “As the burden of student loan debt has impacted ever larger swathes of American society, the U.S. military has seen more service members come onto active duty with student loans,” said former former director of military and consumer protection at Veterans Education Success, Mike Saunders. “This means that PSLF has become a huge factor when it comes to getting the all-volunteer force to reenlist past their initial service obligation.”

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

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 21:20

• Kyle Rittenhouse's Mother "Shocked" Biden Called Her Son A White Supremacist
  Kyle Rittenhouse’s Mother “Shocked” Biden Called Her Son A White Supremacist

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  The mother of Kyle Rittenhouse on Thursday said that she was upset by President Joe Biden calling her son a white supremacist, saying the Democrat defamed the teenager.

  “When I saw that I was shocked, I was angry,” Wendy Rittenhouse said during an appearance on Fox News.

  “President Biden don’t know my son whatsoever. He’s not a white supremacist. He’s not a racist.”

  While running for the presidency last year, Biden shared a video on social media with the caption saying that then-President Donald Trump “refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night.”

  The video included a photograph of Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

  “He did that for the votes, and I was so angry for a while at him and what he did to my son – he defamed him,” Wendy Rittenhouse said in the new interview.

  The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

  There’s been no evidence put forth in the public sphere that indicates Rittenhouse holds white supremacist views.

  The teenager is on trial for shooting three white men in Kenosha amid rioting there in August 2020. Two died.

  

  Kyle Rittenhouse speaks to his mother in Kenosha, Wis., on Nov. 3, 2021. (Mark Hertzberg/Pool/Getty Images)

  Rittenhouse and his defense team say he acted in self-defense, noting the men either attacked or made to attack the teen. Prosecutors say Rittenhouse was trigger-happy and shouldn’t have fired upon the men.

  Rittenhouse faces up to life in prison if convicted on the most-serious charge, first-degree homicide. Rittenhouse was also charged with illegally possessing a weapon because he was 17 at the time, and reckless endangerment.

  Jurors are set to weigh whether to convict him next week following closing arguments.

  Wendy Rittenhouse, who has attended the trial in-person, said she thought her son was going to die when she watched footage that showed one man moving to kick the teen and another pointing a gun at him.

  

  She said her son has nightmares from what transpired.

  The mother also said she believes Kenosha County Judge Bruce Schroeder, who is presiding over the trial, is fair.

  Asked about the jury, she added, “They’ve been keeping a close eye on every evidence, every testimony, and they’re paying good attention what’s been said that’s the truth.”

  Well, @JoeBiden called him a “white supremacist,” and the gutless press failed to ask @PressSec about it today https://t.co/T0m1H08No6

  — Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) November 12, 2021

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

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 21:00

• Loudon County Pharmacy Accidentally Vaxxed 112 Kids With Adult COVID Dose
  Loudon County Pharmacy Accidentally Vaxxed 112 Kids With Adult COVID Dose

  More than 100 children in Loudoun County, Virginia, were given the wrong COVID-19 vaccine dosage. Parents of the children are furious about potential health complications. 

  Ted Pharmacy incorrectly administered Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to 112 children between Nov. 3-4. The children, aged 5-11, were given doses meant for people over 12. 

  “On Nov. 5, state and federal authorities ordered the pharmacy to discontinue administering the vaccine, and Virginia Department of Health (VDH) subsequently collected all COVID-19 vaccines at the pharmacy. 

  “Officials instructed the pharmacy to notify parents about next steps, including the recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding whether patients should restart the vaccine series or receive a correct second dose. VDH is also working to contact parents and ensure they understand the guidance on next steps,” VDH told Fox News in a statement. 

  A letter from VDH’s director, David Goodfriend, published by local news Fox 23, said that the health agency was aware of the incident and shared information with Pfizer and the CDC.

  “If you are the parent/guardian of a child ages 5-11 years old who received a dose of COVID-19 at Ted Pharmacy on Nov. 3 or Nov. 4, 2021, please review the following information,” Goodfriend wrote in a letter to parents who had their kids accidentally vaxxed with adult strength vaccines. 

  He added Ted Pharmacy had been removed from both state and federal COVID-19 vaccination programs. 

  

  Parents of the children are outraged by the vaccine mishap. Dasha Hermosilla told News4 that a pharmacist at Ted’s vaccinated her 7yo daughter with a diluted dose of the vaccine for adults.

  The pharmacist told her it was “okay” though a Google search confirmed Hermosilla’s worst nightmare: her daughter might be indanger.

  “I had this pit in my stomach that, like, what did they just do to my daughter?” she said. 

  Vaxxing children comes after the CDC unanimously recommended a special regimen of Pfizer-BionTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 5-11 years old on Nov. 2. The Biden administration has pushed to vaccinate nearly 28 million school children in the coming months.

  Health officials have asked parents to monitor their children for side effects of the vaccine. 

  Such a mishap will only worsen anxiety among parents about the Biden Administration’s increasingly draconian vaccination mandates.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 20:40

• Los Angeles Defunds Police, Uses Money For Guaranteed Income Experiment
  Los Angeles Defunds Police, Uses Money For Guaranteed Income Experiment

  Authored by James Breslo, op-ed via The Epoch Times,

  When people think of the proper role of city government, they usually think police, roads, and schools. The City of Los Angeles ranks near the bottom in all three (not to mention having the worst homeless problem in the country). Perhaps this is because the city seems more intent on engaging in social experiments than fixing roads, fighting crime, and improving schools.

  

  The latest example is its new “BIG:LEAP” basic income program, designed to “transform the role of local government.”

  While defunding the police and giving free money to people are considered fringe ideas in most places, in Los Angeles it is becoming a reality.

  Last week it began accepting applications for what amounts to a lottery for 3,000 lucky winners. The prize is $12,000 per year, at a total taxpayer cost of $36 million.

  This is far more than the $2,000 per year Andrew Yang, who introduced the concept to Americans in his presidential race, recently proposed to New Yorkers in his mayoral race. New Yorkers rejected it, giving him just 12 percent of the vote.

  About a third of the money comes from defunding the Los Angeles Police Department, another radical idea rejected in other areas. It was just roundly rejected by voters in Minneapolis despite it being the center of Black Lives Matter’s defund the police movement.

  All of the money, of course, comes from Los Angeles taxpayers. While it resembles a lottery, most are not eligible to win. The city effectively takes about $20 per taxpayer and redistributes it, through what is assured to be a “random” draw, to others.

  To be eligible to win this lottery, there is nothing you must do but meet the qualifications established by the city and fill out a lengthy questionnaire. You must have at least one child, thus making it yet another government program that has the effect of encouraging the poor to have children. You also must have income below the federal poverty line.

  So, for instance, a single mother with two children making over $22,000 per year would not qualify. Thus, the program acts as yet another that discourages work, since merely by working less, a person can qualify to make a free $12,000.

  Also, to qualify you must check a box indicating that you were adversely impacted by Covid-19. This allows the program to fit squarely within the “never let a tragedy go waste” strategy for progressives. Just like government subsidies, handouts, loan forgiveness, eviction protections, and rent forgiveness, this program disguises itself as a COVID-19 relief program when in fact it is intended to be the first step toward yet another, more radical government assistance program.

  The final requirement to qualify is filling out an extensive survey replete with highly personal questions about physical and mental health, finances, and lifestyle. It asks numerous unusual questions like, “In the last month how often have you been angered by things that were outside your control?” It appears Los Angeles seeks to turn its residents into lab rats. Indeed, the program is being done in concert with the “Center of Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania” to use as a model to “reform current policies, guide future programs, and aid in the expansion of our social safety net.”

  Naturally, it also asks for ethnicity, gender (i.e., male, female, “non-binary,” “agender,” or “gender fluid”), and sexual orientation. The program is clear in its objective:

  “While no single program can reverse decades of economic and racial inequality that marginalize low-income people of color, BIG:LEAP can point the way towards a more equitable and prosperous future.”

  Considering the application questions and the purported justification for the program, one must wonder how “random” the selection will be.

  Since it’s a city program, it sits on top of the myriad of other state and federal benefit programs already in place, such as CalWORKs (aid program for adults with children), Cal Fresh (food stamps), WIC (women, infants, and children) benefits, MediCal, and the federal earned income tax credit and Medicare. The program proudly boasts however, that unlike other California programs, there are “no restrictions on how the money can be spent.” In other words, using other peoples’ money to support your alcohol, cigarette, or drug habit: totally fine.

  Mayor Eric Garcetti is part of a network of “Mayors for Guaranteed Income,” a national network of mayors “interested in determining how cash—with no strings attached—can assist households in need.” Garcetti, however, will not be around to evaluate the program. He has chosen instead to leave his post midterm as mayor of America’s second largest city in favor of an ambassadorship. So, if this defund the police and redistribution experiment causes more crime in your neighborhood, you may have to address your complaints to New Delhi, India.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 20:20

• World's Largest 3D-Printed Neighborhood Coming To Austin, Texas 
  World’s Largest 3D-Printed Neighborhood Coming To Austin, Texas 

  Construction of the world’s largest community of 3D-printed homes is expected to break ground next year in Austin, Texas. 

  Lennar, the nation’s second-largest homebuilder, has teamed up with ICON, a technology pioneer specializing in large-scale 3D printing, to “print” 100 single-story houses using a giant 3D printer on-site to lay concrete-based building material. 

  Lennar Co-CEO Jon Jaffe recently stressed that the entire building industry faced shortages of materials and skyrocketing costs. To solve this problem, the company is turning to 3D printing: 

  “Labor and material shortages are two of the biggest factors pushing the dream of homeownership out of reach for many American families. 

  “Lennar has always expanded the boundaries of technological innovation to keep quality homes affordable, and 3D printing is an immensely encouraging approach,” Eric Feder, president of LenX, Lennar’s investment arm, said in a press release. 

  Digital renderings of the 3D-printed neighborhood were released last week. 

  

  The printers will squeeze out concrete in layers to build the frames of homes. Each home is expected to take a week to build. 

  

  ICON’s 3D printing technology can print homes up to 3,000 square feet and do it in less time with less waste than convention methods. 

  “Construction-scale 3D printing not only delivers higher-quality homes faster and more affordably, but fleets of printers can change the way that entire communities are built for the better. The United States faces a deficit of approximately 5 million new homes, so there is a profound need to swiftly increase supply without compromising quality, beauty, or sustainability and that is exactly the strength of our technology,” ICON co-founder and CEO Jason Ballard said. 

  With supply chain disruptions and soaring commodity costs, we’ve started to notice that more and more homes are being 3D printed. We told readers in May, “Screw Lumber, Just 3D-Print Your Next Home” because wood prices were at record highs and uneconomic to frame out a house. Also, we noted, homes in Florida and Virginia were printed earlier this year. Now an entire neighborhood in Austin is about to be printed.

  So what’s next? Print an entire city? 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 20:00

• Was COP26 Another Step Towards Disaster?
  Was COP26 Another Step Towards Disaster?

  Authored by Bill Blain via MorningPorridge.com,

  “From Glasgow to Greenock, in towns on each side, the hammer’s ding-dong is the Song of the Clyde”

  Greta Thunburg was right – there was a lot of blah, blah, blah at COP26, but also positive steps. The perception remains of rising climate risks, and that’s fuelling an increasingly de-growth extreme climate change populist agenda – which could prove even more disastrous than rising temperatures!

  As the COP26 climate change conference ticks into its final day, was it a success for the planet or for institutional blah blah blah? I guess we should listen to the scientists… so this morning I’ve taken the gospel according to New Scientist Magazine as one of my texts on the conference. Nicely balanced I thought.

  I am somewhat jaundiced at the prospects for a massive conference-jamboree of politicians, businesspeople and activists actually solving anything – but it does get media attention. We may quickly forget the utterly forgettable Alok Sharma (who he?), but we will remember Greta! We won’t forget the massive protest march in Glasgow. But, since the first COP1 meeting in Berlin in 1995, global CO2 levels have risen nearly 50%, temperatures are up 0.5 degrees, and the ice on the Greenland cap is melting faster. Talk is cheap – but people are listening now.

  The first draft summit communique yesterday didn’t please anyone – apparently. It urged nations to revisit and strengthen 2030 plans to hold warming to 1.5 and below 2 degrees. While Boris promises us the 1.5 degree temp rise ambition is achievable, the UN warned it’s on life support. Who do you believe? Depending on who you read the outcome will be anything from a 2.4 – 2.7 degree temperature rise – which will leave climate scientists in despair. The reality is holding to the 1.5 degree target looks increasingly unlikely, even if the world has agreed to cut methane by 30% – which means teaching cows to fart less or selling MickyDee Stock. (MickeyDee? Look for them at sign of the Golden Arches..)

  Funding for developing nations to ameliorate climate change and to transition from fossil fuels has already fallen well short of what was promised in Paris. While $100 bln is on offer, that’s the same sum India wants as a precondition to action its promised zero carbon plan for 2070. While there is a clearly justified case for the developed nations to pay, it’s an enormous risk. The unspoken reality (unspoken because climate conferences are all about trust, being nice and smiling for the camera, and not mentioning corruption) is the risk much of that money will simply end up making some folk incredibly rich and improving nothing.

  One big issue remains corporate behaviours – more corporate jets and Sushi flown in fresh from California than you could shake a sharp pointy stick at.

  Every company on the planet wants to be seen to be aligned with the new Green Mantra. Every company on the planet exists to sell stuff.

  More than a few are greenwashing – from banking, to autos, to airlines. I could have screamed at BA havering on about how sustainable hydrogen planes tomorrow mean you can still go on holiday today with a clean conscience – but hydrogen plans have massive tech challenges to overcome and are decades, not weeks, away!

  While some nations have banded together to outlaw fossil fuels, others are on the sidelines – while some remain absolutely deaf. Highlight moment from Glasgow has to be the perhaps apocryphal story of Scotland’s smiling first minister Nicola Sturgeon manoeuvring herself into a selfie with Greta, who snapped and asked pointedly if La Sturgeon’s economic plan remained an independent Scottish economy based on Oil… curiously, Scotland hasn’t joined the new European Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, Sturgeon realising what the loss of 100,000 jobs would do her political future.

  

  Over the past years I’ve written about the threats of climate change and global warming many times. I accept the science, and this year’s mounting evidence of rising – potentially chaotic – climate instability. I absolutely agree we have to do something – but what? There has been nonsense in Glasgow, but equally some good and positive stuff around it… The critical thing is: COP was never going to be the magic wand climate protestors demand.

  COP26 confirms World Leaders recognise the climate issue – but its left just as many questions hanging as to how we collectively solve the multiplexity of the crisis. The conference was long on pledges, promises and questions, but short on actual solutions. At the core of the coming crisis is what we perceive to be the threat: how do we transition from fossil fuels?

  Pragmatists understand a complete restructuring of global energy provision can’t happen overnight. It took 200 years for the world to industrialise and destabilise the climate. With the right political push and incentives, we have the wit and wisdom, and innovative capacity to make it cleaner over the next 30-50 years. We are an inventive species, and we may actually succeed in making things better. Just not overnight.

  Yet, of all the climate instability factors markets worry about, the one we might have missed is the growing consequences of green populism. The climate crisis could well manifest itself into a more immediate threat: political instability.

  Being green is no longer eccentric – its mainstream. Everyone will answer yes if asked about a better environment. That has moved the goal posts.

  Increasingly, extreme climate protestors are supporting “De-Growth” strategies – that it’s better to somehow switch off the world to avoid a catastrophic Malthusian disaster caused by too many people consuming to many resources and polluting our closed system spaceship earth. Malthus was wrong in the 18th Century and is no doubt still wrong today!

  What COP26 protests highlights is how polarised Green politics are on collision course with the economy and growth. It’s going to take years to wean the economy off fossil fuels, but protestors will demand it happens now! Governments have politically committed themselves to a Green future, but are only just waking up to the reality of the need to transit from fossil fuels to renewables – which isn’t feasible without a long-term plan.

  Much as I admire the passion of green campaigners, the current volatility of energy pricing demonstrates a massive underlying transition problem and political naivety. We can’t fundamentally change energy provision overnight. Climate protestors furious this generation have “stolen” their futures will be even less happy if they succeed in reversing economic growth. The result will be to ensure billions of children as yet unborn don’t just face rising temperatures and sea-levels, but also chronic poverty, unemployment, starvation, migration and rising conflict over the environment – water being the primary threat.

  While “democratic” western nations may embrace Degrowth populism – nations like China will not.

  It doesn’t need to be a frying pan vs fire choice, but that’s not the way popular politics work.

  The real failure of governments wasn’t ignoring Greta et al and the evidence of global warming, but not anticipating it and working out a transition plan. In coming years, the noise between climate protests and the slow pace of the transition to clean energy will get louder and become ever more likely to dislocate politics. It sets up for a political crisis within the next few years as empowered Green campaigners garner more air time. That has massive market implications.

  Pragmatists take the view we need a well thought out transition programme. I’ve warned about the dangers of over-simplification of the financial and economic aspects of the CO2 mitigation equation many times. There are consequences from doing the easy things like wind and solar renewables and lithium battery technology, rather than pursuing more difficult routes like nuclear and tidal energy, and cleaner capacitance solutions to get to long-term carbon neutrality.

  I’m intrigued to see the latest iteration of the EU’s Green Taxonomy includes Gas during the transition phase and also Nuclear power – a factor that already got some nations antsy! (Ah, how well I remember my student protest days at the Torness Nuclear power construction site and my girlfriends “nein danke nuclear” sticker on her 2CV… ah happy days..)

  The result of the current mishmash of competing green vs transition politics means that navigating the course to a clean global economy becomes a confusing mass of objectives such a timing carbon neutrality, realities such as population and economic growth, short and long-term solutions, and optimisations such as power vs growth. We all need to make compromises to get where we want to go. But, as is so often the case, compromise is a difficult concept for politicians. It’s even more difficult for extreme climate protestors.

  By all means trade markets in line with green objectives, but be very wary of just how destabilising Green Politics may become.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 19:40

• Lawsuit Claims Subway's "100% Tuna" Actually Contains Chicken, Pork And Cattle DNA
  Lawsuit Claims Subway’s “100% Tuna” Actually Contains Chicken, Pork And Cattle DNA

  A new lawsuit against casual dining chain Subway is alleging that chicken, pork and cattle were all found in the company’s tuna, which is advertised as “100% Tuna”.

  A proposed class action was filed this week by Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin, who claims that lab testing confirms the findings, Reuters reported.

  Subway has responded that the lawsuit is “reckless and improper”, that the plaintiffs have “filed three meritless complaints, changing their story each time,” and that its tuna is “high-quality, wild-caught, 100% tuna”.

  The restaurant chain says its tuna is “regulated strictly” in the U.S. 

  Since the initial complaint, Subway has hit back by running TV ads and launching a website dedicated to getting the message out that its tuna is, in fact, 100% tuna. 

  

  The plaintiff’s original complaint claimed that the company’s tuna salads, sandwiches and wraps were “bereft” of tuna and the amended complaint claims that the products are “not 100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna,” Reuters wrote.

  The second complaint was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar, but he gave the plaintiffs a chance to amend their claims. 

  The latest version of the complaint is reliant on the testing of a marine biologist, who looked at 20 tuna samples from 20 different Subway restaurants. 

  19 of those samples allegedly had “no detectable tuna DNA sequences,” while all of the samples contained chicken DNA, the report says. 11 of the samples contained pork DNA and 7 contained cattle DNA, the report says. 

  Amin, who has religious restrictions limiting meat that she can eat, claims she ordered Subway’s “100% Tuna” more than 100 times in the six years between 2013 and 2019.

  The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 19:20

• US And China: Collision Or Cooperation?
  US And China: Collision Or Cooperation?

  Authored by Pat Buchanan,

  In a surprise announcement at the Glasgow summit, U.S. climate czar John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart declared that their two countries have pledged to work together to slow global warming.

  Yet, the arrival a day earlier in Taiwan of a U.S. Navy plane from Clark Air Base in the Philippines, carrying a U.S. congressional delegation, set off a different reaction from Beijing:

  “The Chinese People’s Liberation Army will … take all necessary measures to resolutely smash any interference by external forces and ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist plots.”

  The incidents touch on one of the great questions of our time.

  Are China and the U.S., the world’s preeminent powers, headed for a clash or a level of engagement that will enable us both to avoid either a hot war or a second Cold War?

  

  In the 10 months since Joe Biden became president, the pessimists seem to have been largely proven right.

  Just six weeks into the Biden presidency, the U.S., in its annual human rights report, declared:

  “Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”

  This U.S. equating of China’s behavior with the war crimes for which Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg set the table for what has followed.

  China’s behavior toward the new Biden administration has been almost uniformly hostile and contemptuous of U.S. protests.

  Through the first 10 months of the Biden presidency, China has continued its persecution of the Uyghurs and systematically crushed the remnants of the democracy protests in Hong Kong.

  This past summer, China tested a hypersonic cruise missile that can reach anywhere in the United States and which U.S. forces do not possess.

  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said this hypersonic missile test may be the “Sputnik moment” for this generation, recalling that October day in 1957 when we awoke to learn the Soviet Union of Nikita Khrushchev had taken the lead in the space race.

  Lately, we have learned that China is erecting hundreds of silos to house missiles that can put at risk U.S. cities from L.A. to D.C.

  On one four-day period in October, China sent 149 fighters and bombers through the air defense identification zone of Taiwan.

  Also in October, a fleet of five Russian and five Chinese warships sailed through the Tsugaru Strait between the Japanese home islands of Hokkaido and Honshu, out into the Western Pacific and then back through the Japanese archipelago into the Sea of Japan.

  Message China is sending with its missile tests, warships and warplanes:

  “We, also, have a Monroe Doctrine.”

  “The South China Sea is ours, as are the Spratly and Paracel Islands within, and all the rocks and reefs we have occupied and fortified. The Taiwan Strait is ours, as is the island of Taiwan and its people. Any attempt by the regime in Taipei and its U.S. allies to declare independence will be regarded by China as an act of war. The nearby Senkaku Islands, though claimed and occupied by Japan, are ours also.”

  Message to Japan, South Korea and the Philippines from Beijing:

  “As the 20th was the American Century in the Pacific, the 21st century in East Asia and the Western Pacific will be the Chinese Century.”

  What is China’s goal here?

  Almost surely not a war with the United States, which could rapidly escalate into as great a disaster for us both as World War II was for many of the victors as well as the vanquished.

  The strategic goal for China is the dissolution of the U.S.’s alliances with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Australia; the adoption of a neutral or pro-China stance by the nations of East Asia and the Western Pacific; expulsion of U.S. military from the region back to Guam and Hawaii; and the absorption of the region into China’s orbit, not America’s.

  China aspires to become the new hegemonic power of East and South Asia and the Western Pacific, displacing the United States.

  Nor is this so wild a dream.

  While the Chinese navy is not today a match for the U.S. Navy with its carrier battle groups, China’s navy and army are larger than ours, the largest in the world, and in any conflict would be fighting for and from their own country, not someone else’s.

  Yesterday was Veterans Day, commemorating the 11th day of the 11th month, November, of 1918, when the greatest war in modern history ended with an armistice after millions of war casualties and civilian deaths.

  It had begun the way Chancellor Otto von Bismarck said it would, because of “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” — the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

  If there is a great war between China and the United States, it will likely be because of some damn fool thing in the Taiwan Strait.

  Avoiding that war should be the first order of business of both the Communist Party of China and the democratic capitalists of America.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 19:00

• Iran Nuke Deal Might Be Effectively Dead Without US "Guarantee" Demanded By Tehran
  Iran Nuke Deal Might Be Effectively Dead Without US “Guarantee” Demanded By Tehran

  Iran has recently said it will return to the nuclear negotiating table on Nov.29, however, there’s growing concern among world powers seeking a restoration of the 2015 JCPOA that talks could already be dead before they ever get restarted, given Tehran is now demanding a “guarantee” from Washington that it won’t back out of the 2015 deal again.

  “We need verification, and this remains unresolved. It is one of the issues that remains not finalized. It is not enough for the ink to be put on the agreement,” Iranian chief negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, said at the end of this week. 

  

  Bloomberg notes that “The request is a major logjam to progress as U.S. officials say they can’t bind successor governments. Talks are slated to recommence in Vienna Nov. 29 after a four-month break.” Very likely any future Republican administration would indeed reverse any near-future Biden deal that restores the deal. 

  This is after Iran has already ramped up its uranium stockpile and enrichment purity, breaching the 2015 JCPOA deal’s caps. Tehran is now saying it will not begin a return to full compliance until this guarantee is delivered by the Biden administration. 

  The Iranian chief negotiator’s words come days after Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said of Washington: 

  “They must lift the oppressive sanctions completely and effectively,” Khatibzadeh said, according to a report from Iran’s Mehr news agency. “They must guarantee that no administration in the United States mocks the world and international law” and again unilaterally pulls out of the agreement.

  “Iran will explain its position about the JCPOA talks in detail in the forthcoming trips,” Khatibzadeh said of Bagheri’s European tour. “Iran will not stop its compensatory actions until it is confident that US sanctions will be lifted in an effective and verifiable manner with the necessary and objective guarantees.”

  Given all this, and the likelihood that Washington won’t acquiesce, a number of Western pundits are asking: is the Iran deal already effectively dead without the US guarantee? 

  Iran’s lack of trust in the US administration is understandable: “Given that Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and reimposition of sanctions have crippled the Iranian economy—with high inflation and food prices afflicting the country—it makes sense that Iranian officials prefer to codify their return to the JCPOA under a legally binding treaty, rather than as a mere political commitment,” The National Review observes.

  “In fact, trust is so low that some Iranian conservatives have demanded that the United States compensate Iran for the economic harm it suffered under Trump’s sanctions even while the Islamic Republic was complying with the deal,” the commentary underscores.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 18:40

• IRS Says Tax Brackets Will Be Higher In 2022 Thanks To Faster Inflation
  IRS Says Tax Brackets Will Be Higher In 2022 Thanks To Faster Inflation

  Thanks to faster inflation in 2021, the IRS is raising the threshold for the top federal income-tax bracket in 2022 by nearly $20,000 for married couples – bringing the top 37% rate to income above $647,850, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing a Wednesday statement by the agency.

  

  The roughly 3% adjustment – an automatic provision built into the tax code – brings the top tax bracket for individuals to $539,900.

  The standard deduction for married couples will also rise from $25,100 to $25,900, while the maximum amount able to be placed into a healthcare flexible spending account will rise from $2,750 to $2,850. Estate and gift tax exclusion will rise from $11.7 million to $12.06 million, while the annual exclusion for gifts alone will rise from $15,000 to $16,000.

  The report comes as Tuesday’s “shock” CPI report revealed the highest inflation since 1990, while wages are not keeping pace.

  

  

  Due to increases in consumer prices, all of the tax bracket thresholds and other key tax-code parameters are rising faster than usual. This would be the largest increase in four years. Congress reset the brackets and changed the tax code’s inflation formulas in 2017.

  The changes announced Wednesday typically will affect paycheck withholding and quarterly estimated taxes during 2022 and will be reflected on tax returns filed in early 2023. -WSJ

  That said, Congress can alter the income levels and tax rates at will – with Democrats notably having discussed raising the tax rate while lowering the top-bracket threshold as part of the Biden admin social spending and climate agenda. Notably, however, current tax plans working their way through the House and Senate don’t affect tax brackets.

  According to the report, the bracket changes also affect ‘dozens of other key parameters in the tax code,’ including the tax credit for adoption and rules for those who expatriate.

  In October, consumer prices rose 6.2% YoY according to the Labor Department.

  Things that won’t change unless Congress specifically changes them? The $3,000 deduction for capital losses against ordinary income, the $10,000 SALT cap, and the $2,000 base level for the child tax credit.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 18:00

• Victor Davis Hanson: History Will Grind Out The Truth
  Victor Davis Hanson: History Will Grind Out The Truth

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

  “History will figure that out on its own.”

  That is what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently replied to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

  In a heated congressional exchange, Fauci derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was due to the leak of a dangerous virus, engineered in the Chinese Wuhan virology lab — and in part funded by U.S. health agencies, on the prompt of Fauci himself.

  Fauci offered arguments from authority by citing his own expertise, as well as that of “card-carrying” specialists.

  But in truth, there is little evidence that any animal species has been found infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus or a close relative that causes COVID-19 or a similar illness.

  Many federal health experts increasingly believe the virus was manmade. A number argue that it was likely a product of gain-of-function research that was funded in part by a U.S. government grant.

  Others concede that Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak — who was involved in gain-of-function research, often in cooperation with the Chinese — were not candid about the full extent of their ties to the Wuhan lab.

  But despite Chinese resistance to releasing pertinent data, history eventually will sort the truth out — as it does with most controversies of the moment.

  *  *  *

  Five years ago, the New York Times, the Washington Post, most of the mainstream media and the majority of the bipartisan Washington, D.C., political and government establishments insisted that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election.

  In support of such conspiracy theories, they fixated on the so-called Steele dossier. It was a supposedly independent research effort detailing “proof” of Trump-Russian cooperation to rob Hillary Clinton of the election.

  That supposed evidence was the unspoken ground swell for a 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation of Trump conducted by former FBI head Robert Mueller.

  For over 650 days, the country was consumed with “Russian collusion.” Cable news outlets, public television and radio pundits, along with high-ranking Democratic politicians, almost daily announced the impending end of the colluding Trump administration.

  They peddled rumors of Trump’s supposed obscene activity in Moscow. They spun tales of mysterious meetings between Trump’s family and Russian operatives, and of Trump surrogates’ supposed trips to meet with Russian colluding officials.

  Christopher Steele, the architect of the “dossier,” had not been to Russia in decades. He was a rank partisan in the pay of the Clinton campaign — and for a time the FBI itself.

  Five years later, history has almost sorted out the fable that the most powerful, wealthy and influential Americans in the nation once foisted upon the public.

  Special prosecutor John Durham seems to be slowly indicting the promulgators of the hoax. The earlier lengthy internal audit by Inspector General Michael Horowitz cited wrongdoing on the part of the Department of Justice and FBI.

  The Mueller investigation failed to find any proof of Russian-Trump collusion. The 2018 majority report of the House Intelligence Committee came to the same conclusion.

  The admission of false statements by former FBI interim director Andrew McCabe, along with the felonious altering of a court document by FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, were other elements of the warped and unprofessional behavior of the FBI.

  Both Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey were unable to answer fundamental questions while under oath about the dossier and the role of its authors in spreading the collusion hoax. Mueller’s legal team and Comey himself habitually leaked rumors that fed the collusion hoax.

  History, however, is slowly sorting it out – despite the approved narrative of the well-connected who misled the country to pursue their own political agendas.

  *  *  *

  Someday historians of public health will unravel the full costs of locking down most of America in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic.

  What are now near-taboo topics – the vigorous natural immunity offered from prior infection, and the terrible damage done by the quarantines – earn cancel culture damnation, employment suspension and media calumny. But soon they likely will become matter-of-factly accepted as truth.

  *  *  *

  The same will be said of the hysterical myths that surround the unfortunate January 6 riot at the Capitol.

  Five years from now history will show that there was no conspiracy, no pre-planned “insurrection” — as the FBI has already concluded.

  The late Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick was not murdered as was alleged. Those “armed” inside the Capitol did not carry — much less use — guns. The one violent death, that of Ashli Babbitt, was of an unarmed female who was lethally shot by an officer for attempting to enter through a broken window.

  The solitary confinement, indefinite incarceration and inhumane jail conditions accorded some of the accused will be shown contrary to the Constitution of the United States of America.

  *  *  *

  In other words, history eventually will sort it all out.

  

  Or as the second-century A.D. skeptic philosopher Sextus Empricus noted, eventually the truth emerges and cosmic justice is rendered: “The millstones of the gods grind late, but they grind fine.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 17:40

• Michigan AG Apologizes After Passing Out Drunk At Football Game After "Eating 2 Bloody Marys"
  Michigan AG Apologizes After Passing Out Drunk At Football Game After “Eating 2 Bloody Marys”

  Michigan’s Attorney General apparently has “got some splainin’ to do”...

  That is, of course, only if you think passing out drunk at a football game on over the weekend is some kind of faux pas. For us, we say “what happens on the weekend, stays on the weekend”. 

  But that hasn’t stopped Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel from publicly apologizing after being caught on camera passed out in the stands, according to The Hill. 

  Nessel wrote this week: “My staff has pleaded with me to hire a crisis-management PR firm for an incident that occurred on 10/30 at the UM/MSU football game. Instead, I thought I would just share the events which transpired that fateful day.” 

  She said on Facebook that she went to a tailgate party and – we swear we are not making this up – thought it was a good idea to “eat 2 Bloody Marys.” 

  

  Nessel wrote on social media: “I thought it seemed like a good idea to eat 2 Bloody Mary’s, since as long as you put enough vegetables in them, it’s practically a salad. As it turned out, this was not a brilliant idea.”

  She then says she started to feel sick at the game and friends encouraged her to leave “so she wouldn’t vomit on other fans”. She exited in a wheelchair, the report says. 

  Nessel wrote that her wife helped her through a “skull crushing hangover” the next day. 

  We have to give credit where it’s due, however: Nessel owned the “PR crisis”. On her Facebook, she posted a photo of herself slumped over with her hat pulled over her face.

  She concluded by saying: “From now on, I pledge never to drink on an empty stomach, and definitely never to have another Bloody Mary. Cause it’s gonna take a while to get that taste out of my mouth. Sorry to all the people who have supported me for letting you down. I will try to do better.”

  Godspeed, Dana. Godspeed. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 11/12/2021 – 17:20

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• The Metaverse Is Big Brother in Disguise: Freedom Meted Out By Technological Tyrants
  The Metaverse Is Big Brother in Disguise: Freedom Meted Out By Technological Tyrants

  Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

  “The term metaverse, like the term meritocracy, was coined in a sci fi dystopia novel written as cautionary tale. Then techies took metaverse, and technocrats took meritocracy, and enthusiastically adopted what was meant to inspire horror.”

  – Antonio García Martínez

  Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete.

  

  Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, sees this digital universe—the metaverse—as the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.

  Yet while Zuckerberg’s vision for this digital frontier has been met with a certain degree of skepticism, the truth—as journalist Antonio García Martínez concludes—is that we’re already living in the metaverse.

  The metaverse is, in turn, a dystopian meritocracy, where freedom is a conditional construct based on one’s worthiness and compliance.

  In a meritocracy, rights are privileges, afforded to those who have earned them. There can be no tolerance for independence or individuality in a meritocracy, where political correctness is formalized, legalized and institutionalized. Likewise, there can be no true freedom when the ability to express oneself, move about, engage in commerce and function in society is predicated on the extent to which you’re willing to “fit in.”

  We are almost at that stage now.

  Consider that in our present virtue-signaling world where fascism disguises itself as tolerance, the only way to enjoy even a semblance of freedom is by opting to voluntarily censor yourself, comply, conform and march in lockstep with whatever prevailing views dominate.

  Fail to do so—by daring to espouse “dangerous” ideas or support unpopular political movements—and you will find yourself shut out of commerce, employment, and society: Facebook will ban you, Twitter will shut you down, Instagram will de-platform you, and your employer will issue ultimatums that force you to choose between your so-called freedoms and economic survival.

  This is exactly how Corporate America plans to groom us for a world in which “we the people” are unthinking, unresistant, slavishly obedient automatons in bondage to a Deep State policed by computer algorithms.

  Science fiction has become fact.

  Twenty-some years after the Wachowskis’ iconic film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a blue pill or a red pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.

  We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing human beings and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives.

  In The Matrix, computer programmer Thomas Anderson a.k.a. hacker Neo is wakened from a virtual slumber by Morpheus, a freedom fighter seeking to liberate humanity from a lifelong hibernation state imposed by hyper-advanced artificial intelligence machines that rely on humans as an organic power source. With their minds plugged into a perfectly crafted virtual reality, few humans ever realize they are living in an artificial dream world.

  Neo is given a choice: to take the red pill, wake up and join the resistance, or take the blue pill, remain asleep and serve as fodder for the powers-that-be.

  Most people opt for the blue pill.

  In our case, the blue pill—a one-way ticket to a life sentence in an electronic concentration camp—has been honey-coated to hide the bitter aftertaste, sold to us in the name of expediency and delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.

  Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.

  Look around you. Everywhere you turn, people are so addicted to their internet-connected screen devices—smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions—that they can go for hours at a time submerged in a virtual world where human interaction is filtered through the medium of technology.

  This is not freedom. This is not even progress.

  This is technological tyranny and iron-fisted control delivered by way of the surveillance state, corporate giants such as Google and Facebook, and government spy agencies such as the National Security Agency.

  So consumed are we with availing ourselves of all the latest technologies that we have spared barely a thought for the ramifications of our heedless, headlong stumble towards a world in which our abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos is grooming us for a future in which freedom is an illusion.

  Yet it’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.

  If ever Americans find themselves in bondage to technological tyrants, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.

  Indeed, we’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

  Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

  The key word here, however, is control.

  In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have—and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in—will be connected and talking to each other.”

  By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”

  As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.

  It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

  This “connected” industry has become the next big societal transformation, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.

  Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. (By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.)

  These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

  Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

  The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

  Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries. As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”

  For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street. For that matter, how do you defend yourself against a robotic cop—such as the Atlas android being developed by the Pentagon—that has been programmed to respond to any perceived threat with violence?

  Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

  It is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:

  Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.

  In other words, the IoS will rely on technology being able to access and act on your thoughts.

  Fourtane outlines several trends related to the IoS that are expected to become a reality by 2030:

  1: Thoughts become action: using the brain as the interface, for example, users will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination.

  2: Sounds will become an extension of the devised virtual reality: users could mimic anyone’s voice realistically enough to fool even family members.

  3: Real food will become secondary to imagined tastes. A sensory device for your mouth could digitally enhance anything you eat, so that any food can taste like your favorite treat.

  4: Smells will become a projection of this virtual reality so that virtual visits, to forests or the countryside for instance, would include experiencing all the natural smells of those places.

  5: Total touch: Smartphones with screens will convey the shape and texture of the digital icons and buttons they are pressing.

  6: Merged reality: VR game worlds will become indistinguishable from physical reality by 2030.

  This is the metaverse, wrapped up in the siren-song of convenience and sold to us as the secret to success, entertainment and happiness.

  It’s a false promise, a wicked trap to snare us, with a single objective: total control.

  George Orwell understood this.

  Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

  As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.

  The Metaverse is just Big Brother in disguise.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 23:40

• In Rare Move, Space Station Fires Thrusters To Dodge Debris From 2007 Chinese Weapons Test
  In Rare Move, Space Station Fires Thrusters To Dodge Debris From 2007 Chinese Weapons Test

  Low Earth orbit (LEO) is cluttered with space junk that has been steadily increasing over the years. The problem is so severe that the International Space Station (ISS) had to power up its thrusters to dodge a piece of Chinese space debris on Wednesday.

  NYT reports the ISS dodged “35114” in NASA’s list of space junk, also identified as 1999-025DKS, a piece of debris from a Chinese weather satellite that was blown up in LEO via a ballistic missile test in 2007. The in-orbit explosion caused over 3,000 pieces of debris. 

  NASA and Russia’s space agency in Moscow worked together to fire up ISS’ thrusters that raised ISS about a mile in altitude to avoid 35114. 

  

  “It just makes sense to go ahead and do this burn and put this behind us so we can ensure the safety of the crew,” Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS manager, told reporters on Tuesday ahead of the maneuver.

  Since the inception of the space station in the late 1990s, there have only been 29 such avoidance maneuvers. 

  Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at Harvard who tracks space junk, tweeted Wednesday that thrusters were fired around “2015 UTC to adjust the Space Station’s orbit and make sure it doesn’t get hit by debris object 35114.” 

  Roskosmos confirmes that the Progress MS-18 engines were fired as planned at 2015 UTC to adjust the Space Station’s orbit and make sure it doesn’t get hit by debris object 35114. https://t.co/NegUFedDNq

  — Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) November 10, 2021

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

  ISS’ debris-dodging maneuver didn’t impact Thursday’s docking of the Crew Dragon capsule with the station. 

  Not all objects can be dodged. On May 12, a small, untrackable piece of space junk ripped through a robotic arm on the station. It caused no damage but underlined the space junk problem. 

  Space agencies track around 30,000 pieces of space debris in LEO. As the technology to launch satellites and humans into space becomes cheaper and more accessible, more junk gathers in LEO. 

  “The biggest contributor to the current space debris problem is explosions in orbit, caused by left-over energy—fuel and batteries—onboard spacecraft and rockets. Despite measures being in place for years to prevent this, we see no decline in the number of such events. Trends towards end-of-mission disposal are improving, but at a slow pace,” European Space Agency recently said. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 23:20

• Aussie Health Chief Says People Who Don't Get Vaccinated Will Be "Miserable" And "Lonely" For Life
  Aussie Health Chief Says People Who Don’t Get Vaccinated Will Be “Miserable” And “Lonely” For Life

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  The Queensland president of the Australian Medical Association said during a television appearance that people still refusing to get the vaccine will be “miserable” and “lonely” for the rest of their lives.

  

  Yes, really.

  “Oh, they’re crazy not to get vaccinated, life will be miserable without getting vaccinated,” said Dr. Chris Perry.

  “You won’t be able to hide, you won’t be able to get a doctor to sign off that you got an exclusion because there’s quite set rules on that and doctors will be audited, every one of their exclusions will be looked at very carefully,” he added, before threatening doctors with fines and termination.

  Perry also threatened people who falsely obtain a vaccine exemption that they will also be hit with fraud charges if they “try and get round the system.”

  @mickrowan

   

  ♬ original sound – Mick M. Rowan

  https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js

  “It’s going to be very hard to maintain your employment if you’re not vaccinated and you won’t be able to go anywhere for any entertainment,” he said.

  Perry concluded by saying that those who don’t get double jabbed will have “a very, very lonely life” and wouldn’t be able to maintain a job.

  Now tell me again how the vaccine isn’t mandatory?

  During subsequent comments, Perry blamed “conspiracy theorists” for making people hesitant to take the vaccine.

  “In the age of social media, any potential slight headache or small, serious problem with the vaccines is magnified,” he said.

  *  *  *

  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. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here.Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Get early access, exclusive content and behinds the scenes stuff by following me on Locals.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 23:00

• "Yeah, That Looks Bad": Metallurgist Pleads Guilty To Faking Navy Submarine Steel Tests For Decades
  “Yeah, That Looks Bad”: Metallurgist Pleads Guilty To Faking Navy Submarine Steel Tests For Decades

  A Washington state-based metallurgist has pleaded guilty to fraud after fabricating the results of strength tests on steel used in US Navy submarines for more than 30 years.

  

  According to federal prosecutors, 67-year-old Elaine Marine Thomas of Auburn, Washington falsified strength and toughness results in at least 240 tests between 1985 and 2017 – claiming that the steel met the Navy’s strength requirements when in fact it did not. Thomas, who was charged with one criminal count of major fraud against the United States, was the director of metallurgy at a Tacoma foundry which was acquired by Kansas City-based Bradken, Inc., the Navy’s leading supplier of high-strength steel used in submarine hulls.

  The tests, often conducted at -100 degrees Fahrenheit, represented nearly half of Bradken’s high-yield steel produced for use in Navy submarines.

  Thomas was busted after a junior metallurgist being groomed as her replacement reported suspicious test results, after which she was immediately terminated. The fraud was admitted to after a special agent from the Department of Defense’s Criminal Investigative Service confronted Thomas with evidence dating back to 1990.

  “Yeah, that looks bad,” she said, according to the criminal complaint, which added that she thought conducting tests at such cold temperatures was “a stupid requirement.”

  Thomas faces up top 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine when she’s sentenced in February.

  While the affected vessels were not disclosed by authorities, there was no indication in the initial complaint that any submarine hulls had been compromised. That said, it would be interesting to know if any of the compromised metal was used in the USS Connecticut, which collided with an underwater mountain in the South China Sea on Oct. 2, injuring 11 crewmembers and causing an undisclosed amount of damage. Built between 1992 and 1997 by General Dynamics, the Connecticut underwent a hull inspection in 2019 as part of a $17 million project at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

  

  The falsified reports came to public attention in June 2020, when Bradken paid a $10.9 million fine as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice. The company learned of the deception in 2017, however they found themselves in hot water after initially suggesting that the discrepancies were not the result of fraud. The lie reportedly hindered the Navy’s investigation into how widespread the problem was, along with efforts to determine what risk it had put sailors in.

  “Bradken placed the Navy’s sailors and its operations at risk,”  Seattle U.S. Attorney Brian Moran said last year. “Government contractors must not tolerate fraud within their organizations, and they must be fully forthcoming with the government when they discover it.”

  Thomas’s lawyer, John Carpenter, said in a statement filed in federal court on Monday that his client “took shortcuts and made material misrepresentations.”

  “Ms Thomas never intended to compromise the integrity of any material and is gratified that the government’s testing does not suggest that the structural integrity of any submarine was in fact compromised,” the statement continues.

  “This offense is unique in that it was neither motivated by greed nor any desire for personal enrichment. She regrets that she failed to follow her moral compass – admitting to false statements is hardly how she envisioned living out her retirement years.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 22:40

• Promoting World Peace, Not Glorifying War
  Promoting World Peace, Not Glorifying War

  Via Veterans For Peace,

  After Armistice Day was rebranded Veterans Day by U.S. Congress, it quickly morphed into an occasion for honoring the military…

  

  Over one hundred years ago, in 1918, the world celebrated peace as a universal principal.

  The first World War had just ended and nations mourning their dead collectively called for an end to all wars.

  Armistice Day was born and was designated as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated.”

  After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to rebrand Nov. 11 as Veterans Day.

  Honoring the warrior quickly morphed into honoring the military and glorifying war. Armistice Day was flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.

  Veterans For Peace has taken the lead in lifting up the original intention of Nov. 11th – as a day for peace. As veterans we know that a day that celebrates peace, not war, is the best way to honor the sacrifices of veterans. We want generations after us to never know the destruction war has wrought on people and the earth.

  Veterans For Peace is calling on everyone to stand up for peace this Armistice Day. More than ever, the world faces a critical moment. Tensions are heightened around the world and the U.S. is engaged militarily in multiple countries, without an end in sight.

  Here at home, we have seen the increasing militarization of our police forces and brutal crackdowns on dissent and people’s uprisings against state power. We must press our government to end reckless military interventions that endanger the entire world. We must build a culture of peace.

  This Armistice Day, Veterans For Peace calls on the U.S. public to say no to more war and to demand justice and peace, at home and abroad. We know Peace is Possible and call for an end to all oppressive and violent policies, and for equality for all.

  Learn More about Armistice Day.

  *  *  *

  Numbers from the Census Bureau show that despite the continued U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts, older veterans remained the norm in the U.S. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes,  as of 2019, more than half were over the age of 65.

  In the same year, there were 17.4 million veterans in the U.S., down from 21.8 million in 2010.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Only around 380,000 World War II veterans were still alive in 2019.

  The number of U.S. vets is expected to further decline as the largest group among them remain the older Vietnam vets.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 22:20

• Robots Steal Jobs During Pandemic As Working Poor Displaced 
  Robots Steal Jobs During Pandemic As Working Poor Displaced 

  Companies faced with worker shortages and soaring labor costs are increasingly turning to automation to address the challenging economic climate. 

  Hiring issues have been widespread across the economy, and wages are spiking. These two forces are compressing margins for companies that force them to invest in robots to mitigate labor woes. 

  During the pandemic, we reported microbe-zapping disinfecting robots were introduced in airports and hospitals, fast-food chains adopted hamburger flipping robots, and restaurants began to use robo-waiters. 

  

  With the worst days of the virus pandemic hopefully over, the automation trend continues to gain momentum. Bloomberg, citing a new report from the International Federal of Robotics, said spending on professional service robots jumped 12% last year. 

  

  With the number of open jobs around 10MM, Americans are quitting with ease. For the first time in decades, workers have power in the labor market. And they’re using this newfound leverage to launch a flurry of strikes, demanding higher pay and more benefits from companies. This has created all sorts of headaches for their preoccupied bosses, dealing with snarled supply chains. 

  Unions have long viewed robots as a threat. Companies “have one goal in mind: to eliminate your job, and put more money in their pockets,” International Longshoremen’s Association President Harold Daggett said at a June conference. “We’re going to fight this for 100 years.” 

  But the fight could be pointless as the automation wave is already sweeping through the economy, supercharged by the pandemic. Even before the virus, wealth inequality was at extremes, and what will make it worse is automation:

  “If it continues, labor demand will grow slowly, inequality will increase, and the prospects for many low-education workers will not be very good,” said Daron Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He testified Wednesday at a Senate hearing on automation. 

  Acemoglu said firms could “develop technologies that are more complementary to workers.” But he said that’s not “the direction the technology is going currently.” 

  Robot technology allows machines to displace humans and could boost productivity but wipe out jobs for the working poor. There will be growing pains in the economy this decade as displaced workers sit idle, and what’s likely to happen is the government will continue to issue stimulus checks. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 22:00

• Escobar: Afghanistan – Between Pipelines & ISIS-K, The Americans Are Still In Play
  Escobar: Afghanistan – Between Pipelines & ISIS-K, The Americans Are Still In Play

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

  US trained and armed Afghan security forces are joining ISIS-K, which makes the US ‘withdrawal’ from Afghanistan look more like an American ‘repositioning’ to keep chaos humming…

  

  Something quite extraordinary happened in early November in Kabul.

  Taliban interim-Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi and Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov got together to discuss a range of political and economic issues. Most importantly, they resurrected the legendary soap opera which in the early 2000s I dubbed Pipelineistan: the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline.

  Call it yet another remarkable, historical twist in the post-jihad Afghan saga, going back as far as the mid-1990s when the Taliban first took power in Kabul.

  In 1997, the Taliban even visited Houston to discuss the pipeline, then known as TAP, as reported in Part 1 of my e-book Forever Wars.

  During the second Clinton administration, a consortium led by Unocal – now part of Chevron – was about to embark on what would have been an extremely costly proposition (nearly $8 billion) to undercut Russia in the intersection of Central and South Asia; as well as to smash the competition: the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline.

  The Taliban were duly courted – in Houston and in Kabul. A key go-between was the ubiquitous Zalmay Khalilzad, aka ‘Bush’s Afghan,’ in one of his earlier incarnations as Unocal lobbyist-cum-Taliban interlocutor. But then, low oil prices and non-stop haggling over transit fees stalled the project. That was the situation in the run-up to 9/11.

  In early 2002, shortly after the Taliban were expelled from power by the American “bombing to democracy” ethos, an agreement to build what was then still billed as TAP (without India), was signed by Ashgabat, Kabul and Islamabad.

  

  The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline route

  As years went by, it was clear that TAPI, which runs for roughly 800 km across Afghan lands and could yield as much as $400 million annually in transit revenue for Kabul’s coffers, would never be built while hostage to a guerrilla environment.

  Still, five years ago, Kabul decided to revive TAPI and work started in 2018 – under massive security in Herat, Farah, Nimruz and Helmand provinces, already largely under Taliban control.

  At the time, the Taliban said they would not attack TAPI and would even provide their own security. The gas pipeline was to be paired with fiber optic cables – as with the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan – and a railway line from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan.

  History never stops playing tricks in the graveyard of empires. Believe it or not, we’re now back to the same situation on the ground as in 1996.

  The spanner in the works

  If we pay attention to the plot twists in this never-ending Pipelineistan saga, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that TAPI will finally be built. It’s certainly a quadruple win for all involved – including India – and a massive step towards Eurasia’s integration in its Central-South Asian node.

  Enter the spanner in the works: ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), the subsidiary of Daesh in Afghanistan.

  Russian intel has known for over a year that the usual suspects have been providing help to ISIS-K, at least indirectly.

  Yet now there’s a new element, confirmed by Taliban sources, that quite a few US-trained soldiers of the previous Afghan National Army are incorporating themselves into ISIS-K to fight against the Taliban.

  ISIS-K, which sports a global jihadi mindset, has typically viewed the Taliban as a group of dirty nationalists. Earlier jihadi members used to be recruited from the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Yet now, apart from former soldiers, they are mostly young, disaffected urban Afghans, westernized by trashy pop culture.

  It’s been hard for ISIS-K to establish the narrative that the Taliban are western collaborators – considering that the NATO galaxy continues to antagonize and/or dismiss the new rulers of Kabul.

  So the new ISIS-K spin is monomaniac: basically, a strategy of chaos to discredit the Taliban, with an emphasis on the latter being unable to provide security for average Afghans. That is what underlies the recent horrific attacks on Shia mosques and government infrastructure, including hospitals.

  In parallel, US President Joe Biden’s “over the horizon” spin, meant to define the alleged American strategy to fight ISIS-K, has not convinced anyone, apart from NATO vassals.

  Since its creation in 2015, ISIS-K continues to be financed by the same dodgy sources that fueled chaos in Syria and Iraq. The moniker itself is an attempt to misdirect, a divisive ploy straight out of the CIA’s playbook.

  Historic ‘Khorasan’ comes from successive Persian empires, a vast area ranging from Persia and the Caspian all the way to northwest Afghanistan – and has nothing whatsoever to do with Salafi-jihadism and the Wahhabi lunatics who make up the terrorist group’s ranks. Furthermore, these ISIS-K jihadis are based in south-eastern Afghanistan, away from Iran’s borders, so the ‘Khorasan’ label makes zero sense.

  Russian, Chinese and Iranian intel operate on the basis that the US ‘withdrawal’ from Afghanistan, as in Syria and Iraq, was not a withdrawal but a repositioning. What’s left is the trademark, undiluted American strategy of chaos executed via both direct (troops stealing Syrian oil) and indirect (ISIS-K) actors.

  The scenario is self-evident when one considers that Afghanistan was the precious missing link of China’s New Silk Roads. After the US exit, Afghanistan is not only primed to fully engage with Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but also to become a key node of Eurasia integration as a future full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

  To hedge against these positive developments, the routine practices of the Pentagon and its NATO subsidiary remain in wait in Afghanistan, ready to disrupt political, diplomatic, economic and security progress in the country. We may be now entering a new chapter in the US Hegemony playbook: Closet Forever Wars.

  The closely connected SCO

  Fifth columnists are tasked with carrying the new imperial message to the West. That’s the case of Rahmatullah Nabil, former head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS), “the Afghan intelligence service with close ties to the CIA,” as described by Foreign Policy magazine..

  In an interview presented with a series of trademark imperial lies – “law and order is disintegrating,” “Afghanistan has no friends in the international community,” “the Taliban have no diplomatic partners” – Nabil, at least, does not make a complete fool of himself.

  He confirms that ISIS-K keeps recruiting, and adds that former Afghan defense/security ops are joining ISIS-K because “they see the Islamic State as a better platform for themselves.”

  He’s also correct that the Taliban leadership in Kabul is “afraid the extreme and young generation of their fighters” may join ISIS-K, “which has a regional agenda.”

  Russia “playing a double game” is just silly. In presidential envoy Zamir Kabulov, Moscow maintains a first-class interlocutor in constant touch with the Taliban, and would never allow the “resistance,” as in CIA assets, to be based in Tajikistan with an Afghan destabilization agenda.

  On Pakistan, it’s correct that Islamabad is “trying to convince the Taliban to include pro-Pakistan technocrats in their system.” But that’s not “in return for lobbying for international recognition.” It’s a matter of responding to the Taliban’s own management needs.

  The SCO is very closely connected on what they collectively expect from the Taliban. That includes an inclusive government and no influx of refugees. Uzbekistan, for instance, as the main gateway to Central Asia for Afghanistan, has committed to participating in the reconstruction business.

  For its part, Tajikistan announced that China will build a $10 million military base in the geologically spectacular Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region. Countering western hysteria, Dushanbe made sure that the base will essentially host a special rapid reaction unit of the Regional Department for Organized Crime Control, subordinated to Tajikistan’s Minister of Internal Affairs.

  That will include around 500 servicemen, several light armored vehicles, and drones. The base is part of a deal between Tajikistan’s Interior Ministry and China’s Ministry of State Security.

  The base is a necessary compromise. Tajik President Emomali Rahmon has a serious problem with the Taliban: he refuses to recognize them, and insists on better Tajik representation in a new government in Kabul.

  Beijing, for its part, never deviates from its number one priority: preventing Uighurs from the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) by all means from crossing Tajik borders to wreak havoc in Xinjiang.

  So all the major SCO players are acting in tandem towards a stable Afghanistan. As for US Think Tankland, predictably, they don’t have much of a strategy, apart from praying for chaos.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 21:40

• America Is Short A Whopping 80,000 Truck Drivers 
  America Is Short A Whopping 80,000 Truck Drivers 

  America is short tens of thousands of truck drivers as supply chain woes increase at ports, creating shortages and pushing inflation higher. Truckers haul an astonishing 72.5% of all freight in the US and account for 6% of the full-time workforce.

  Bob Costello, the Chief Economist for the American Trucking Association (ATA), told 6 News that the US is short a whopping 80,000 truck drivers, up from an estimated shortage of 61,500 drivers before the virus pandemic. He said the industry needs to recruit over a million drivers this decade to replace an aging workforce. 

  

  Costello said several factors contribute to the shortage of drivers, including age demographics, ongoing COVID pandemic, drug testing, trouble recruiting, pay, age restrictions (commercial drivers must be 21), and infrastructure issues. 

  He told Fortune that “there is no single cause of the driver shortage, that means there is no single solution, adding that “the solution to the driver shortage will most certainly require increased pay, regulatory changes, and modifications to shippers’, receivers’ and carriers’ business practices to improve conditions for drivers.” 

  However, there is some good news as labor markets recover and increasing job transitions are underway, which is an uptick in applications for commercial driver’s licenses.  

  Sunny Truck Driving School in Queens, New York, has added new training trucks to keep up with a flood of new applicants, according to BBC. The wait times to take the test have jumped from 4 weeks to 12 weeks. Some of the new applicants are former taxi and uber drivers, seeking higher pay after the pandemic left them jobless. 

  In Texas, the state government has expanded truck-driver license testing to six days a week (instead of five) in response to the nationwide shortage that has resulted in supply chain snarls. The pay is so good in The Lone Star State that one transportation company is offering drivers $14k per week. 

  DPS adds Saturday services for CDLs at select offices in Nov. to help address #SupplyChain strain. @TxDPS Director McCraw: “…we can get more qualified commercial drivers out on the roads to move more goods to Texans… & help meet the demand.”https://t.co/A9Yy2UX6WE pic.twitter.com/QT3bpUk9t2

  — Gov. Greg Abbott (@GovAbbott) November 4, 2021

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

  Big trucking companies warn that driver shortages will persist into next year and pressure freight rates higher. An effort is already being made to process new drivers and get them on the road, but it could take years to attract new drivers and clear up the shortage. That’s why companies are pushing towards automation and robot trucks. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 21:20

• Judge Orders FBI To Stop "Extracting" Data From Veritas Devices Amid Mystery Leaks To NYT
  Judge Orders FBI To Stop “Extracting” Data From Veritas Devices Amid Mystery Leaks To NYT

  A federal judge has ordered the FBI to stop “extracting” information from James O’Keefe’s phone following the raids on multiple properties last week, as part of a probe into the alleged theft of President Biden’s daughter’s diary.

  

  The FBI claims the diary was stolen. O’Keefe has vehemently denied that:

  “Late last year, we were approached by tipsters claiming they had a copy of Ashley Biden’s diary,” said O’Keefe,” adding “the tipsters indicated that they were negotiating with a different media outlet for the payment of monies for the diary.”

  “At the end of the day, we made the ethical decision that because, in part, we could not determine if the diary was real, if the diary in fact belonged to Ashley Biden, or if the contents of the diary occurred, we could not publish the diary and any part thereof.”

  O’Keefe said that they turned the diary over to law enforcement after Ashley Biden’s attorney refused to accept or authenticate it.

  But that was not enough for ‘the establishment’, especially in light of O’Keefe’s persistent nuisance factor of exposing ugly truths.

  Judge Analisa Torres ordered the FBI to stop extracting information contained in O’Keefe’s phone and further ordered verification by Friday.

  

  This is a ‘win’ for O’Keefe and the Project Veritas team, but not before the contents of the documents/phones seized had been leaked to The New York Times.

  The FBI raided Project Veritas on a pretext and is now leaking their privileged communications to the New York Times

  This is a scandal pic.twitter.com/gll5PG4ShW

  — Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) November 12, 2021

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

  As Mike Cernovich tweeted:

  “Something tells me that the Federal judge who ordered the FBI to stop removing files from Project Veritas devices is going to have some questions as to how attorney-client privileged communications were removed from those devices and sent to the NYT.”

  This is the Deep State that Trump has warned about for years.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 21:10

• With 7.4 Billion COVID Shots In Arms, Bill Gates Admits The Quiet Part Out Loud
  With 7.4 Billion COVID Shots In Arms, Bill Gates Admits The Quiet Part Out Loud

  Authored by Jordan Schachtel via The Dossier substack,

  The world’s most influential “public health” advocate has come to seemingly doubt the technology behind mRNA injections, following their deployment into more than 7.34 billion arms worldwide.

  A little-noticed interview from last week with a U.K. think tank saw Microsoft founder Bill Gates make some incredible statements about his most prized “solution” to the pandemic.

  “We didn’t have vaccines that block transmission,” said Gates, contradicting previous interviews in which he claimed the shots significantly block transmission.

  “We got vaccines that help you with your health, but they only slightly reduce the transmission,” he added.

  [The vast majority of the interview involves Gates demanding totalitarian solutions to bad weather, which he refers to as climate change. The part about the COVID shots comes at minute 27.]

  Gates is correct about the fact that the shots aren’t blocking transmission. With record COVID numbers coming out of Europe, it’s become obvious that the mRNA shots are doing little, if nothing at all, to stop transmission. Moreover, the impact these shots have in preventing a positive COVID test appear to expire after 6-9 months. 

  Gates wasn’t done.

  He added a pretty shocking statement to top it off:

  “We need a new way of doing the vaccines.”

  Just like that, Gates appears to be wiping his hands clean of his involvement in the worldwide mRNA experiment.

  It’s a surprising tone from a man whose foundation has accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars (thanks to pre-IPO access to BioNtech, the maker of the “Pfizer shot”)  from the shots, in addition to his fierce advocacy for them. Additionally, Gates has added billions of dollars in income to his personal arsenal during the pandemic. 

  Despite being one of the largest proponents of presently-available COVID-19 vaccines, Gates admits to the failure of the vaccine industry that he has worked so hard to prop up.

  MORE: https://t.co/aw7PJZ86jM pic.twitter.com/lo9kKuImo9

  — Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) November 9, 2021

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

  To make matters even worse, Gates then endorsed the Police State models for COVID “mitigation” that are currently being implemented by New Zealand and Australia.

  “At least Australia and New Zealand showed that competent management could keep the death rate down pretty dramatically,” he said in the interview.

  He did not mention that both countries have been under lockdown for significant portions of COVID Mania, with citizens facing massive restrictions of their rights for almost two years. And on top of that, both countries, despite their heinous lockdowns and mRNA deployments, are currently facing massive outbreaks on an unprecedented scale.

  Clearly, the man described by Politico as the “world’s most powerful doctor” is doubling down on the totalitarian madness that he is attempting to impose on the world.

  At The Dossier, we have reported extensively on the influence the Gates Network wields over the world of “public health.” The Gates network is primarily responsible for seeding America’s COVID policy catastrophes. You can read about it below and listen to my podcast with more detail:

  How the Gates Foundation seeded America’s COVID-19 policy catastrophes

  The Monopolist: How Bill Gates wields enormous influence over COVID policy

  *  *  *

  Please support my amazing new sponsor, iTrustCapital, the #1 Bitcoin and precious metals IRA/401K platform in America! Sign up using my promo code DOSSIER and you get a free month of tax-free investing and trading. Linked here and in the banner!

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 21:00

• YouTube Hides "Dislikes" Following Mass Downvoting Of Biden Administration Videos
  YouTube Hides “Dislikes” Following Mass Downvoting Of Biden Administration Videos

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  YouTube has announced it will hide ‘dislikes’ from videos to curb “creator harassment,” with critics pointing out that this is merely a way of removing the huge amount of downvotes on videos posted by the Biden administration.

  

  “YouTube has announced that it’ll be hiding public dislike counts on videos across its site, starting today,” reports The Verge.

  “The company says the change is to keep smaller creators from being targeted by dislike attacks or harassment, and to promote “respectful interactions between viewers and creators.” The dislike button will still be there, but it’ll be for private feedback, rather than public shaming.”

  Quite how viewer feedback in the form of a thumbs down icon represents “harassment” is anyone’s guess, but the immediate response to the announcement from many was that the Google-owned company was merely moving to protect the Biden White House from ridicule.

  “Is this the reason?” asked one respondent, highlighting how Biden speeches and White House press briefings receive massive dislike ratios, sometimes at a rate of ten to one.

  Is this the reason? pic.twitter.com/BSaM92k9Vl

  — 🙂FRANK SINATRA (@FRANK_SINATRA7) November 10, 2021

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

  Gee, I wonder why they’re about to hide dislikes.

  It’s a total mystery. pic.twitter.com/tCEwDDVdBY

  — Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 10, 2021

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

  “This is for the White House account you KNOW that right?” commented another.

  This is for the White House account you KNOW that right?

  — Ryan Ashe (@RealRyanAshe) November 10, 2021

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

  “The video department of the Ministry of Truth doing its part for the greater good,” added another.

  The video department of the Ministry of Truth doing its part for the greater good.

  — Ian (@ianpiepenbrock) November 10, 2021

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

  Another respondent pointed out the massive dislike ratio received by the Fauci propaganda movie.

  Wonder why 🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/5qcqdpZHYK

  — ₿hargav (@ThatIndianGuy) November 10, 2021

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

  With the recent popularity of the ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ meme, this seems like another transparent attempt to protect the plunging popularity of Biden, whose approval rating just fell to a record low.

  As we previously highlighted, despite being “the most popular president in U.S. history” after his *totally not unusual* vote record, Joe Biden didn’t fare too well on YouTube in the days after his inauguration, where every single video posted to the official White House channel received massive downvote ratios.

  Thanks to YouTube, those ratios will never be a problem again.

  *  *  *

  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. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Get early access, exclusive content and behinds the scenes stuff by following me on Locals.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 20:44

• For Several Companies, The "Activist Investor" Push To End Coal Mining Has Had The Opposite Effect
  For Several Companies, The “Activist Investor” Push To End Coal Mining Has Had The Opposite Effect

  The obvious case for allowing the free market to make decisions in industries like energy is that, when changes are forced instead of adopted naturally (usually via laws or government subsidies), they often work against the interests of efficiency. 

  That’s a lesson several companies found out first hand. In fact, Bloomberg writes there is now a “growing unease among climate activists and some investors that the policy many of them championed could lead to more coal being produced for longer”.

  

  For example, Anglo American Plc, one of the world’s most powerful mining companies, has become “a case study in unintended consequences” after climate activists and investors urged it to stop digging up coal, Bloomberg reported this week. Now, it has transformed mines that were one set for closure into “the engine room for a growth-hungry coal business”.

  Anglo American CEO Mark Cutifani had seen Rio Tinto sell off its coal mines and had a plan to shut down its seven South African mines. But the company wasn’t taking action fast enough for activists and investors, so Anglo spun off another company called Thungela and tucked its coal operations into the SpinCo. Investors could then “decide for themselves” if they wanted to hold or sell shares of the SpinCo. 

  The SpinCo Chief Executive Officer, July Ndlovu, then announced they were looking to grow their coal production, not shrink it. 

  “I didn’t take up this role to close these mines, to close this business,” Ndlovu said. Its South African mines have the potential to add a decade or more of mining, producing more than 10 million tons of coal per year. 

  

  BHP Group, a rival company, had trouble selling a colliery earlier this year so it applied to extend mining at the site for another two decades. It was thought of as a way to sweeten a deal to sell the mine, but may wind up turning into BHP simply mining at the site for longer than expected. Investors continue to bring up BHP’s exit strategy from the mines as a point of contention. 

  “The big push from investors is around ensuring that any divestment that occurs is to parties that are responsible,” BHP CEO Mike Henry said.

  Glencore Plc announced earlier this year it would increase its ownership of a large Colombian coal mine after seeking out the opinions of activists, the report says. The company has promised to end its coal operations by 2050, but has also prepared “contingency” plans in the event investors “force it”. 

  Nick Stansbury, head of climate solutions at Legal & General Group Plc, told Bloomberg: “Everyone in the industry is starting to be more sophisticated, more nuanced and more careful on the way they think these issues through.” 

  Ashley Hamilton Claxton, the head of responsible investment at Royal London Asset Management, concluded by stating that fossil fuel companies should hold on to their coal assets and manage their decline: “Selling the problem to a third party has unintended consequences. We need to shift the debate in the investment industry about being more sophisticated around these things.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 20:40

• Why You Should Care About 'Taproot', The Next Major Bitcoin Upgrade
  Why You Should Care About ‘Taproot’, The Next Major Bitcoin Upgrade

  Authored by ‘NAMCIOS’ via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  By making transactions cheaper, more efficient and more private, Taproot sets the stage for extra functionality on the Bitcoin network.

  

  Much has been written about Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade, and plenty of resources exist to explain its technical concepts. However, in the author’s opinion, a more comprehensive roundup of why Taproot is being implemented, what it will bring to the network, and what it might enable for the future, in plain English, is still lacking. Driven by the misconceptions that regular users have about Taproot and a certain lack of understanding, this essay leverages the technical resources that came before it to enlighten you to the broader implications of what is arguably the most significant upgrade to Bitcoin yet.

  WHY TAPROOT MATTERS

  In short and at the highest level of abstraction possible, the Bitcoin Taproot soft fork will optimize scalability, privacy, and smart contract functionality. It will bring about a new address type, allowing bitcoin spending to look similar regardless of whether the sender is making a simple payment, a complex multi-signature transaction, or using the Lightning Network. Moreover, Taproot addresses will allow users to save on transaction fees — the more complex the spending conditions, the more the user will save — compared to previous address types. By reducing the transaction size and making nearly any transaction appear like a simple, single-signature one, Taproot will also enable larger and more complex operations to be deployed on Bitcoin that were previously unfeasible or almost impossible.

  If you only use Bitcoin to hold coins long term and sparingly move them around between wallets, you might think Taproot will have little impact on you. But in fact, the possibilities that this soft fork will enable for Bitcoin’s future are extensive, as Taproot lays the groundwork for more prominent and more significant developments to land on the network.

  For one, Taproot ultimately empowers the Lightning Network to unleash its full potential as a proper scaling technology for Bitcoin. Currently, the second layer protocol can be spotted in action in the Bitcoin blockchain, reducing coins’ fungibility. Fungibility is vital for a monetary good to actualize the medium of exchange role because it allows for coins to be seen as equal. If transaction outputs were seen differently, they could suffer from discrimination by the receiver, preventing users from using their BTC for payments in certain conditions.

  In addition, the Lightning Network and other complex wallets and contracts will enjoy greater efficiency and lower transaction fees, further empowering the usage of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. Enabled by Schnorr signatures, even the most complex transactions made between Taproot-supporting wallets will incur the same fees as simple ones. Furthermore, this reduction of costs and the increased flexibility and capabilities for smart contracts will ultimately enable very complex setups that were previously not feasible in Bitcoin.

  But to comprehend why Taproot is being implemented in Bitcoin, one must first understand how Bitcoin transactions work and the many upgrades that have been made up to this point, naturally leading to Taproot.

  A QUICK OVERVIEW OF HOW BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS WORK

  Bitcoin transactions work based on inputs and outputs, which are also equal since coins are not destroyed. If you want to send me 5 BTC, for instance, you would need to select precisely 5 bitcoin, else the transaction would be either incomplete, or you’d have too many funds.

  For the former, Bitcoin can’t do much — you can’t send funds you don’t have — but for the latter, Bitcoin will give you the “rest” as change. Therefore, if you select 7.38 BTC to send me five, 2.38 will go back to you as change. So you’d have 7.38 as input and 2.38 + 5 as outputs, although you’d receive a little less than 2.38 because the network needs to deduct the transaction fees.

  When we talk about spending, we are referring to an output. Now that I have the 5 BTC you sent me, I can use it as I wish. I can send 3 BTC to Alice and 2 BTC to Bob, for instance, or I can send 5 BTC to Joe. Or I can keep the 5 BTC and HODL indefinitely. Unless I choose to hold it, I will be making a transaction regardless of the use I make of my new bitcoin. This latest transaction will get the 5 BTC output I have as input, and this transaction’s output will be whatever I decide to send. Notice that since I received the 5 BTC in full, even if I want to send only 3 bitcoin, I will have to input all the 5 bitcoin into the transaction, and I’ll get the rest back as change.

  What’s essential in this dynamic is to realize the interaction of coins as inputs and outputs. When we spend, we are transferring a transaction output to another person. But to do that, we need to input it into a new transaction, and the other person will get the BTC as another transaction output. For that reason, the concept of a wallet is an abstraction intended to make things easier to acknowledge and understand by summing up all the transaction outputs you own. Because after all, that’s all there is — transaction outputs (UTXOs).

  IMPROVING THE BITCOIN TRANSACTION MODEL

  The history of paying in bitcoin has changed a lot since the early days of the network. Overall, the UTXO model described above relies on scripts or contracts created using the Bitcoin Script “programming” language. This author has put “programming” in quotation marks because Bitcoin’s scripting language can more accurately be seen as a verification language than one that provides computation directives. In essence, Bitcoin scripting is a way to specify conditions for spending a UTXO.

  There are three major constraints when considering Bitcoin Script and how its improvements are made: privacy, space efficiency, and computational efficiency — usually, improving one of these cascades into strengthening the other two. For instance, seeking to reveal less about a transaction and thereby improving privacy would entail submitting a smaller amount of data, reducing space needs for the transaction, and making it easier to be verified — it’s less computationally intensive.

  The community has been improving how Bitcoin transactions work by gradually introducing new script, or address, types. Ultimately, these changes have sought to enhance transactional privacy, make the transfer of funds more lightweight, and speed up the process of validating transactions. As a result, users have greater flexibility for creating scripts that increase the resilience of their savings, move funds around more efficiently and privately, and help unleash financial sovereignty. Albeit complicated for the end-user, technical tools have emerged to adopt these practices and abstract low-level technicalities, ensuring greater adoption of current best practices.

  One clear example of this is multisignature addresses, which once had to be done manually with Bitcoin Script but can now be effortlessly created with a smartphone or a laptop. The same is true for Lightning, Bitcoin’s second-layer scaling solution for small and frequent payments. This Layer 2 is now available in mobile apps and allows for people to transact once-unfeasible amounts of BTC with each other instantly.

  Taproot, the latest upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol and arguably the most important one to date, is a natural evolution of the way Bitcoin transactions, and hence scripts, work. Enabled by Schnorr signatures, MAST and Tapscript, Taproot seeks to increase flexibility and privacy without compromising security.

  In the early days of Bitcoin, with legacy addresses, the sender of a transaction had to care about the receiver’s wallet policy — its contract, or script — which was not only impractical but represented a significant privacy shortcoming. The contract had to be revealed when the transaction was sent for anyone to see; hence, the receiver’s privacy was low.

  With the advent of pay to script hash (P2SH), Bitcoin changed that dynamic, and transactions started to be sent to the hash of the contract instead of the contract itself. This meant the contract wouldn’t be revealed until the output was spent, and outputs became identical — just a hash.

  A hash is the output of a hashing function, which takes a variable-length input and returns an encrypted result of fixed length. Not only did this addition to Bitcoin transactions improve privacy by making all outputs look similar, but it also reduced the output size, thereby increasing efficiency.

  However, the contract had to become visible when spending and all of the spending conditions had to be revealed. The two downsides with this approach are privacy and efficiency, as any observer could learn about the different spending conditions — thus learning plenty of information about the spender — and the blockchain would be bloated with a large script with unnecessary logic — it only makes practical sense to verify the spending condition that was used to spend that output.

  The Taproot upgrade improves this logic by introducing Merklelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), a structure that ultimately allows Bitcoin to achieve the goal of only revealing the contract’s specific spending condition that was used.

  There are two main possibilities for complex Taproot spending: a consensual, mutually-agreed condition; or a fallback, specific condition. For instance, if a multisignature address owned by multiple people wants to spend some funds programmatically, they could set up one spending condition in which all of them agree to spend the funds or fallback states in case they can’t reach a consensus.

  If the condition everyone agrees on is used, Taproot allows it to be turned into a single signature. Therefore, the Bitcoin network wouldn’t even know there was a contract being used in the first place, significantly increasing the privacy of all of the owners of the multisignature address.

  However, if a mutual consensus isn’t reached and one party spends the funds using any of the fallback methods, Taproot only reveals that specific method. As the introduction of P2SH increased the receiver’s privacy by making all outputs look identical — just a hash — Taproot will increase the sender’s privacy by restricting the amount of information broadcast to the network.

  Even if you don’t use complex wallet functionality like multisignature or Lightning, improving their privacy also improves yours, as it makes chain surveillance more difficult and increases the broader Bitcoin network anonymity set.

  WHAT TAPROOT COULD ULTIMATELY ENABLE FOR AVERAGE BITCOIN USERS

  By making transactions cheaper, more efficient, and more private, the adoption of Taproot will set the stage for extra functionality to land on the Bitcoin network. As nodes upgrade and people start using Taproot addresses primarily, it will become more difficult for blockchain observers to spot and discriminate between senders and receivers, UTXOs will be treated more equally, and the broader Bitcoin network will be a more robust settlement network that enables complex functionality to be built on top.

  Layer 2 protocols and sidechains will be empowered to step up and leverage even more sophisticated smart contracts for coordinating funds on the base layer. The end-user might not construct these themselves, but they will benefit from more special offerings in the broader Bitcoin ecosystem with stronger assurances. Although some decentralized finance applications and use cases are already being implemented on Bitcoin, the greater smart contract flexibility and capabilities brought by the Taproot upgrade can ultimately allow even more use cases to be implemented and more complex functionality to be deployed while leveraging the strong security assurances of the Bitcoin network — which no other “cryptocurrency” can match.

  As bitcoin is actual money, long-term applications of decentralized finance can naturally only be built on top of it. Novelty networks such as Ethereum lack the monetary properties of the Bitcoin base layer and its security and robustness — part of the reason why most applications built on them have fallen short of accomplishing their value proposition over the long run. By patiently building up the foundations for a distributed, uncensorable, antifragile, and sovereign monetary network throughout its lifetime, Bitcoin is set to enjoy actual long term functionality and growth through a layered approach.

  The Taproot upgrade, which also comprises Schnorr, MAST and Tapscript, builds on that foundation by furthering the security and privacy of the base layer and enabling more complex applications to be built on top of it. Greater flexibility of the smart contract functionalities of Bitcoin brings about a new era of unthinkable possibilities, opening up the door for broader use cases to be implemented on the best monetary network humanity has ever known.

  Over the long term, upgrades like Taproot and Lightning might effectively render altcoins redundant and unnecessary. If a given functionality can be implemented in Bitcoin, the most robust and secure network, it is only natural that it will. While altcoins foster innovation and eventually showcase some exciting use cases, they can be more accurately seen as experimentation playgrounds. Once real use cases are found, they will likely be ported to Bitcoin –– their best bet for continued, long-term development and usage.

  *  *  *

  To learn more about Taproot, Aaron van Wirdum’s technical overview is a good place to start. For a more extensive explanation, reference Kraken Intelligence’s detailed report published earlier this year. If you want to jump into the specific proposals, read BIP340, BIP341 and BIP342.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 20:20

• "We Are One Year To The Midterms And The Signs Do Not Look Good For The Democrats"
  “We Are One Year To The Midterms And The Signs Do Not Look Good For The Democrats”

  With just one year to go to the US midterm elections, which will likely be a pivotal moment for Joe Biden’s presidency as a Republican takeover of either the House or Senate would give them power to block any legislation, Deutsche Bank admits that “the signs do not look promising for the Democrats.”

  As the bank’s credit strategist Jim Reid writes, only last week Dems lost the governor’s race in Virginia, a state Biden won by 10 points in 2020. He also adds that history isn’t on their side either: there’s only been one occasion since WWII when the incumbent president’s party has gained House seats in their first midterm vote, and that was when President George W. Bush still had high approval ratings following the 9/11 attacks the previous year.

  

  Furthermore, the Democrats’ narrow House majority means the Republicans need just 5 more seats to be back in control. In the Senate, where 34 seats are up for election, the Republicans need to flip just one. If the Republicans win either chamber, legislative accomplishments would then largely rely on bipartisan agreements. It’s no coincidence that President Obama’s major legislative wins all came in the first 2 years of his 8-year presidency (when Democrats had both chambers), including the post-GFC stimulus, Obamacare, and the Dodd-Frank Act. Similarly for President Trump, his major legislative achievement in the 2017 tax overhaul was when Republicans controlled both chambers too.

  Here, Reid points out that a big concern markets will have about divided government is the potential for further wrangling over the debt ceiling. The 2011 crisis saw S&P downgrade America’s AAA credit rating, and a repeat could cause further jitters. Having said that the debt ceiling has been raised or suspended 13 times since then, spanning different congressional compositions. At a minimum we’ll likely be back to brinkmanship if we don’t see a longer-term raising in the months ahead.

  It would also likely put an end to any further stimulus, with Republicans already railing against the inflationary impact of Biden’s policies — a potential argument for team transitory even if there’s plenty of inflationary stimulus in the system for now. That said, 12 months is still a very long time in political terms, and if we’ve learnt anything from election outcomes over recent years, it’s that plenty of surprises could still happen along the way.

  As an aside, according to online betting markets, the odds of a Republican sweep during next year’s midterms are about two in three, not what the Democrats wants to see and the clearest sign yet that the Dems will try to create a social or economic crisis to prevent this particular outcome.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 20:00

• 10 States Sue Biden Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate For Healthcare Workers
  10 States Sue Biden Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate For Healthcare Workers

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  A coalition of 10 states led by Missouri’s attorney general on Wednesday sued President Joe Biden over his administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.

  

  A federal court has blocked, for now, the administration’s private employer vaccine mandate, but a stricter one for healthcare workers remains in place.

  The healthcare worker mandate, which covers over 17 million nurses and others, does not include a testing opt-out.

  The coalition says the mandate is unlawful under federal law, in part because the federal government is trying to wrest away compulsory vaccination power that has “always been the province of—and still properly belongs to—the states.”

  “Vaccination requirements are matters that depends on local factors and conditions. Whatever might make sense in New York City, St Louis, or Omaha could be decidedly counterproductive and harmful in rural communities like Memphis, Missouri or McCook, Nebraska,” the 58-page filing in federal court in Missouri says.

  “Federalism allows states to tailor such matters in the best interests of their communities. The heavy hand of CMS’s nationwide mandate does not. This court should thus set aside that rule as unlawful agency action under the Administrative Procedure Act.”

  The mandate is poised to exacerbate an already “alarming shortage” of healthcare workers, the coalition said. As proof, they cite Dr. Randy Tobler, the CEO of Scotland County Hospital in Memphis, Missouri. He said that people working in his hospital informed him that if the mandate takes effect, they will not work at the hospital any longer.

  Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson, and Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor filed the suit with the attorneys general of Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, and New Hampshire. All the attorneys general are Republicans.

  The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service, or CMS, the agency that issued the rule, and the White House did not return requests for comment on the lawsuit.

  

  A nurse prepares a Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccination in Los Angeles, Calif., on Aug. 23, 2021. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

  The Biden administration says the mandate will curb the transmission and spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. The rule acknowledges that many healthcare workers have recovered from COVID-19 and have some level of immunity as a result. But, citing a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study that was challenged by some scientists, CMS says natural immunity is not allowed as an alternative to vaccination.

  CDC officials have acknowledged natural immunity exists but say even those with it can benefit from vaccination. A number of health experts share the view but a host of others say vaccination isn’t necessary among the recovered.

  CMS officials say the agency has the legal authority to issue a vaccine mandate through several sections of the Social Security Act, though the rule notes that CMS has never required vaccinations before.

  Healthcare facilities that don’t comply with the mandate face a series of penalties, including fines. They could be ousted from Medicare and Medicaid programs, a senior administration official told reporters on a call last week.

  One official later explained why there’s not a testing opt-out, a major difference between the rule and the private employer mandate.

  “We have a higher bar for healthcare workers, given their critical role in ensuring the health and safety of their patients,” the official said. “And so, it’s either vaccination or an exemption under the rules outlined.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 19:40

• Manhattan Apartment Rents Soar The Most On Record 
  Manhattan Apartment Rents Soar The Most On Record 

  We’ve been documenting a massive divergence in Manhattan real estate, one where residential housing is coming back to life in a post-pandemic world, but commercial real estate remains dead. 

  The latest data from appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate shows median rent for Manhattan apartments surged 18% in October from a year earlier to $3,382, the most on record, according to Bloomberg. 

  

  The borough is one of the hottest rental markets in all of the city. Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, said a shortage of homes in suburban markets had led some people to find better upgrades in the city.

  “There are more people understanding the relationship of where they want to live and where their employer wants them to work from,” Miller said.

  Demand for luxury apartments pushed overall rents higher. Complexes with door attendants and a front desk saw rents soar 25% to $4,263 compared with non-doorman properties, only rose 7.4%

  As for studios, rents surged 17%, one-bedrooms increased 16%, and two-bedroom rents jumped 26%. Miller said each benchmark set a new annual growth record last month. 

  Meanwhile, the number of new leases sank 22% from a year ago to 4,395 as the housing market returned to normal levels. 

  When it comes to supply, the number of available apartment rentals across the city has become scarce. In the last week of September, real estate firm StreetEasy reported that apartment inventory stood at 15,541, a considerable decline from the 48,753 rentals available in September 2020. 

  

  People are flocking back to the city or upgrading to more affluent parts as back to office slowly returns for some workers. Kastle Systems, whose electronic access systems secure thousands of office buildings across NYC, shows an increasing number of workers returned to the office at the beginning of November. Since September, the index has risen nearly fourteen percentage points from 20% to about 34%. Overall, the index remains well below pre-pandemic levels. 

  

  With that being said, commercial real estate in the borough remains in turmoil. Rents plunged last month the most in five years—an enormous glut of storefronts and office space line city streets. 

  The massive divergence between residential and commercial real estate can easily be explained. As workers remain at home, foot traffic on city streets is muted, and in return, spending at storefronts slumps. People still need a roof over their heads but are more frequently using Amazon to avoid in-person stores. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 19:20

• Appeals Court Blocks House Jan. 6 Panel From Accessing Trump’s White House Records
  Appeals Court Blocks House Jan. 6 Panel From Accessing Trump’s White House Records

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A federal appeals court on Thursday halted the scheduled transfer of records of President Donald Trump’s time in office from the National Archives to Congress, ruling that Congress cannot access the files for now.

  

  A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overruled a federal judge, who had opined earlier this week that a House of Representatives panel investigating the Jan. 6 of the U.S. Capitol had a legitimate legislative purpose in seeking the records.

  U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama nominee, said the transfer could proceed as planned on Friday.

  Trump appealed. Jesse Binnall, a Trump lawyer, said the former president is likely to prevail as he tried to convince the higher court to enter an injunction against Chutkan’s order.

  “The alleged legislative purpose underpinning the overbroad request at issue here clearly does not merit involving the President and his records,” Binnall said. “The Committee has failed to identify anything in the broad swath of requested materials that would inform proposed legislation.”

  The panel agreed to stop the transfer, pending a further order from the court.

  The court will hear the case in the coming days before making a more permanent ruling.

  Trump’s team was ordered to file a brief by Nov. 16 at noon, with a brief due from the House panel six days later. Trump’s team can respond in a second filing due by Nov. 24 at noon. Oral argument is slated to take place on Nov. 30.

  The panel consisted of Judges Patricia Millett, an Obama nominee; Robert Wilkins, an Obama nominee; and Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden nominee.

  Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the head of the Jan. 6 House panel, did not immediately react to the order.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 19:00

• Taiwan Halts 2nd Dose Of Pfizer Jabs For 12-17 Year Olds
  Taiwan Halts 2nd Dose Of Pfizer Jabs For 12-17 Year Olds

  Taiwan has become the latest country to halt or restrict the use of a Covid-19 vaccine due to concerns over adverse reactions.

  On Wednesday, Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) announced the suspension of 2nd doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab for children aged 12-17 over concerns that it may increase the risk of myocarditis, according to Taiwan News. The CECC also said that it would hold off on its decision for those under 12 years-old until the 2nd dose issue is settled.

  

  Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle which can reduce the heart’s ability to pump, as well as cause abnormal heart rhythms. The mortality rate from this disease is approximately 20% after one year, and 50% at five years. Of course, it has yet to be seen whether Covid-19 or Vaccine-induced myocarditis follows the same risk profile.

  According to US statistics, the risk of the condition following the second Pfizer dose is 10x higher than after the first dose.

  Taiwan follows Hong Kong in changing their policies regarding Covid-19 vaccines in adolescents, which went from two doses of Pfizer to a single dose for those aged 12-17, while the UK has recommended just one shot for children between 12-18 years of age.

  Chen said that the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) has decided to halt administration of second BNT doses to this age group for two weeks, during which time experts and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) physicians will look at the 16 cases of myocarditis among adolescents after BNT vaccination before making a final decision on whether to go ahead with the second shot.

  International data will also be consulted before the final decision is made, the CECC head said, adding that currently, children between the ages of 12-17 are being vaccinated with two doses worldwide except in Hong Kong and the U.K. -Taiwan News

  Meanwhile, Moderna on Thursday said that while its vaccine has fewer breakthrough cases than Pfizer’s offering, it carries a higher risk of myocarditis in young men, according to CNBC. 

  Reported cases of the rare heart inflammation in men under age 30 are relatively higher after Moderna’s vaccine compared with those who received the shots made by Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna Chief Medical Officer Dr. Paul Burton told reporters on a call Thursday.

  Burton cited data from France on males ages 12 to 29. It showed there were 13.3 cases of myocarditis per 100,000 people for Moderna’s vaccine compared with 2.7 cases per 100,000 people for the Pfizer vaccine.

  When it comes to breakthrough cases resulting in mild or severe disease, Moderna has the fewest at 86 breakthroughs per 100,000 people, vs 135 per 100k with Pfizer’s, according to Burton.

  Some scientists have suggested that young men are experiencing higher rates of Myocarditis post-vaccination due to testosterone, as well as the fact that Moderna’s vaccine uses a higher concentration of mRNA than Pfizer’s.

  “I do think this hypothesis of testosterone is important,” said Burton. “We know that there is indeed some inflammation associated with testosterone. … We do have in the primary series, as you know, 100 micrograms of mRNA, so we have slightly higher levels of spike protein, and that could be a contributing factor as well.”

  Remember folks, the vaccines currently being administered are still under emergency use, and if anything goes wrong you can’t sue.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 18:40

• Greenwald: Democrats Are Profoundly Committed To Criminal Justice Reform… For Everyone But Their Enemies
  Greenwald: Democrats Are Profoundly Committed To Criminal Justice Reform… For Everyone But Their Enemies

  Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

  The 2020 protest movement that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha became one of the most sustained and consequential in modern U.S. history. Though there seems to be a somewhat bizarre effort underway by its advocates to insist that this movement accomplished nothing — why are some claiming that radical cultural and political changes are happening? — it is demonstrably true that, as intended, that the movement transformed discourse and policy around multiple issues from race, to policing, to gender identity, to the teaching of history, and fostered an ongoing effort for still-greater changes.

  

  The issues raised by that movement were varied and often shifting: though it was catalyzed by the claim that the U.S. is swamped with racist police brutality as illustrated by the Floyd and Blake cases, it quickly metastasized into other areas far removed from those two cases. White Antifa members clashed with Black protesters over the attempt to steer or broaden the movement away from a narrow focus on racist police brutality into one devoted to generalized insurrectionary anarchy. One of the largest and most densely packed gatherings was a spontaneous march, at the height of the COVID pandemic, in Brooklyn, where ten thousand people paid homage to the importance of “black trans lives,” a cause whose relationship to the Floyd and Blake cases was tenuous at best. Institutional changes regarding gender identity were quickly adopted by the corporations and security state institutions that lent their support, however cynically, to this growing movement.

  But one constant focus of this movement has been the need for sweeping criminal justice reform. Americans were introduced to the slogan “Defund the Police,” with some activists making clear they meant that literally, while leading progressives in Congress chanted along. Prison abolition and the evils of “the “carceral state” became mainstream progressive positions. Last May, The New Yorker heralded what it called “The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition,” noting that while some activists merely want incremental reform, for many these events “confirmed that the institution of policing should be abolished completely. In the past year or two, propositions to defund or abolish the police and prisons have travelled from incarcerated-activist networks and academic conferences and scholarship into mainstream conversations.”

  

  So mainstream did these once-fringe criminal justice reform proposals become that large cities began presenting proposals or referenda to defund the police and replace it with “public safety” alternatives (in most liberal cities where these proposals were presented to residents, including Minneapolis, they were rejected, including with large opposition from Black residents who, polling consistently shows, want the police in their communities). That the U.S. criminal justice system is far too punitive, thus becoming the largest prison state in the world by imposing far longer and harsher prison terms than most western or democratic countries, has been a long-standing view of criminal justice reform advocates (I wrote a 2011 book with that as one of its primary themes). But prior to the 2020 protest movement, that view had largely been confined to the fringes, rarely able to overtake the decades-old harsh law-and-order framework which the GOP began championing in the 1960s with Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, joined in the 1990s by Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.

  But after this 2020 protest movement, all of that changed. That radical reform was needed to both policing and the criminal justice system — to make the “carceral state” far less punitive and sprawling — became the mainstream view, practically the obligatory view, in Democratic Party politics. One of the most centrist corporatists in the House Democratic Caucus is the former corporate lawyer Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the fourth-ranking member of House Democratic leadership and one of the leading candidates, if not the leading one, to replace Nancy Pelosi when she finally abandons her position as House Democratic leader. Despite his careful centrist image, Jeffries, in mid-2020, began advocating slogans which, just months earlier, had been confined to more radical precincts of academic and leftist activism:

  

  Yet a profound dilemma is visible from the momentum of this movement: a large bulk of liberal politics is driven by precisely the opposite impulses. The most loyal Democratic partisans are frequently venerating prosecutors, advocating for harsh criminal punishments, championing punitive theories of criminal law that have long been rejected by liberal jurists and, above all else, often demanding the longest and harshest punishments in “the carceral state” for a large group of people.

  Why are so many Democrats simultaneously chanting radical criminal reform slogans to abolish or greatly reduce the police and the prison state while simultaneously demanding harsh prison terms for so many people under the classic law-and-order ideology they claim to oppose? The answer is clear: Democrats believe that the only real criminals, or at least the worst ones, are those who reject their political ideology and are their political adversaries. And thus, while they work with one hand to usher in radical reforms to the policing and prison state, they work with the other to concoct theories to justify the long-term imprisonment of their political opponents, even when their alleged crimes involve no violence.

  This internal contradiction in Democratic politics was vividly illustrated by the fact that — though they will now deny it — the most revered and admired figure over the last five years in liberal politics was Robert Mueller, named in 2001 by George W. Bush to be FBI Director and then in 2017 by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to be Special Counsel investigating Russiagate. Liberals did not even bother hiding their glee at the prospect that Mueller was coming to arrest and imprison as many of their political adversaries as possible. They sung songs in his honor and danced to their fantasies about the next convictions. Every indictment was cheered, every prosecution applauded, every punishment lamented for being insufficiently harsh, as their favorite cable channels were filled to the brim with the very life-long federal prosecutors their ideology ostensibly opposed. Throughout the Trump years, Democratic politics was driven at its core by a bloodlust to imprison Trump, his family, his aides and his supporters for as long and as harshly as possible. Cravings for punishment and prison, at its core, was what drove the arousal of Russiagate.

  To accomplish this, they often championed the exact theories of criminal justice which liberal jurists had long warned were abusive and even unconstitutional. Few convictions excited them as much as the one obtained by Mueller against former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, whose grave crime was lying to the FBI by falsely denying that he had spoken to a Russian official about foreign policy during the transition, weeks before he was to assume his White House job. The most admired liberal judges, such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens, had long argued that lying to the FBI in the way Flynn did should not even be a crime at all, that making it one was a violation of the constitutional right against self-incrimination and bestowed the FBI with the power to turn citizens into criminals through entrapment. But no matter: Flynn was a Trump supporter, and therefore they were thrilled he was prosecuted and outraged he spent no time in prison.

  Then there is Julian Assange, who has been effectively detained for a decade and confined to a harsh high-security British prison for two years on charges that he committed “espionage” by publishing authentic documents in 2010 that exposed crimes by the U.S. Government. As someone who has long reported on WikiLeaks and advocated for Assange’s rights, I vividly recall how much support there was for him back then on the liberal-left. Yet virtually all of that support disappeared in 2016, when he committed the real crime that caused Democrats and liberals to hate him and want him in prison: namely, he published true and publicly relevant documents that reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

  As a result of the political impact of Assange’s work, there is little opposition to his prosecution among Democrats and a great deal of glee over his imprisonment, despite the consensus view from press freedom and civil liberties groups that the prosecution of Assange poses the greatest threat to press freedoms in years, and despite its reliance on dangerously broad interpretations of what the wildly authoritarian 1917 Espionage Age encompasses. Here one finds the same dynamic: Democrats believe that the gravest crimes, the only ones that merit harsh prison, are not murder, rape or assault but political and ideological opposition to their leaders, the only real crime which Assange committed in their eyes.

  Indeed, the only thing that changed from 2013, when Democrats cheered the Obama DOJ for not indicting Assange, to 2021, when Democrats applaud the Biden DOJ for aggressively prosecuting him is that, in the interim he engaged in journalistic and political activity that harmed Democrats. Thus, they are itching to see him spend years longer if not decades more in the harsh carceral state which, in other circumstances, they pretend to oppose. Like Trump officials, Assange harmed the political interests of Democrats, and thus the harshest state punishments are warranted.

  The most protracted thirst for harsh criminal punishment from Democrats has been directed at those who participated in the protest-turned-riot at the Capitol on January 6. Of the more than six hundred people charged with crimes in connection with that riot, only a minority are accused of using violence of any kind. In other words, the majority of 1/6 defendants are accused of non-violent crimes. While few object to prison terms for people who used violence as part of that riot (even though many progressives do object to long prison terms for those who used violence as part of the 2020 protest movement), a large number of non-violent protesters face serious felony charges and lengthy prison terms. That non-violent protesters should not be imprisoned is foundational…

  To read the rest, click here to subscribe

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 18:20

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• Denmark To Re-Impose CCP Virus Restrictions After Ditching All Rules 2 Months Ago: Prime Minister
  Denmark To Re-Impose CCP Virus Restrictions After Ditching All Rules 2 Months Ago: Prime Minister

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

  Denmark will re-introduce COVID-19-related restrictions after a rise in cases, said Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Monday, coming less than two months after ditching the rules.

  Frederiksen cited the Danish Epidemic Commission’s recommendation that the government classifies COVID-19 as a “socially threatening disease” for reimplementing restrictions, telling journalists: “The government will follow this recommendation.”

  

  About 86 percent of people aged 12 or older are fully vaccinated in Denmark. Despite that, authorities said last week hospitals are at risk of being overwhelmed due to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. Critics of vaccine mandates have said that because COVID-19 vaccines cannot entirely prevent the transmission of the virus to others, such requirements are not necessary and will create unnecessary economic and social hardship.

  In a Sunday Facebook post, Frederiksen claimed that COVID-19 is spreading from unvaccinated people to elderly people and at-risk people who have been vaccinated, although she did not provide evidence for her assertion. Health authorities will “soon” advise the Danish government on new measures, she added.

  “The health authorities were expecting more people to be infected (by COVID) and hospitalized, but the things have gone faster than expected,” Frederiksen also told reporters Monday.

  Among those restrictions, the government may mandate that certain businesses require customers to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination before entering, she said.

  “You can live with the corona-pass,” Frederiksen said, referring to the vaccine passport. It will be re-imposed on bars, nightclubs, restaurants, and similar venues.

  The pass shows whether an individual has been vaccinated, has recently recovered from the virus, or has had a recent negative test. Opposition parties include the Conservative Party, the Danish People’s Party, and Venstre oppose the passport, but the governing left-wing coalition is in favor of it.

  And Eskild Petersen, a prominent infectious diseases professor at Aarhus University, said during public remarks that the country needs to reimpose a mask mandate.

  “If we are to avoid closures of schools and the rest of society, we need to get ahead of things, and it is proven that both corona-pass and face masks work against infection spread,” he said last week.

  The number of new coronavirus cases was higher than 2,000 again Monday, for the fifth day running. Medical staff members are treating 26 people in intensive care.

  Out of a population of about 5.8 million, some 2,745 people have died of COVID-19 to date, according to health officials.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 02:00

• Elon Musk & His Brother Have Sold Over $5 Billion Of Tesla Shares In The Past Week
  Elon Musk & His Brother Have Sold Over $5 Billion Of Tesla Shares In The Past Week

  Update (2200ET): Just hours after the world’s richest person filed to show a 934,000 ($1.1 billion) share sale (on Monday) to cover tax liabilities on the exercise of over 2 million options, a second set of filings (here, here, and here) showed an ever more massive sale of another 3.6 million shares for an average price of about $1,070 in the following two days (or around $3.9 billion).

  The interesting thing about the price action this week is that when the sale occurred (Monday and Wednesday), TSLA shares miraculously surged as the wave of Musk selling hit. And yet collapsed on Tuesday – which as far as the filings are concerned saw no Musk sales… 

  

  Combined, the transactions this week represent about $5 billion, or 3%, of Musk’s overall stake. 

  Elon still owns roughly 167 million Tesla shares.

  This is only the third time Musk has sold Tesla stock since the company went public on the Nasdaq exchange in 2010—and it’s easily his biggest transaction. In July 2010, Musk sold slightly more than 1.4 million shares for $24 million, and in 2016, he sold another 2.7 million shares for about $593 million.

  Elon’s huge sales of TSLA shares this week follow his brother Kimbal Musk – a Tesla board member – sold 15% of his stake on November 5th. That sale of 88,500 shares totalled $109 million.

  This sale came days before Elon’s now infamous tweet about whether he should sell 10% of his own stake.

  *  *  *

  As we detailed earlier, having somewhat hinted at his actions over the weekend – given the tweet poll’s comments:

  “much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock.”

  And almost 58% of the 3.5 million votes were cast in favor of a sale.

  It is now clear that Elon Musk was indeed selling (though not 10% of his holdings) and was thus responsible for Tesla’s big tumble early this week after exercising his options and dumping some of the shares to cover his tax liability.

  

  In fact, on Monday, Musk exercised his options which were struck at the extraordinarily low price of $6.24, receiving 2,154,572 shares…

  

  The last time TSLA traded at $6.24 was Nov 2012…

  

  He then sold a large number of them to cover his tax liability.

  As per the Form 4:

  “The shares of common stock were sold solely to satisfy the reporting person’s tax withholding obligations related to the exercise of stock options to purchase 2,154,572 shares”

  And as the following table shows, Musk was left with 1,220,481 shares from that options exercise.

  

  Therefore he sold 934,081 shares (or 43.4% of the exercised options) – or around $1.1 billion.

  Given the price levels from Form 4, the following chart shows when the sells were made. Thanks perhaps to the magic of ‘gamma’ manipulation, TSLA shares exploded higher during the first hour of trading as Musk’s 934k shares were dumped on ‘diamond hands’…

  

  …and in the end, the selling pressure took TSLA stock down 16% in two days (one has to wonder just who or what was holding the stock up all day on Monday, only to let it all come crashing down on Tuesday after the sale was complete)…

  

  It’s the billionaire’s first sale since 2016, when he last exercised stock options and liquidated some of his newly acquired shares to cover about $590 million of income taxes.

  However, there is one awkward thing. It appears the whole premise of the poll was a lie since Musk has pre-arranged this sale on September 14th:

  “AUTOMATICALLY EFFECTED PURSUANT TO A RULE 10B5-1 TRADING PLAN PREVIOUSLY ADOPTED ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2021”

  

  The problem that TSLA shareholders have is two-fold – if a 934k lot sparks such a significant drop in the stock… and Musk has 170 million shares left…

  

  What happens every year when Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax comes due?

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 00:25

• National Firearm Registry? Might Be Closer Than You Think 
  National Firearm Registry? Might Be Closer Than You Think 

  Submitted by The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN).

  Recently, an internal ATF document was released showing some very interesting statistics. The most significant statistic is that in 2021, the ATF processed 54.7 million Out-of-Business records. The records they are referring to, of course, is Form 4473.

  The 4473 is the physical form that records the firearm information; make, model, serial number, type, caliber, and information for those unfamiliar with firearm paperwork. It essentially ties a name to the firearm as it was transferred to an individual from a licensed dealer, sometimes referred to as an FFL.

  The 4473 also has personal information on it. It has name, birthdate, current address, birthplace, height, weight, and driver’s license number. Some even opt to give their social security number so that their NICS check goes faster. Speaking of NICS checks, let us clear up another misconception. The firearm information does not get entered during the NICS check. No system associates specific firearms with individuals… yet.

  For those familiar with ATF paperwork, a pattern might be forming. We had our first taste of it back in November of 2020. Of course, the hyperbolic media was more focused at the time on the fact that the ATF added a gender box for “non-binary” but completely ignored the fact that all the pertinent information had been consolidated to the first page of the form.

  For those unfamiliar, before November of 2020, page one of the 4473 form asked for personal information but no information on the firearm associated. Prior to 2020, the firearm information was located on page 3. Why would the ATF move the firearm information and the personal information onto the same page?

  

  To a  person, the answer is obvious—data collection. There is absolutely no way the ATF is not preparing for the eventual digitization of their systems and then a fight for a searchable database that they are prohibited by law from having. Furthermore, if one is familiar with how the Federal Government operates, the moves they make now are setting up the push five or even ten years down the road.

  This step towards tyranny is why gun owners must stay vigilant. When your personal friends that own firearms tell you that they “do not see an issue with universal background checks,” let them know that legitimate gun violence is not stopped by overregulation and government control.

  What makes the problem even more egregious is that in 2021, Joe Biden directed the ATF to make a few more regulations to current firearms law. One of those regulations is that FFLs (Firearms Dealers) cannot ever destroy the 4473 Forms that they keep on-site. Current law says that after 20 years, the records can be destroyed.

  If this regulation goes through, the Biden administration will have just set the first chess piece in a very, very long game of death by attrition. If gun shops close or go out of business, they will be required to turn over every 4473 ever filled out at their shop.

  Of course, this massive amount of collected paperwork will lead to the push for a digital database. It is a well-known fact that the ATF’s West Virginia office is filled to the brim with paperwork. It has been reported that the floor collapsed due to the large amounts of paperwork stored. What would make life easier for digitizing all those forms? If the information that was pertinent to the database was all on the first page. Sounding familiar?

  Right now, the ATF is prohibited by law from having a searchable registry of gun ownership. However, if you do not believe that the steps are being taken right now to push for that in 20 years, you are just not paying attention. For example, the stated top priority of the anti-gun lobby is universal background checks. It is supposedly an idea supported by gun owners (fudds maybe, other than that, I doubt it), but the question that people should be asking is, “How would that work?” Unfortunately, in reality, universal background checks would not work without a gun registry. 

  The historical fact is that gun registries lead right to government confiscation. If you’ve ever seen the Alex Jones interview with Piers Morgan, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

  So, gun owners need to stay vigilant and realize that right now, the ATF is prohibited from collecting this information for a good reason. Furthermore, if we want to keep our right to defend our liberty and freedom, we need to make sure that we continue to fight for it.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 11/11/2021 – 00:05

• White House Unveils Program To Get Conflict Zones Around The World Vaxxed
  White House Unveils Program To Get Conflict Zones Around The World Vaxxed

  The Biden administration says it’s now prioritizing US delivery of Covid vaccines to conflict zones around the world, in a policy that perhaps too few are seeing the irony of…

  Proper mask etiquette but terrible trigger discipline pic.twitter.com/aTfgq9oQqe

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 14, 2021

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

  On Wednesday a senior White House official said, “The Biden administration is set to announce today that it has brokered a deal to get more doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine into conflict zones around the world,” according to Axios.

  The initiative is being framed as part of efforts to “save lives” amid the global pandemic, though it begs the question of whether the “priority” should actually be to diplomatically push to end the particular conflicts in question. In places like Syria or Venezuela, for example, far-reaching US sanctions have actually made it extremely difficult for people to access Covid vaccines as well as vital medicines in general.

  The program will have Johnson & Johnson at the forefront, working to distribute its Covid-19 vaccine through NGOs on the ground in war-torn regions, for example in Iraq, Yemen, or disputed regions like Nagorno-Karabakh.

  Axios outlines some of the early details of the new program which will fast-track delivery of vaccines into the conflict-prone regions as follows: 

  • …in many humanitarian settings and conflict zones, there’s no government entity to administer the doses and accept that liability.
  • The U.S., J&J, and the global COVAX initiative built a “novel legal approach” in which J&J agreed to waive the legal liability it normally requires from a country for donated doses.
  • J&J is essentially saying, “we’re going to let an NGO give them to people who are most vulnerable because the situation demands it,” the official said. They said they expect it could be a model for donations from other vaccine makers.

  Below: map of conflict zones and geopolitical hotspots around the world…

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Early in the pandemic, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made a global appeal for a ceasefire in all conflicts, citing the “common enemy” of the pandemic: “Our world faces a common enemy: COVID-19. The virus does not care about nationality or ethnicity, faction or faith. It attacks all, relentlessly. Meanwhile, armed conflict rages on around the world,” according to March 2020 statements.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 23:45

• Six Degrees From Brookings: How A Liberal Think-Tank Keeps Coming Up In The Russian Collusion Investigation
  Six Degrees From Brookings: How A Liberal Think-Tank Keeps Coming Up In The Russian Collusion Investigation

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  The latest indictment by Special Counsel John Durham has created a stir in Washington as the investigation into the Russian collusion scandal exposed new connections to the Clinton campaign.  The indictment of  Igor Danchenko exposes additional close advisers to Hillary Clinton who allegedly pushed discredited and salacious allegations in the Steele dossier.

  However, one of the most interesting new elements was the role of a liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution, in the alleged effort to create a false scandal of collusion.

  Indeed, Brookings appears so often in accounts related to the Russian collusion scandal that it could be Washington’s alternative to the Kevin Bacon parlor game. It appears that many of these figures are within six degrees of Brookings.

  

  The fact is that Washington remains a small town for the ruling elite where degrees of separation can be quite small as figures move in and out of government. Moreover, think tanks are often the parking lots for party loyalists as they wait (and work) for new Administrations. The Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation play a similar role for conservative figures.

  However, even in Washington’s inbred environment, the layers of connections to Brookings is remarkable in the Durham indictments and accounts of the effort to create a Russian collusion scandal. The effort was hardly a secret before anyone knew the name of the former British spy Christopher Steele. On July 28, former CIA Director John Brennan briefed then President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” Notes from the meeting state the plan to invent a collusion narrative was “allegedly approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” That was three days before the Russian investigation was initiated.

  Durham is detailing how this plan was carried out and many of those referenced are within not six but two degrees of separation from Brookings.

  Brookings played a large role in pushing the Russian collusion narrative, hiring a variety of experts who then populated media outlets like MSNBC and CNN stating confidently that Trump was clearly incriminated in a series of dubious criminal acts. While no such crimes were ever charged, let alone prosecuted, Brookings maintained a deep bench of enabling experts like Susan Hennessey (now a national security adviser in the Biden Administration), Ben Wittes (who defended James Comey in his leaking of FBI memos) and Norm Eisen (who then become counsel in the Trump impeachment effort). This included the Brookings site, LawFare, which ran a steady stream of columns on how Trump could be charged for crimes ranging from obstruction to bribery.

  However, that type of media cross-pollination is common. What is most surprising is how the indictment seems to map out roads that keep leading back to Brookings:

  • The latest indicted figure, Danchenko, worked at Brookings. He proved to be the key unnamed source for Christopher Steele and later admitted to the FBI that the information attributed to him was not just “unsubstantiated” but, after being reworked by Steele, was unrecognizable from the original gossip or speculation. Steele himself was introduced to Danchenko

  • It appears that Danchenko was introduced to former British spy Christopher Steele by Brookings employee Fiona Hill. If that name seems familiar, Hill secured a position on President Trump’s National Security Council and later became a key witness against him in the first Trump impeachment over the Ukraine scandal.

  • Steele also testified in London that his friend and then Brookings President Strobe Talbott was involved in briefings and inquiries on the development of the dossier. Talbott is also a former Clinton administration diplomat and Clinton friend who served in a high-ranking position under Hillary Clinton. (Another figure, Cody Shearer, who has been mentioned in accounts developing and spreading his own collusion claims, was the brother of Talbott’s late wife).

  • When Steele was called to the State Department for a briefing on his dossier, Talbot sat next to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is currently at Brookings. The role of figures at Brookings in the dossier is still developing but all roads seem to lead back to the think tank.

  • Even when it became clear that false statements made in the secret FISA applications targeted Trump associate Carter Page, the secret court selected David Kris, who wrote for Brookings’ LawFare despite his prior denial that the FBI misled the court and criticism of Trump).

  Brookings has long been viewed as effectively the research arm for Democratic figures and liberal causes. Yet, even in the Baconesque world of Washington insiders, it is rare to see a think tank connected on so many levels to a criminal investigation. Like much in our politics, these connections will mean different things to different people. For conservatives, Brookings looks like the mothership for this scandal with associates coordinating meetings and roles in the metastasization of the scandal.  For liberals, the connections simply show the influence of the liberal think tank and any highlighting of the think tank is gaslighting a new “Trilateral Commission” narrative.

  With the exception of Danchenko, there is no evidence that any of these Brookings-related individuals have committed criminal acts or are suspected of such acts by Durham. However, these connections have already factored in the investigation and are likely to be addressed in any final Special Counsel report. Brookings Institution’s influence on the Russian collusion scandal will likely remain central to Durham’s unravelling of how the FBI was duped into the Russian investigation and the role of Clinton operatives in that effort.

  Notably, on September 9, 2015, Hillary Clinton appeared at Brookings and stressed there are “a lot of long-time friends and colleagues who perch here at Brookings including Strobe.”

  The question is whether that perch will become increasing precarious as Durham continues his investigation.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 23:25

• New York Preps To Avoid Repeat Of Texas' Grid Mayhem As Winter Looms
  New York Preps To Avoid Repeat Of Texas’ Grid Mayhem As Winter Looms

  New York’s grid operator modeled a scenario that was equivalent or greater than the Texas cold snap earlier this year that nearly collapsed the entire power grid and left millions in the dark, according to Bloomberg. 

  Wes Yeomans, vice president of operations for the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), said electricity demand would soar to record highs under such a scenario. At the same time, deliveries of natural gas to power plants would be disrupted, he added. 

  The disruption would cause power reserves to plummet by 90% to 526 megawatts, the model revealed. Yeomans said that NYISO had identified electrical circuits required to keep gas flowing through pipelines to prevent a grid collapse. Notice most of the fossil fuel generation is downstate. 

  

  One of the critical failures of the Texas power grid, besides declining renewable energy power, was outages at gas wells and processing plants that led to fuel shortages at power plants and ultimately left millions of Texans in the dark for nearly a week in February.

  Modeling has helped NYISO better prepare its grid and protect customers against periods of colder weather that could boost demand for energy and strain grid operations. The grid operator doesn’t want to repeat what happened in Texas earlier this year.

  NYISO’s modeling and grid preparations come as a ‘double-dip La Niña‘ has formed. So what does this mean for the Northeast’s climate this winter?

  

  Explaining more on the subject is Bob Larson, expert senior meteorologist for Accuweather, recently told Daily Mail, “the snowfall forecast for New York City is, on average, 29.8 inches, but our predictions up to 32 inches.” 

  So it comes as no surprise that NYISO is preparing for what could be a brutal winter. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 23:05

• Bitcoin Adoption Is The Start Of A Digital Revolution
  Bitcoin Adoption Is The Start Of A Digital Revolution

  Authored by Emeka Ugbah via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  The global adoption of bitcoin is only beginning as the world evolves toward a society based upon cryptographically secured money…

  

  It’s remarkable how far we’ve come in only a little more than a decade. Since its launch in 2009 by the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin, the world’s first and largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and dominance, has seen astonishing rises in value. Taking a look back at when the digital asset saw its first significant price increase, going from trading at a few fractions of a cent to 0.08 cents and then to $1, no one could have predicted with absolute certainty that we would one day live in a world where the asset would have gained over 6 million percent. Well, it happened in only 12 years.

  This astronomical growth gave birth to a whole new industry that has altered our perception of the financial world. It has also, just as expected, piqued the interest of millions of users worldwide. From nation-states to individuals, both private and publicly-owned companies and global financial institutions, these entities are either already invested and therefore now beneficiaries of this new monetary revolution, they are still on the sidelines thinking about how best to get involved, or just outrightly against the idea of this disruptive innovation, playing a blind eye to what it stands for, or just sadly oblivious of it.

  THE PANDEMIC VERSUS THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

  

  Image by Gerad Altmann from Pixabay

  2020 was an inflection point for the entire global financial market. The pandemic, as well as efforts by different countries to contain it, resulted in an unprecedented collapse of the global economy. In an attempt to salvage the situation, central banks lept into action, printing so much money that it further skewed the already unbalanced supply and demand relationship. That action laid bare what was already known, the fact that the monetary policies of most developed nations, and by extension the less developed ones, are tethered to a flawed system. After the markets crashed, it became clear that adverse measures had to be adopted if the world isn’t to end up in yet another recession. These measures had to be adopted at all levels, from the individual to the national, as well as at the corporate and institutional levels.

  The cryptocurrency market wasn’t spared during the crash, of course. Devastating declines were experienced across the board. Bitcoin itself lost over 50% of its value in March 2021. But as a result of its intrinsically scarce nature, its recovery was unlike anything seen in modern times within the financial world. Over the space of eight months, Bitcoin was able to crawl and claw its way back up, breaking its previous all-time high of $20,000 reached at the peak of its 2017 bull run. And since then the price of the digital asset has been on an absolute tear, bulldozing its way through psychological levels of resistance, printing new all-time highs and defying all the fear, uncertainty and doubt thrown its way.

  As expected, this parabolic rise in the value of the asset didn’t happen under the radar. Right before its steady climb, rumors and whispers of institutional interest in bitcoin began flooding the space, a lot of which was later confirmed by the institutions themselves. One such institution was MicroStrategy.

  THE CORPORATIONS JUMP IN

  

  New York City skyline view. Image by Manuel Romero from Pixabay

  In August 2020, MicroStrategy — the largest independent, Nasdaq-listed, publicly-traded cloud-based business intelligence provider — announced the purchase of 21,454 bitcoin for a total purchase price of $250 million, including fees and expenses. The company deliberated for months before deciding on a capital allocation approach. CEO Michael J. Saylor, went ahead to state that some macro factors — along with the public health crisis caused by the pandemic — forced governments around the world to adopt financial stimulus measures like quantitative easing to mitigate the crisis. Despite their best intentions, these measures may well depreciate the long-term real value of fiat currencies and many other various asset classes, along with many of those traditionally held by corporate treasury operations.

  The company’s bitcoin acquisitions didn’t stop at 21,454 bitcoin. Overall, MicroStrategy is said to hold a total of 114,042 bitcoin worth $6,966,574,887 based on the current price of the asset at the time of writing. Their total acquisition was purchased for $3.16 billion at an average price of $27,713 per bitcoin.

  Following the announcement of MicroStrategy’s acquisitions, news broke that Ruffer, a UK-based wealth management firm, had followed suit. The financial firm invested 2.5 percent of its $27 billion portfolio into bitcoin in November 2020. But unlike MicroStrategy who still holds bitcoin to date, purchasing a few thousands more now and again, Ruffer’s game plan was different. They opted to take out their initial investment of $650 million in profit, and subsequently, when the price of bitcoin began showing signs of weakness just before the May 2020 crash, they sold their entire position, turning a $650 million investment into $1.1 billion in the process.

  If that isn’t evidence of the market’s potential, it’d be difficult then to think of anything else that could be. The wealth management firm wasn’t the only non-crypto or blockchain-native company to demonstrate this. The Tesla case, despite having a different twist, still pushed that narrative. The American electric vehicle and renewable energy company revealed in February that it had purchased 42,902 bitcoin worth $1.5 billion. They also announced that “according to relevant regulations and initially on a limited basis,” they have begun making arrangements to accept bitcoin payments in return for their products. This news, as predicted, had a tremendous impact on the price of the digital asset, driving investors into a buying frenzy that drove the price up by more than 20% in just a few days that followed.

  As the months ticked by and the price of bitcoin verged into the unsteady waters that marred the second quarter of 2021, the air was saturated with fear, uncertainty and doubt. Different countries had begun yet again putting up measures to stifle the growth of the bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency market, pushing out exaggerated data and false narratives about the Bitcoin network’s energy consumption, claiming that Bitcoin miningis not good for the environment. In the midst of all that, it was reported that Tesla had sold its bitcoin position and would no longer accept the asset as payment for their products. However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, tweeted in response to the heat he had been receiving from the cryptocurrency community, saying that “Tesla only sold ~10% of holdings to confirm BTC could be liquidated easily without moving the market. When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with a positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing bitcoin transactions.”

  To date, the company still holds 42,000 bitcoin and is said to have no plans of selling.

  THE CHANGE OF AN INSTITUTIONAL VIEWPOINT

  It is interesting to think about how things have changed though. A few years ago, a number of these corporations and institutions that are now hovering around bitcoin and some of the major altcoins, had a completely different opinion.

  In 2017, analysts at Morgan Stanley, the American multinational investment bank, stated that “Bitcoin’s real value could be zero.” Fast-forward to 2021, Morgan Stanley became “the first big U.S. bank to offer its wealthy clients access to bitcoin funds.”

  Also in 2017, Jamie Dimon, a long time to-date opponent of bitcoin and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., another investment bank, was quoted as saying, “Bitcoin is a fraud that will blow up;” furthermore that, “cryptocurrency is only fit for use by drug dealers, murderers and people living in North Korea.” Fast forward yet again to 2021, two of the investment bank’s strategists Amy Ho and Joyce Chang wrote; “In a multi-asset portfolio, investors can likely add up to 1% of their allocation to cryptocurrencies in order to achieve any efficiency gain in the overall risk-adjusted returns of the portfolio.” Jamie Dimon himself, still unchanged in his view, recently stated that he still sees bitcoin as “worthless,” but “our clients are adults. They disagree. If they want to have access to buy or sell bitcoin, we can’t custody it — but we can give them legitimate, as clean as possible access.”

  Goldman Sachs, yet another multinational investment bank, reopened their cryptocurrency trading desk, a little over a year after they listed five reasons “why bitcoin is ‘not an asset class’, nor ‘a suitable investment.’”

  PayPal and Visa, the payment processing behemoths who have also in the past expressed their stances against bitcoin, calling it “ridiculous as a store of value” and “unacceptable as a payment system,” now both have completely different stands. PayPal now allows users to buy and sell bitcoin as well as a few other cryptocurrencies on their platform, while Visa is working on enabling bitcoin purchasing on theirs. A complete 180-degree turn from where they both were years ago. An interesting turn of events by all standards, no?

  There are currently a few arguments floating around on this topic: Some schools of thought will argue that without the corporations and institutions, the entire bitcoin and cryptocurrency network won’t reach its full potential, and that mainstream adoption is vital for its continued growth, seeing as the corporations have the ability inject so much capital into the networks.

  Data has it that the Global Asset Management industry holds $103 trillion as AUM (assets under management). Retail portfolios, representing 41% of global assets at $42 trillion and institutional investments amounting to $61 trillion, or 59%.

  From the data gathered, if the global institutions were to adopt the 1% portfolio allocation model to bitcoin as suggested by JPMorgan Chase & Co., this would mean an additional $1.03 trillion would flow into bitcoin, which already has a $1.15 trillion market capitalization. That would probably see the price of the digital asset shoot towards the $120,000 range. So is there a valid point in that argument?

  Another argument is that these corporations and institutions are only getting into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — not because they support the growth of the networks nor have beliefs in the blockchain technology, decentralization and its impact on the future — but that they are all capitalists who will sell as soon as they make a profit, much like Ruffer did. If we are being completely honest, who isn’t in it for the profit? Though most of the participants in the cryptocurrency space can boldly say that they are in it for a whole lot more. However, there’s no doubt that wealth creation and preservation remains an underlying incentive. The increase in institutional interest and involvement within the space will inherently bring some form of stability reducing the wild price volatility that the digital asset market has been known for. The market will certainly have a whole lot more liquidity. It all makes for a bit of a conundrum because the lack of liquidity in the market is one of the reasons why institutions aren’t jumping in mass just yet.

  “The crypto asset class is relatively still too small, illiquid and lacking depth to absorb large pension funds like institutional investments that would otherwise move the markets,”

  – Amber Ghaddar, cofounder of decentralized capital marketplace AllianceBlock.

  The third argument is that for the institutions to be committed fully to allocating portions of their portfolio into bitcoin or other digital assets, regulatory clarity has to be achieved within the space. Institutions operate within certain regulatory frameworks, that’s a known fact. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are largely unregulated. The philosophy behind the creation of bitcoin in the first place has decentralization at its core, which makes it a bit of a nightmare for regulators.

  MY THOUGHTS

  It is as clear as a bright, sunny day that regulators worldwide have bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency market in their crosshairs. Why has it now become a thing after over a decade of being in existence? Is it because the entire space has now garnered so much popularity that it can no longer be ignored? Or is it because the regulators are only just starting to figure out how to peek through the multiple complex layers of this otherwise nascent financial innovation? Of these two scenarios, the first can certainly be considered valid to some extent. But the second scenario, if the regulators only just started scrambling to try and regulate the space because they think they have figured it out, then it probably means they haven’t.

  

  Bitcoin was designed to self-regulate and preserve. Embedded within the codes of the protocol are set rules and mechanisms put in place to enforce any and all needed regulations, from supply schedules to security. Its adherence to these rules is pertinent to the network’s existence, buttressing the earlier mentioned self-regulatory and preservative point. There is a reason why it is considered a “trustless” payment network after alI, no?

  Now the argument that institutional adoption is required for bitcoin to attain its status as the hardest, most sound form of money, as well as a store of value is false, to say the least. The Bitcoin network was meticulously designed to be self-sustaining and its native currency transacted peer-to-peer by individuals who freely opted into its usage. As the number of users grows, so will its security, and as a result its value. With all that said, for lack of a better way to put these next few words, it’s a “if you can’t beat them, join them, or just leave them alone” thing.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 22:45

• Satellite Imagery Reveals China's Third Aircraft Carrier Nears Launch 
  Satellite Imagery Reveals China’s Third Aircraft Carrier Nears Launch 

  China could be months away from launching its newest aircraft carrier, according to a new analysis by a Washington-based think tank. 

  The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published commercial satellite imagery of China’s third aircraft carrier, commonly known as the Type 003, which will launch in three to six months. The images from Jiangnan Shipyard (captured on October 23) shows tremendous progress has been on the vessel: 

  The last several weeks witnessed a significant shift in the visual appearance of the Type 003. Sometime between September 18 and October 23, the two large openings in the vessel’s deck were sealed shut. These gaps allowed for large internal components, such as the engines and powerplants, to be inserted into the hull. Their closure suggests that the initial installation of major internal components has been completed. It is worth noting that the rear opening is not yet fully flush with the rest of the deck.

  

  Other major components of the carrier are nearing completion, including the vessel’s catapults, which will assist with launching aircraft. One of the bow catapults remains covered by environmental shelters, indicating that workers are still installing and testing the system. The second bow catapult is not yet covered by environmental shelters, but it will be once installation and testing begin. Behind the two bow catapults, work is underway (underneath environmental shelters) on a third catapult on the ship’s port side.

  

  The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), the world’s largest naval force, has only two aircraft carriers, the Liaoning and Shandong. The Liaoning was created using the hull of an older Soviet vessel, and the Shandong is a copy of the Liaoning with some improvements.  

  Type 003 is the most modern aircraft carrier China has designed to date. Offering a new Catapult Assisted Take-Off But Arrested Recovery (CATOBAR) will allow heavier aircraft with more payload and fuel to be launched. This could prove critical in defending its militarized islands in the South China Sea. When the new vessel enters service, CSIS said it would be a major addition for PLAN to project power in the Indo-Pacific region. 

  Naval domination is on the list for President Xi Jinping, who could be delivered a third presidential term next year, and likely remain in power for life. Xi has spent the better part of the last decade modernizing its military forces. The new carrier would give PLAN’s reach beyond the First Island Chain, including Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan.

  A 2020 Pentagon report estimated the carrier could enter service around 2023-2024. PLAN has an impressive force of approximately 355 ships and submarines, according to the DoD. The US Navy is smaller but has eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and fielding stealth fighters. However, China is way ahead of the US in developing hypersonic weapons that could become aircraft carrier killers. 

  The great power competition between Bejing and Washington continues to heat up as Xi flexes his military might in the Indo-Pacific region. Both superpowers are falling into Thucydides Trap, a term used to explain when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power that usually result in war. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 22:25

• America's Woke Colleges Can't Be Salvaged. We Need New Ones
  America’s Woke Colleges Can’t Be Salvaged. We Need New Ones

  Authored by Niall Ferguson, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,

  I’m Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken

  If you enjoyed Netflix’s “The Chair” – a lighthearted depiction of a crisis-prone English Department at an imaginary Ivy League college – you are clearly not in higher education. Something is rotten in the state of academia and it’s no laughing matter.

   

  

  Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals.

  Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker disinvitations, but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship.

  Some say that universities are so rotten that the institution itself should simply be abandoned and replaced with an online alternative — a metaversity perhaps, to go with the metaverse. I disagree. I have long been skeptical that online courses and content can be anything other than supplementary to the traditional real-time, real-space college experience.

  However, having taught at several, including Cambridge, Oxford, New York University and Harvard, I have also come to doubt that the existing universities can be swiftly cured of their current pathologies. That is why this week I am one of a group of people announcing the founding of a new university — indeed, a new kind of university: the University of Austin.

  The founders of this university are a diverse group in terms of our backgrounds and our experiences (though doubtless not diverse enough for some). Our political views also differ. To quote our founding president, Pano Kanelos, “What unites us is a common dismay at the state of modern academia and a belief that it is time for something new.”

  There is no need to imagine a mythical golden age. The original universities were religious institutions, as committed to orthodoxy and as hostile to heresy as today’s woke seminaries. In the wake of the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, scholars gradually became less like clergymen; but until the 20th century their students were essentially gentlemen, who owed their admission as much to inherited status as to intellectual ability. Many of the great intellectual breakthroughs of the Enlightenment were achieved off campus.

  Only from the 19th century did academia become truly secularized and professional, with the decline of religious requirements, the rise to pre-eminence of the natural sciences, the spread of the German system of academic promotion (from doctorate up in steps to full professorship), and the proliferation of scholarly journals based on peer-review. Yet the same German universities that led the world in so many fields around 1900 became enthusiastic helpmeets of the Nazis in ways that revealed the perils of an amoral scholarship decoupled from Christian ethics and too closely connected to the state.

  Even the institutions with the most sustained records of excellence — Oxford and Cambridge — have had prolonged periods of torpor. F.M. Cornford could mock the inherent conservatism of Oxbridge politics in his “Microcosmographia Academica” in 1908. When Malcolm Bradbury wrote his satirical novel “The History Man” in 1975, universities everywhere were still predominantly white, male and middle class. The process whereby a college education became more widely available — to women, to the working class, to racial minorities — has been slow and remains incomplete. Meanwhile, there have been complaints about the adverse consequences of this process in American universities since Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind,” which was published back in 1987.

  Nevertheless, much had been achieved by the later years of the 20th century. There was a general agreement that the central purpose of a university was the pursuit of truth — think only of Harvard’s stark Latin motto: Veritas — and that the crucial means to that end were freedom of conscience, thought, speech and publication. There was supposed to be no discrimination in admissions, examinations and academic appointments, other than on the basis of intellectual merit. That was crucial to enabling Jews and other minority groups to take full advantage of their intellectual potential. It was understood that professors were awarded tenure principally to preserve academic freedom so that they might “dare to think” — Immanuel Kant’s other great imperative, Sapere aude! — without fear of being fired.

  The benefits of all this defy quantification. A huge proportion of the major scientific breakthroughs of the past century were made by men and women whose academic jobs gave them economic security and a supportive community in which to do their best work. Would the democracies have won the world wars and the Cold War without the contributions of their universities? It seems doubtful. Think only of Bletchley Park and the Manhattan Project. Sure, the Ivy League’s best and brightest also gave us the Vietnam War. But remember, too, that there were more university-based computers on the Arpanet — the original internet — than any other kind. No Stanford, no Silicon Valley.

  Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all this gave rise. Yet, in the past decade, exhilaration has been replaced by suffocation, to the point that I feel genuinely sorry for today’s undergraduates.

  In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying things they believed, up from 55% in 2019, while 41% were reluctant to discuss politics in a classroom, up from 32% in 2019. Some 60% of students said they were reluctant to speak up in class because they were concerned other students would criticize their views as being offensive.

  Such anxieties are far from groundless. According to a nationwide survey of a thousand undergraduates by the Challey Institute for Global Innovation, 85% of self-described liberal students would report a professor to the university if the professor said something that they found offensive, while 76% would report another student.

  In a study published in March entitled “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination and Self-Censorship,” the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology showed that academic freedom is under attack not only in the U.S., but also in the U.K. and Canada. Three-quarters of conservative American and British academics in the social sciences and humanities said there is a hostile climate for their beliefs in their department. This compares to just 5% among left-wing faculty in the U.S.

  Again, one can understand why. Younger academics are especially likely to support dismissal of a colleague who has made some heretical utterance, with 40% of American social sciences and humanities professors under the age of 40 supporting at least one of four hypothetical dismissal campaigns. Ph.D. students are even more intolerant than other young academics: 55% of American Ph.D. students under 40 supported at least one hypothetical dismissal campaign. “High-profile deplatformings and dismissals” get the attention, the authors of the report conclude, but “far more pervasive threats to academic freedom stem … from fears of a) cancellation — threats to one’s job or reputation — and b) political discrimination.”

  These are not unfounded fears. The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, according to research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE has logged 426 incidents since 2015. Just under three-quarters of them resulted in some kind of sanction — including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation — against the scholar. Such efforts to restrict free speech usually originate with “progressive” student groups, but often find support from left-leaning faculty members and are encouraged by college administrators, who tend (as Sam Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College demonstrated, and as his own subsequent experience confirmed) to be even further to the left than professors. There are also attacks on academic freedom from the right, which FIRE challenges. With a growing number of Republicans calling for bans on critical race theory, I fear the illiberalism is metastasizing.

  Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S.

  To the historian’s eyes, there is something unpleasantly familiar about the patterns of behavior that have, in a matter of a few years, become normal on many campuses. The chanting of slogans. The brandishing of placards. The letters informing on colleagues and classmates. The denunciations of professors to the authorities. The lack of due process. The cancelations. The rehabilitations following abject confessions. The officiousness of unaccountable bureaucrats. Any student of the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century recognizes all this with astonishment. It turns out that it can happen in a free society, too, if institutions and individuals who claim to be liberal choose to behave in an entirely illiberal fashion. 

  How to explain this rapid descent of academia from a culture of free inquiry and debate into a kind of Totalitarianism Lite? In their book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the social psychiatrist Jonathan Haidt and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff lay much of the blame on a culture of parenting and early education that encourages students to believe that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” that you should “always trust your feelings,” and that “life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

  However, I believe the core problems are the pathological structures and perverse incentives of the modern university. It is not the case, as many Americans believe, that U.S. colleges have always been left-leaning and that today’s are no different from those of the 1960s. As Stanley Rothman, Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte showed in a 2005 study, while 39% of the professoriate on average described themselves as left-wing in 1984, the proportion had risen to 72% by 1999, by which time being a conservative had become a measurable career handicap.

  Mitchell Langbert’s analysis of tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors from 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in 2017 found that those with known political affiliations were overwhelmingly Democratic. Nearly two-fifths of the colleges in Langbert’s sample were Republican-free. The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio across the sample was 10.4:1, or 12.7:1 if the two military academies, West Point and Annapolis, were excluded. For history departments, the ratio was 17.4:1; for English 48.3:1. No ratio is calculable for anthropology, as the number of Republican professors was zero. In 2020, Langbert and Sean Stevens  found an even bigger skew to the left when they considered political donations to parties by professors. The ratio of dollars contributed to Democratic versus Republican candidates and committees was 21:1.

  Commentators who argue that the pendulum will magically swing back betray a lack of understanding about the academic hiring and promotion process. With political discrimination against conservatives now overt, most departments are likely to move further to the left over time as the last remaining conservatives retire.

  Yet the leftward march of the professoriate is only one of the structural flaws that characterize today’s university. If you think the faculty are politically skewed, take a look at academic administrators. A shocking insight into the way some activist-administrators seek to bully students into ideological conformity was provided by Trent Colbert, a Yale Law School student who invited his fellow members of the Native American Law Students Association to “a Constitution Day bash” at the “NALSA Trap House,” a term that used to mean a crack den but now is just a mildly risque way of describing a party. Diversity director Yaseen Eldik’s thinly veiled threats to Colbert if he didn’t sign a groveling apology — “I worry about this leaning over your reputation as a person, not just here but when you leave” — were too much even for an editorial board member at the Washington Post. Democracy may die in darkness; academic freedom dies in wokeness.

  Moreover, the sheer number of the administrators is a problem in itself. In 1970, U.S. colleges employed more professors than administrators. Between then and 2010, however, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents” increased by slightly more than 50%, in line with student enrollments. The number of administrators and administrative staffers rose by 85% and 240%, respectively. The ever-growing army of coordinators for Title IX — the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination — is one manifestation of the bureaucratic bloat, which since the 1990s has helped propel tuition costs far ahead of inflation.

  The third structural problem is weak leadership. Time and again — most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a lecture by the University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was abruptly canceled because he had been critical of affirmative action — academic leaders have yielded to noisy mobs baying for disinvitations. There are notable exceptions, such as Robert Zimmer, who as president of the University of Chicago between 2006 and 2021 made a stand for academic freedom. But the number of other colleges to have adopted the Chicago statement, a pledge crafted by the school’s Committee on Freedom of Expression, remains just 55, out of nearly 2,500 institutions offering four-year undergraduate programs.

  Finally, there is the problem of the donors — most but not all alumni — and trustees, many of whom have been astonishingly oblivious of the problems described above. In 2019, donors gave nearly $50 billion to colleges. Eight donors gave $100 million or more. People generally do not make that kind of money without being hard-nosed in their business dealings. Yet the capitalist class appears strangely unaware of the anticapitalist uses to which its money is often put. A phenomenon I find deeply puzzling is the lack of due diligence associated with much academic philanthropy, despite numerous cases when the intentions of benefactors have deliberately been subverted.

  All this would be bad enough if it meant only that U.S. universities are no longer conducive to free inquiry and promotion based on merit, without which scientific advances are certain to be impeded and educational standards to fall. But academic illiberalism is not confined to college campuses. As students collect their degrees and enter the workforce, they inevitably carry some of what they have learned at college with them. Multiple manifestations of “woke” thinking and behavior at newspapers, publishing houses, technology companies and other corporations have confirmed Andrew Sullivan’s 2018 observation, “We all live on campus now.”

  When a problem becomes this widespread, the traditional American solution is to create new institutions. As we have seen, universities are relatively long-lived compared to companies and even nations. But not all great universities are ancient. Of today’s top 25 universities, according to the global rankings compiled by the London Times Higher Education Supplement, four were founded in the 20th century. Fully 14 were 19th-century foundations; four date back to the 18th century. Only Oxford (which can trace its origins to 1096) and Cambridge (1209) are medieval in origin. 

  As might be inferred from the large number (10) of today’s leading institutions founded in the U.S. between 1855 and 1900, new universities tend to be established when wealthy elites grow impatient with the existing ones and see no way of reforming them. The puzzle is why, despite the resurgence of inequality in the U.S. since the 1990s and the more or less simultaneous decline in standards at the existing universities, so few new ones have been created. Only a handful have been set up this century: University of California Merced (2005), Ave Maria University (2003) and Soka University of America (2001). Just five U.S. colleges founded in the past 50 years make it into the Times’s top 25 “Young Universities”: University of Alabama at Birmingham (founded 1969), University of Texas at Dallas (1969), George Mason (1957), University of Texas at San Antonio (1969) and Florida International (1969). Each is (or originated as) part of a state university system.

  In short, the beneficiaries of today’s gilded age seem altogether more tolerant of academic degeneration than their 19th-century predecessors. For whatever reason, many prefer to give their money to established universities, no matter how antithetical those institutions’ values have become to their own. This makes no sense, even if the principal motivation is to buy Ivy League spots for their offspring. Why would you pay to have your children indoctrinated with ideas you despise?

  So what should the university of the future look like? Clearly, there is no point in simply copying and pasting Harvard, Yale or Princeton and expecting a different outcome. Even if such an approach were affordable, it would be the wrong one.

  To begin with, a new institution can’t compete with the established brands when it comes to undergraduate programs. Young Americans and their counterparts elsewhere go to college as much for the high-prestige credentials and the peer networks as for the education. That’s why a new university can’t start by offering bachelors’ degrees.

  The University of Austin will therefore begin modestly, with a summer school offering “Forbidden Courses” — the kind of content and instruction no longer available at most established campuses, addressing the kind of provocative questions that often lead to cancelation or self-censorship.

  The next step will be a one-year master’s program in Entrepreneurship and Leadership. The primary purpose of conventional business programs is to credential large cohorts of passive learners with a lowest-common-denominator curriculum. The University of Austin’s program will aim to teach students classical principles of the market economy and then embed them in a network of successful technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and public-policy reformers. It will offer an introduction to the world of American technology similar to the introduction to the Chinese economy offered by the highly successful Schwarzman Scholars program, combining both academic pedagogy and practical experience. Later, there will be parallel programs in Politics and Applied History and in Education and Public Service.

  Only after these initial programs have been set up will we start offering a four-year liberal arts degree.  The first two years of study will consist of an intensive liberal arts curriculum, including the study of philosophy, literature, history, politics, economics, mathematics, the sciences and the fine arts. There will be Oxbridge-style instruction, with small tutorials and college-wide lectures, providing an in-depth and personalized learning experience with interdisciplinary breadth.  

  After two years of a comprehensive and rigorous liberal arts education, undergraduates will join one of four academic centers as junior fellows, pursuing disciplinary coursework, conducting hands-on research and gaining experience as interns. The initial centers will include one for entrepreneurship and leadership, one for politics and applied history, one for education and public service, and one for technology, engineering and mathematics.

  To those who argue that we could more easily do all this with some kind of internet platform, I would say that online learning is no substitute for learning on a campus, for reasons rooted in evolutionary psychology. We simply learn much better in relatively small groups in real time and space, not least because a good deal of what students learn in a well-functioning university comes from their informal discussions in the absence of professors. This explains the persistence of the university over a millennium, despite successive revolutions in information technology.

  To those who wonder how a new institution can avoid being captured by the illiberal-liberal establishment that now dominates higher education, I would answer that the governance structure of the institution will be designed to prevent that. The Chicago principles of freedom of expression will be enshrined in the founding charter. The founders will form a corporation or board of trustees that will be sovereign. Not only will the corporation appoint the president of the college; it will also have a final say over all appointments or promotions. There will be one unusual obligation on faculty members, besides the standard ones to teach and carry out research: to conduct the admissions process by means of an examination that they will set and grade. Admission will be based primarily on performance on the exam. That will avoid the corrupt rackets run by so many elite admissions offices today.

  As for our choice of location in the Texas capital, I would say that proximity to a highly regarded public university — albeit one where even the idea of establishing an institute to study liberty is now controversial — will ensure that the University of Austin has to compete at the highest level from the outset.

  My fellow founders and I have no illusions about the difficulty of the task ahead. We fully expect condemnation from the educational establishment and its media apologists. We shall regard all such attacks as vindication — the flak will be a sign that we are above the target.

  In our minds, there can be no more urgent task for a society than to ensure the health of its system of higher education. The American system today is broken in ways that pose a profound threat to the future strength and stability of the U.S. It is time to start fixing it. But the opportunity to do so in the classic American way — by creating something new, actually building rather than “building back” — is an inspiring and exciting one.

  To quote Haidt and Lukianoff: “A school that makes freedom of inquiry an essential part of its identity, selects students who show special promise as seekers of truth, orients and prepares those students for productive disagreement … would be inspiring to join, a joy to attend, and a blessing to society.”

  That is not the kind of institution satirized in “The Chair.” It is precisely the kind of institution we need today.

  *  *  *

  Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was previously a professor of history at Harvard, New York University and Oxford. He is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm. His latest book is “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 22:05

• China Gets Half A Million Barrels Of Iranian Oil Every Day, Violating US Sanctions As Biden Looks The Other Way
  China Gets Half A Million Barrels Of Iranian Oil Every Day, Violating US Sanctions As Biden Looks The Other Way

  For the past several years, Iran has been subject to “crippling” oil-export sanctions, but that is news to China whose imports of Iranian oil have held above half a million barrels per day on average for the last three months, traders and ship-tracking firms told Reuters as Chinese buyers judge that getting crude at cheap prices outweighs any risks from busting U.S. sanctions, especially when the US president is unlikely to wake up from his afternoon nap and do anything to punish China for violating the terms of the “draconian” embargo.

  Indeed, as Reuters notes, Chinese purchases of Iranian crude have continued this year despite the sanctions that, if enforced, would allow Washington to cut off those who violate them from the U.S. economy.

  While normally it would be odd that a nation would so flagrantly flaunt terms of sanctions imposed by the world’s “superpower”, in this case virtually nobody bats an eyelid that Joe “10% for the big guy” Biden, whose son has long been a conduit for unofficial Chinese backchanneling to Joe; and having purchased tens of millions in family favors the White House has no choice but to look the other way and has chosen not to enforce the sanctions against Chinese individuals and companies amid negotiations that could revive a 2015 nuclear deal that would allow Iran to sell its oil openly again.

  After a dip in June and July from a record high in May as buyers ran low on import permits, Chinese independent refiners embraced Iran’s cheaper crude again as the government released fresh quotas, the traders and ship-tracking sources said.

  “Deep discounts of Iranian oil and the new import quotas supported demand from Chinese independent refiners,” said Emma Li, tanker tracker Vortexa Analytics’ China market analyst, adding that strong Chinese refining margins also lent support.Li also said that about 13 million barrels of Iranian oil stored in vessels off China and Singapore arrived in Shandong last month.

  Prohibited Iranian oil shipments are now worth some $1.3 billion a month and the bulk of which go to China, providing key revenue for Tehran. Iran and world powers are set to resume talks on Nov. 29 to restore the nuclear deal and lift U.S. sanctions on the sales. Iranian arrivals into China hit 660,000 bpd in August and 545,000 bpd in September, before dropping back to 470,000 bpd in October, according to data from Vortexa Analytics.

  

  That put the three-month average at 560,000 bpd, up from a 478,000 bpd average for June and July, according to Vortexa data. The shipments hit a peak of 730,000 bpd in May, while the year’s average to end-October was 562,000 bpd.

  China’s June and July Iran shipments dipped as Beijing clamped down on irregular quota trading and independent refiners’ import permits dried up. In the quota interim, about 7 million barrels were moved into bonded storage between July and September, according to Vortexa and the China-based trading executive, to await Beijing’s October quota release.

  These barrels were subsequently trans-shipped in October to Shandong province, China’s independent refining hub.

  “Any significant improvement in the nuclear talks will lead to higher imports from Iran, although much of the volumes will first be discharged from bonded tanks,” said Michal Meidan, director of the China programme at Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “Renewed flows from Iran are more likely next year.”

  Other tanker trackers said Vortexa’s volumes for the three months are similar to their own estimates.

  Daniel Gerber, Chief Executive of Petro-Logistics, said that while volumes are down from earlier in the year “going forward, if China is able to control the recent surge in COVID infections, I would not be surprised to see stronger imports from Iran, given high oil prices, OPEC discipline and the discounts that are available on sanctioned oil.”

  Of course, officially China has not imported any oil from Iran since the start of 2021, according to its customs data, as state-owned refiners remain sidelined by the U.S. sanctions.

  To bypass triggering US red lines, Iranian crude, which accounts for about 6% of China’s crude oil imports, is currently exported to China as oil from Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, squeezing out supplies from Brazil and West Africa. Iranian oil was last transacted at a $4-$5 per barrel discount to Brent crude on a delivered basis, about $6-$7 below Middle East benchmark Oman, traders said.

  Beijing’s acquiescence over these transactions has also emboldened traders and buyers.

  “The government does not wish to intervene as it sees little downside risks allowing in these imports,” said a China-based trading executive involved in the business. In other words, China has precisely zero fear of any a forceful (or any) retaliation from Joe Brandon Biden.

  China’s foreign ministry told Reuters normal business dealings between China and Iran should be respected, without going into details on shipments. “China urges the U.S. to lift the illegitimate unilateral sanctions as soon as possible,” the ministry said.

  Meanwhile, making a further mockery of the feeble old man in the White House, a senior U.S. official told Reuters that Washington is aware of China’s Iranian oil purchases, and has chosen diplomacy as a “more effective path forward to address our concerns”.

  Said otherwise, the US will punish countries who violate its sanctions, but it won’t dare touch China as it itself is too afraid of what an escalation could look like.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 21:45

• A Fat, Comfortable Military Is A "Woke" Military
  A Fat, Comfortable Military Is A “Woke” Military

  Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

  Over the past decade federal military and intelligence agencies have increasingly embraced so-called woke campaigns and policy positions. Specifically, these government agencies have taken explicitly ideological positions in promoting “pride month” and more recruitment of larger numbers of gay and transgender personnel explicitly for purposes of increasing “diversity.” Actual military concerns appear to be receding into the background even as the US military establishment has recently lost yet another war and blown trillions of taxpayer dollars.

  For example, as early as 2014, the CIA was bragging that it “has participated in the DC Capital Pride Festival for the past three years … and is active in advancing LGBT diversity and inclusion efforts throughout the Intelligence Community.” More recently, the CIA in May 2021 released a series of recruitment videos clearly focused on recruiting personnel which would allow the agency to check certain diversity boxes.

  Also, in May of this year, the US Army released a recruitment video celebrating a lesbian wedding and a pride march. In November, the navy launched the USNS Harvey Milk, named after the famed gay rights activist and icon. 

  For more astute observers of government institutions, of course, none of this will be surprising. Military and intelligence agencies are fundamentally nothing more than tax-funded bureaucratic agencies, and as such are political organizations. They will identify which way the political winds are blowing in Washington and then pander to the groups most likely to increase their budgets and privileges.

  The latest effort at “woke” politics is simply public relations designed to maximize budgets and increase influence. Moreover, because the US military establishment so rarely faces any real political scrutiny or fiscal discipline, it need not concern itself with efficiency or serving customers, as a private firm must. Instead, military and intelligence bureaucracies are free to spend time on political and ideological concerns instead. 

  

  Left versus Right on the Embrace of “Woke”

  Interestingly, it has been the Left that has offered the most insightful criticism of the drive for embracing diversity in Langley and at the Pentagon.

  Glenn Greenwald, for instance, identified the CIA diversity drive for what it is: a cynical ploy designed to appeal to a corporate center-left elite that fancies itself the defender of “tolerance” while it bombs children with drones. Similarly, Alan Macleod scoffs about Pentagon claims that LGBT women are “’shattering stereotypes’ by joining the world’s largest killing machine.”

  When it comes to the military, at least some elements on the left knows a con when they see one.

  On the right, the preferred critique centers on whether or not the woke PR campaign has anything to do with providing military defense services. For example, Robert Berg at National Review writes that the new emphasis on diversity is pursued “at the cost of mission readiness.” That’s true in the sense that the woke campaigns contribute nothing to securing the lives and property of the taxpayers. But none of the Right’s milquetoast protests will amount to any meaningful reform because the Right is never willing to use the Congress’s number one tool for reining in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies: the federal budget.

  Yes, the Heritage Foundation may whine on occasion about Pride Month at the Pentagon, but we all know that in the end, the Heritage Foundation will call loudly for ever-larger budgets for the US’s military establishment, no matter what. They may even use their alleged outrage about wokeness to push the lie that the Pentagon endured “damaging cuts” during the Obama years.

  So, by pushing wokeism, the Pentagon and the CIA win either way. The conservatives will never actually endanger the military and intelligence budgets, and the Left will embrace the new “tolerant” military-industrial complex all the more.

  This, however, is exactly what we should expect from military defense agencies that are inherently more concerned with political goals than geostrategic ones.

  This isn’t peculiar to modern times or to the United States, of course. Any military establishment that enjoys big budgets and a high amount of public approval—as is clearly the case in the United States—will feel little need to focus on military readiness or economic efficiency. This is further compounded when a regime is—as is also the case in the United States—fundamentally secure and faces no credible existential threats.

  Politics, Not Economics, Drives Military Policy

  Because military spending is allocated politically rather than through the marketplace—there really is no way to calculate the value provided by military forces. When market demand plays so little of a role in the allocation of resources, “value” becomes a function of the ability of military personnel to cater to the whims of policymakers who make budget decisions.

  Moreover, the more the military establishment is insulated from the consumers and taxpayers, the more military and intelligence agencies are likely to engage in ideological flights of fancy unconnected to military defense. Military expertise is not what lies behind most decisions from military and intelligence personnel. Rather, military bureaucrats are incentivized to make decisions that bring political benefit.

  In his essay “Secession and the Production of Defense,” Jörg Guido Hülsmann explains how in a functional marketplace the people paying the bills—i.e., the taxpayers—are able to guide the allocation of resources in the market through the use of their dollars. This is apparent in all relatively free markets like real estate, insurance, or shoes. In military and intelligence “markets,” on the other hand, the money extracted from the end user—“the people”—is used by policymakers for political purposes. So, the real “clients” of military and intelligence bureaucrats are politicians, not taxpayers. Hülsmann writes:

  The possibility to ignore the needs of the consumers gives the producers [i.e., the Pentagon and the CIA] the opportunity to produce goods that only they consider important.

  Ultimately,

  Freed from the need to serve consumers as efficiently as possible, the producers of defense services now have a bigger margin for wasteful behavior…. The effects of compulsory funding are similarly devastating. It reduces the necessity for the military agencies to satisfy customer needs. As a consequence, as we have seen, the various military executives can start satisfying their own needs, both in respect to the services they produce and in respect to the selection of personnel.

  The end result is that military and intelligence personnel seek out “experts” who are really just experts in having the correct opinions:

  Moreover, rather than hiring the most capable personnel, they start hiring the fellows who know the best jokes, or the children of their schoolmates, or people who share their political, sexual, religious, and other preferences. Or they might hire particularly ruthless individuals, who despise common morality. Also, rather than organizing the defense units in the most militarily efficient way, they acquiesce to other considerations. For example, the recent admission to the U.S. military of females and homosexual males does not seem to be based on military, but political, expediency.

  Restoring Some Control to the Taxpayers

  What is the answer to this?

  The first of course, would be to restore some fiscal discipline at the federal level. Washington’s knee-jerk habit of relentlessly increasing military and intelligence budgets must end. For example, when the CIA (and also the FBI, among others) failed spectacularly on 9/11, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies received only more power and larger budgets. In Afghanistan, after twenty years of Pentagon generals insisting that victory was right around the corner, they face no blowback. There is absolutely no incentive for these bureaucratic agencies to actually improve their wasteful use of resources.

  At a bare minimum, federal military spending ought to be cut by $1 trillion (in 2022 dollars) over ten years, as recently contemplated by the Congressional Budget Office. But more radical changes must be pursued as well. 

  As Angelo Codevilla has shown, the CIA is a dysfunctional and partisan organization, incapable of achieving its stated goals. Codevilla concludes: “[A]s regards strategic intelligence, CIA is usually worse than useless.” The CIA is actually an impediment to the effective use and sharing of intelligence information. It should simply be abolished.

  As far as the Pentagon goes, one key move to reining in federal power, waste, and social policy antics is decentralizing military power. A first step in this direction is winning the passage of the “Defend the Guard” legislation now being contemplated in numerous state legislatures. This movement restores to state governments some control over the use of the National Guard, providing a limited veto on deployments and federal military adventurism. Yet far more power must be shifted toward American decisionmakers—both public and private—outside Washington, DC, and closer to the taxpayers if the US’s military establishment is to face any real accountability. Otherwise, the usual tiny number of reliable Washington insiders will ensure the Pentagon and the intelligence “community” remains fat, comfortable, and insulated from any public discontent. In itself, the military move to wokeness is actually a minor affair, and only one example of how little the military does that is critical to military defense. Rather, the woke movement is part of the larger problem of a military that is overfunded and thus disconnected from all fiscal discipline and what might be loosely termed “customer service.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 21:25

• "We Must Learn To Live With It" – WHO's EU Chief Admits COVID Isn't Going Anywhere
  “We Must Learn To Live With It” – WHO’s EU Chief Admits COVID Isn’t Going Anywhere

  Speaking in an interview with Spain’s La Vanguardia newspaper, WHO’s European Director Hans Kluge warned that the COVID pandemic, which has been raging for nearly two years now, won’t end until nations “learn to live with the virus”, and build health-care systems that are strong enough so that they are not overwhelmed by infections and deaths if newly infectious variants ever emerge.

  

  Kluge warned that the international health body is not able to declare an end to the pandemic while there is still a risk that health systems may be unable to cope with a spike in case numbers. But the problem is, the likelihood that every health system in the world can verifiably achieve such goals is pretty close to nil.

  “We have to learn to live with the virus. As soon as our health system is not overwhelmed by hospitalizations and deaths from Covid, that is, it can provide the services it provided before, the pandemic will possibly become an endemic,” Kluge said.

  The comments from the WHO’s Europe boss come as he addresses concerns about the situation on the Continent ahead of what’s expected to be a cold, dark winter.

  Responding to a question about whether “Europe is once again the epicenter of the pandemic,” Kluge flagged that the WHO is expecting “half a million deaths” from the virus before February. Kluge blamed a combination of “fake news” and the “relaxation of public health and social measures,” for this projection. Kluge was clear that countries have to refute opposition to the COVID vaccine and safety protocols, and proposed a “working group in Europe” to challenge critics.

  Despite these concerns Kluge said the situation would have been “very difficult” without the, so far, effective vaccine rollout. However, for vaccinations to be fully effective, Kluge stressed that countries must “leave no one behind” and focus on booster shots and inoculating children to maximize the coverage provided and to reduce the spread of the virus.

  To be sure, Kluge’s view on vaccinations – particularly when it comes to children – is far from indisputable science. In fact, anybody who’s interested in learning more about the opposing view can attend a virtual debate being held by a top NIH scientist named Dr. Matthew Memoli.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 21:05

• Biden DoJ Launches Crackdown On Corporate Misbehavior As President's Approval Numbers Sag
  Biden DoJ Launches Crackdown On Corporate Misbehavior As President’s Approval Numbers Sag

  As President Biden’s approval rating slumps and inflation surges to the highest level in 30 years, the White House needs a new boogeyman to try and distract the people from the terrible job the Dems are doing managing the country. And since the DoJ has already launched crackdowns on Big Tech and Big Pharma (well, sort of), it looks like Attorney General Merrick Garland is preparing to take corporate America – specifically, banks – to the woodshed, with an emphasis on repeat offenders.

  In an interview with the FT, John Carlin, a senior DoJ official who will be leading the crackdown, issued the following warning to corporations: “you’ll see cases in the weeks to come” involving “some of the largest corporations” in the US.

  Specifically, the Biden DoJ will be going after companies that have violated the terms of deferred prosecution agreements, which dismiss or delay criminal charges for a period of time to allow a given corporate offender to prove that it has “reformed” its behavior.

  Across the corporate space, we can think of one industry in particular that has benefited from these types of agreements…Wall Street.

  Whether it’s Goldman Sachs helping Malaysia’s then-leader steal billions from his own people to create a political slush fund, along with a bevy of ultra-luxury items – yachts, jewelry, the film “The Wolf of Wall Street” etc – or Deutsche Bank racking up billions in fines for its recidivist behavior (it got to the point to where the SEC finally decided to make DB’s CEO personally liable for the bank’s future bad behavior, which is extremely uncommon in the US), banks have shown time and time again that when they break US laws, the response from regulators is rarely more than a slap on the wrist.

  

  Carlin, who is Garland’s principal associate deputy AG, said the crackdown is part of Biden’s Admin’s pledge to take a tougher line on “corporate malfeasance” compared with the “laissez-faire” stance of the Trump Administration.

  According to the FT, corporate crime prosecutions brought by the DoJ dropped to its lowest level in 25 years in 2020, according to research from Syracuse University.

  White-collar criminals be warned, Carlin said. There’s a new sheriff in town.

  “There are going to be serious consequences,” Carlin warned. “You should expect in the days, months, years to come an unprecedented focus by this attorney-general on corporate accountability,” he said, referring to Merrick Garland, the US government’s top lawyer. He added: “Now is the time to get the house in order, focus on compliance, because there [are] going to be tough enforcement actions coming out of the department if you do not do so.”

  Last month, Carlin’s boss at the DoJ said prosecutors would work to hold individuals accountable for “corporate malfeasance”.

  Last month Lisa Monaco, deputy attorney-general and Carlin’s superior, announced sweeping changes to the justice department’s corporate enforcement policies, such as taking into account historical misconduct during company investigations. Monaco also signalled that the DoJ would encourage the appointment of independent monitors – outside individuals appointed by the authorities to ensure that companies were adhering to deferred prosecution agreements. During the Trump administration, monitors were deemed unnecessary in many instances where DPAs were imposed. The deputy attorney-general said businesses seeking leniency in exchange for co-operating with authorities must also identify all individuals linked to misconduct – irrespective of their seniority.

  We’re certainly curious to see who Biden’s first corporate scapegoat will be. The trick is to find someone powerful enough to impress the NYT editorial board…but not a Jamie or Larry – you know, one of the CEOs who’s actually responsible for running the country.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 20:45

• "Grave Constitutional Violation": Rittenhouse Defense Asks For Mistrial After Insane Day At Court
  “Grave Constitutional Violation”: Rittenhouse Defense Asks For Mistrial After Insane Day At Court

  Attorneys for Kyle Rittenhouse have asked Judge Bruce Schroeder to declare a mistrial in the case, accusing lead prosecutor Thomas Binger of “what amounts to prosecutorial overreach” when he questioned the teenager’s right to remain silent after his fatal shootings of two men who chased an attacked him during demonstrations in Kenosha, WI last year. 

  

  With the jury out of the room, Schroeder warned Binger after he asked Rittenhouse why he chose to remain silent about the incident until now.

  “The problem is this is a grave constitutional violation for you to talk about the defendant’s silence,” Schroder told Binger. “You’re right on the borderline, and you may be over it. But it better stop.”

  Judge Scolding The Prosecution In The Rittenhouse Case

  “The problem is this is a grave constitutional violation for you to talk about the Defendant’s silence.”

  “You are right on the borderline, you may be over. It better stop.” pic.twitter.com/OVK9eYOSSm

  — The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) November 10, 2021

  Schroeder again admonished Binger for bringing a matter before the jury which Schroeder had explicitly disallowed – causing defense attorney Mark Richards (and others) to accuse the prosecution of trying to provoke a mistrial.

  “I was astonished when you began your examination by commenting on the defendant’s post-arrest silence,” said Schroeder, adding “That’s basic law. It’s been basic law in this country for 40 years, 50 years. I have no idea why you would do something like that.“

  NOW – Judge in Rittenhouse trial screams at the prosecutor. pic.twitter.com/UBxDTwVIoT

  — Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 10, 2021

  …The judge just said that he is also concerned with a mistrial given the prosecutor’s comments on pre-trial silence which was outrageous.

  — Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) November 10, 2021

  When Binger tried to slick talk his way out of trouble for introducing prohibited topics, Judge Schroeder said “I don’t believe you.“

  Judge CALLS OUT prosecution for their perceived attempt at a mistrial earlier by introducing excluded evidence. Prosecution claims he did so in good faith. Judge says “I don’t believe you!” Amazing pic.twitter.com/gTK5pXt99e

  — Nuance Bro (@NuanceBro) November 10, 2021

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

  Asking for the mistrial:

  “Both elements for mistrial with prejudice have been met.”

  The Defense Attorneys for Kyle Rittenhouse call for a mistrial in their client’s homicide case due to the statements of lead prosecutor Thomas Binger. pic.twitter.com/PYHj5JEbrG

  — Newsmax (@newsmax) November 10, 2021

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

  Did the prosecutor in the Rittenhouse case deliberately attempt to cause a mistrial because he knew acquittal was coming given how horribly the case was going for the prosecution?

  — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 10, 2021

  I never commented on the Rittenhouse case until I started watching large chunks of the trial, and all I can say is that anyone who has done the same and denies that there’s a huge gap between the media narrative about this and what actually happened is not telling the truth.

  — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 10, 2021

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

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 20:45

• Fabulist MSNBC Anchor Brian Williams Is Finally Retiring
  Fabulist MSNBC Anchor Brian Williams Is Finally Retiring

  Longtime NBC and MSNBC Anchor Brian Williams is finally quietly retiring from NBC and MSNBC, where he served as an anchorman and reporter for nearly 3 full decades. His departure is expected at the end of the year.

  Williams’ credibility was permanently blemished when he was exposed as a repeated fabulist, who frequently shared different versions of a story where a helicopter he was riding in while embedded with the US military was allegedly struck down by an enemy projectile.

  

  In case you aren’t familiar/don’t remember the fracas that forced Williams into hiding for months before he quietly slunk back to the anchor desk, here’s the short version, courtesy of Politico: “over the years, Williams has told a shifting story about the day he flew aboard a U.S. Army helicopter during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In later versions, he has said his helicopter was hit and forced down by enemy fire, the version he told last Friday. Called out for his fabrication, Williams came clean, calling the recollections a ‘mistake’ and acknowledging that it was a helicopter flying well ahead of his helicopter that got hit. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another,” Williams later told Stars and Stripes.

  Of course, any journalist – or amateur storyteller – could probably empathize: why should the truth stand in the way of a good story?

  The only problem is that while Williams’ career never recovered after that incident (which occurred back in 2015), he did often criticize President Trump, using the excuse that the then-President’s speeches weren’t “based in reality” as justification for cutting away.

  Here’s more on Williams’ departure, news of which was clearly and conveniently leaked to Williams’ CNN pal Brian Stelter.

  For the past five years, Williams has anchored “The 11th Hour,” an end-of-the-day newscast and political talk program. CNN Business reported in August that his contract was expiring in the next six months and that he wanted to move off the late-night hour.

  Now he is doing it. But he added in Tuesday’s statement, “I ask all those who are a part of our loyal viewing audience to remain loyal. The 11th Hour will remain in good hands, produced by the best team in cable news.”

  Williams’ exit from NBC has an end-of-an-era feel. He was a key player in the launch of the MSNBC news channel in 1996, manning breaking news coverage and a prime time recap of the day. Then he became one of America’s best-known newsmen during his decade at the helm of the “NBC Nightly News,” one of the most-watched news programs in the US.

  Stelter added that Williams’ “comeback” was remarkable.

  “Most broadcasters would have been cooked if they had undergone the sort of scandal that Williams faced in 2015,” Vanity Fair said in 2017. “But a slow-and-steady revival — a mixture of dutiful penance, clever planning, and a dramatic change in the media — has Williams turning 11 p.m. into the new primetime.”

  Well, that’s one way to put it. Maybe on his last day at 30 Rock, NBC can fly Williams out via helicopter.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 20:25

• The Two Real Reasons Democrats Lost Virginia: A Woke Post-Mortem
  The Two Real Reasons Democrats Lost Virginia: A Woke Post-Mortem

  Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

  It has been nothing short of hilarious over the last couple of days watching news pundits try to dissect why the governor’s race in Virginia swung so wildly in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin after the state voted so overwhelmingly for President Biden in the 2020 general election.

  

  Once again, I am left to pick up the “common sense” pieces for the Democratic mainstream pundits whose jaws are on the floor because of a political victory that, in their eyes, not only shouldn’t have happened, but was near-impossible.

  I thought about this for the last couple of days and arrived at the conclusion that there were two main reasons that Virginia swung: government overreach from a party that claims to be advocating for middle class freedom, and willful ignorance (i.e. government under-reach) about the state of the economy, and inflation, in our country.

  There’s no doubt that a tone of government overreach has grown to a fever pitch since President Biden took office. Whether it is forcing children to wear masks at school, counter-intuitive vaccine mandates which have resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs, or the idea of indoctrinating children too small to even read or write properly with elements of critical race theory, my guess would be that Virginians have simply had enough government in their lives for the time being. And another guess is that the swing state is likely a barometer for a large portion of the rest of the country.

  

  Nearly everything that the Biden administration has done since he has taken office has likely appeared to centrist voters to be counterintuitive: he turned our country’s exit from Afghanistan into a humanitarian and economic travesty, he has pushed a Soviet-style propaganda campaign for vaccination mandates and most recently introduced the bizarre idea of paying $450,000 to the families of illegal immigrants separated at our border.

  

  “It is bizarre,” a family member who voted for Biden said to me this weekend, while discussing Biden’s proposed $450,000 payments.

  And therein lies a key axiom: there comes a point where even the most fervent Democrats realize that they have to side with common sense, even if it means disagreeing with the candidate they voted for. I am guessing that this is the principle that helped drive so many anti-Donald Trump voters in Virginia back to the sensibility of conservative government.

  On top of this toxic track record, President Biden has simply done a poor job of communicating with the public. His press conferences are often abbreviated and don’t include a question and answer session. At Town Hall events, Biden has constantly stumbled and mumbled over his own words, while his posture and narrative on key issues do little to give the impression that he is acting with any confidence.

  All of this can add to an ethos that makes citizens wonder why government would have the gall to intrude on their lives and tell him what to do in the first place.

  My guess is that, in Virginia, common sense simply won out.

  The second part of explaining Virginia has to do with government under-reach, believe it or not.

  While President Biden has been bragging about the number of jobs he has “created” (which, of course, are really jobs coming back after Covid), inflation in the country has been running rampant and the administration doesn’t look like they are serious in trying to address the situation. Meanwhile, analysts like Lawrence Lepard believe the market is on the cliff and is ready to crash. 

  Just yesterday, it was reported that Lael Brainard was meeting with the White House and may potentially be the next pick to replace Jerome Powell as Fed Chair. Brainard is widely seen as being more dovish than the already-dovish Powell in terms of her stance on monetary policy. This type of think is exactly what I’m talking about when I say the White House is out of touch, economically, with the middle class.

  Some analysts and fund managers are predicting that commodities will “never” return to their 2020 lows again, mostly due to inflation. The country needs a Paul Volcker to rope in inflation right now. Brainard would be every last bit of Volcker’s complete and total foil when it comes to policy decisions.

  As inflation and supply chain shortages that there’s “no quick fix” for ravage a country that hasn’t seen anything like it in decades, all the administration – and its mainstream media counterparts – are doing is trying to assure the American public that everything is OK, when it clearly isn’t.

  Take, for example an editorial that the Washington Post wrote a couple weeks ago urging Americans to lower their expectations when it comes to supply chain shortages. I swiftly rebutted this editorial in a piece that argued that the left was trying to steal your quality of life by asking you to ignore that something is obviously amiss.

  At the same time, the country is dealing with unprecedented inflation that, to the middle class, looks as though it has spun completely out of control. No matter how many times the government or the Federal Reserve claim that inflation is transitory, it doesn’t change the fact that prices for the American middle-class – like many people in Virginia – are rising faster than wages.

  

  And instead of addressing this and taking it seriously, as these cost burdens significantly affect the well-being of American citizens, the government has continued to drag its feet and try to assure the American public that the pain is only temporary and that we are imagining things.

  Another pathetic example was when MSNBC put out a tweet yesterday trying to urge the American public that the inflation that they are seeing is a good thing. The tweet, archived by Zerohedge, looked like this:

  

  “Not surprisingly, after getting ratio’ed in a furious backlash, MSNBC did the only thing it could and deleted its tweet, as its latest attempt at mass gaslighting propaganda went terribly wrong,” Zerohedge wrote.

  Fox News wrote about the content of the linked article:

  An MSNBC opinion columnist is attempting to spin the current inflation crisis as a “good thing,” calling the coronavirus pandemic an “unlikely hero” in a new piece published Monday. 

  James Surowiecki began his column by suggesting the media has been fearmongering over the consequences of inflation Americans have been facing, calling out an “odd” CNN segment that highlighted the impact of rising milk costs for a family of nine who buys 12 gallons a week rather than a normal-sized family, writing “the segment succumbed to one of the media’s worst tendencies: taking a real issue and overhyping it beyond recognition,” accusing the network of “frightening” viewers instead of “enlightening” them. 

  The point of noting this idiocy from both the Washington Post and MSNBC in relation to Virginia is to make the argument that there are some problems you can’t explain away in the spin room.

  The in the issues of inflation and supply chain logistics are very real and hit the American consumer head-on. Even President Biden‘s proposed solutions for supply chain issues – to micromanage the economy even more and print more money – are far off base. The Biden administration knows nothing about economics and has completely lost touch with the middle class, which I believe is the second reason they lost Virginia.

  As I said earlier, the Democratic Party is going to have to get back in touch with the middle class that it claims to represent before midterms and the 2024 general election. You can’t run on a base of defending the worker while paying people not to work – it’s spitting in the face of those who get up every morning and earn. You can’t advocate for empowering the middle class and then burst through their front door to try to tell them when and how their children should be vaccinated, while at the same time ignoring that the price of basic goods and groceries has gone up double digit percentages over the last year in a lot of households.

  No matter how long people have sworn their allegiance to the Democratic Party, there is always going to be a “fault line” where common sense usurps political affiliation.

  For some people, this fault line is further left than President Biden has taken us so far, but for many people – like the ones in Virginia – it has already been crossed. To continue reading…

  —

  To support this type of journalism, I’d love to have you as a subscriber. Zerohedge readers are entitled to 10% off an annual subscription, which you can use at this link. You can also sign up for free here. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 20:05

• China Blinks: As Contagion From Property Sector Crash Spreads, Regulators Set To Ease Bond Rules
  China Blinks: As Contagion From Property Sector Crash Spreads, Regulators Set To Ease Bond Rules

  Two months ago Wall Street was quick to conveniently ignore China’s property crisis, repeating that not only was the sudden hit to Chinese housing – the world’s largest asset class according to Goldman…

  

  … not a “Lehman moment”, but that any contagion would be limited at best; at the same time central bankers – not just in China but around the globe – were quick to assure investors that a collapse by China Evergrande Group wouldn’t lead to a crash. As usual, Wall Street consensus (especially when coupled with soothing lies from central planners bankers) was dead wrong because now that the bond selloff has spread to China’s entire real estate sector and beyond, including healthy government-backstopped investment grade companies, concern is growing about the potential risk to the global financial system.

  On Monday, the Federal Reserve made that link explicit in its semi-annual report on financial stability, warning that what happens in China’s property industry could impact financial markets and threaten world economic growth. Underscoring the risks of a potential spillover, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority asked banks to disclose their exposure to Chinese real estate, according to a local media report.

  As Bloomberg reported, at the heart of the bond market rout is concern that developers may have far more debt than disclosed on their balance sheets. That emerged after companies suddenly struggling to pay public and hidden debt despite representing that they have sufficient capital. Making matters worse is developers’ inability to roll over maturing debt due to surging borrowing costs that effectively shut them out of the dollar bond market. China’s 10 largest developers by sales owe a combined $1.65 trillion in liabilities.

  Commenting on the latest events in China, overnight Rabobank’s Michael Every wrote that the “contained” Evergrande crisis – which even the Fed has noticed – is seeing contagion:

  “Junk bond yields are soaring and the trend is spreading to better quality credits and large banks, with investment grade yields up 8-10bp yesterday. As developers who have not crossed any debt redlines ‘mysteriously’ see their bonds plunge, Bloomberg reports the 10 largest developers carry debts of $1.7 trillion…on book. Off book and contingent liabilities are likely *far* higher. Worse, Chinese cities are now tightening the use of proceeds from pre-sold properties, effectively forcing developers to use this cashflow to finish construction rather to repay debts. Can you guess what happens next?”

  Yes we can, but for the sake of suspense let’s assume it won’t happen: instead let’s give the mic to Larry Hu, head of China economics at Macquarie Group, who said that “China appears to be stress-testing its financial system,” adding that “only under stress do you know how much off-balance sheet debt there is and how much pressure the system is able to handle. But the danger is that China decides to ease off too late.”

  Alas, one look at bond yields and it may already be too late as the cash crunch is worsening by the day. The yield on a Bloomberg index of Chinese junk dollar bonds – which is dominated by property firms – has surged to a record 24%. Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd., which said last week it missed payments on wealth products, was downgraded further into junk by Fitch Ratings on Tuesday.

  

  In the latest flashing red light the selloff – which so far had been contained mostly to property names – spread to higher-grade issuers such as Country Garden Holdings while even an investment grade company controlled by China’s government, Sino Ocean Land (not to be confused with Sino Forest) has seen its bonds slump. Spreads on the nation’s investment-grade bonds over Treasuries widened the most since April on Tuesday.

  

  And with bonds freefalling, it’s hardly a surprise that shares are also plunging. A Bloomberg index of Chinese developers is at the lowest level in more than four years after losing 33% in 2021. Shareholders of companies such as Evergrande, China Fortune Land Development, China Aoyuan Group and Yuzhou Group Holdings are sitting on losses exceeding 70%. The gauge is valued at just 0.3 times book value, showing traders are assigning a significant discount to developers’ reported assets

  

  Among the chief reasons behind the collapse in property assets has been the government’s insistence on not intervening, and forcing companies to prioritize completion of existing projects over repayment of creditors while forcing companies to liquidate non-core assets. Cities including Beijing and Tianjin have tightened supervision over the use of proceeds from property pre-sales to ensure projects are completed, China Business News reported. That will worsen the cash shortage for developers, making it harder for them to repay their debts.

  To be sure, the stakes are high. According to Bloomberg, Chinese banks had more than 51.4 trillion yuan ($8 trillion) of outstanding loans to the real estate sector as of September, an increase of 7.6% from a year earlier. The exposure was more than any other industry, and accounted for about 27% of the nation’s total lending, according to official data (for more statistics on China’s property sector, please see “Catastrophic” Property Sales Mean China’s Worst Case Scenario Is Now In Play“).

  

  About 41% of China’s banking system assets were either directly or indirectly associated with the property sector at the end of last year.

  “We expect most of Beijing’s property curbs will remain in place for a while, with the worst likely yet to come for both China’s property sector and macro-economy,” Nomura International HK’s economists Ting Lu and Jing Wang wrote in a note published Monday. “Beijing’s policy makers may opt to ramp up support to prevent worsening defaults in coming months.”

  And while banks like Goldman see the ongoing selloff the selloff as an opportunity, telling clients to add a “modest amount of risk” through high-yield dollar bonds issued by China property developers and claiming that the market is overestimating the contagion risk, as Goldman portfolio management team member Angus Bell said in an interview last week, even central bankers are starting to sound the alarm: Hong Kong banks will be required to disclose their loans and credit issued to mainland developers, treasury units’ securities holdings as well as the proportion of their exposed assets, the Hong Kong Economic Journal reported.

  Meanwhile, in its twice-yearly Financial Stability Report released Monday, the Fed said that “financial stresses in China could strain global financial markets through a deterioration of risk sentiment, pose risks to global economic growth, and affect the United States.”

  For now, contagion in mainland financial markets remains limited giving Chinese authorities room to maintain their curbs on the property industry, meaning the likelihood of some of kind of Lehman moment remains remote. But that could very rapidly change as the entire world heads into a stagflationary episode in 2022 as a result of soaring inflation and shrinking growth.

  As a result, how Beijing manages its crackdown on the nation’s real estate industry may have far-reaching consequences beyond its borders: “Even if systemic risk remains low for now, the contagion risk is very real,” Macquarie’s Hu said. “I would say China needs to act if onshore markets panic and the economic risk grows so big they can’t defend 5% growth next year.”

  Perhaps it’s the rising frequency of concerns such as this one that something must be done, or maybe it was the Fed’s warning that finally shook Beijing out of its complacent stupor, but overnight China’s Securities Times reported that rules for real estate developers to issue domestic bonds may be loosened.

  Picking up on the story this afternoon, the WSJ reported that Chinese regulators, wary of financial risks spreading as a result of their crackdown on property lending, are considering easing the rules to let struggling developers sell off assets to avoid defaults and hits to the broader economy.

  Currently, rules put in place late last year to restrict how much property firms can borrow, dubbed the “three red lines” on leverage ratios and which we previewed last year (in an Oct 2020 article which we correctly titled that “China Crackdown On Property Developer Debt Sparks Fears About Systemic Crisis”) are so strict that they have hurt the ability of developers like China Evergrande Group to sell assets to repay debts.

  

  Citing people with knowledge of the discussions, the WSJ reported that the PBOC is considering opening a pathway for financially strained property firms to unload projects by allowing the buyers, likely state-owned firms, to take over the assets without having the projects’ associated debt affect their own debt ratios.

  The potential easing of the borrowing rules highlights a deepening dilemma for Beijing as it tackles the oversize real-estate sector, which, together with related industries such as construction, accounts for nearly a third of China’s economic output. Rising default risks in the country’s real-estate sector have rattled global markets and threatened a sharp slowdown in the Chinese economy.

  According to the WSJ, the potential move would represent a calibration – rather than a capitulation – of the broader policy aimed at reining in real estate speculation and reducing the economy’s reliance on the sector, the people said, adding that the property lending restrictions likely would be in place for up to four years.

  For the central bank, which has publicly called risks from developer defaults controllable, the challenge is to stand firm on its goal of breaking the vicious cycle of builders’ binge borrowing leading to rising property prices, while preventing any kind of widespread defaults that could destabilize the entire financial system—its other major mandate. In the end, this will be an epic failure as we have said many times previously, as China simply can not grow at its current breakneck pace without the debt-fueled ponzi scheme that is its housing sector. 

  Sure enough, as pains from the clampdown spill over from private developers to their state-owned peers as well as to investors and local governments, calls for easing are coming from many corners of Chinese society.

  As the WSJ reports, on Monday, when senior officials affiliated with China’s State Council, the top government decision-making body, held a discussion with a dozen or so real estate and banking executives in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen to size up their concerns, many spoke up about the dire conditions of the industry and its knock-on effects on other parts of the economy, according to a summary of the gathering reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

  Li Haiming, executive director of Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd. , a private builder that missed a payment to investors last week, said at the meeting that developers like his are facing a severe liquidity crunch and could be saddled with unfinished so-called zombie projects.

  Li’s suggestion to the officials present, who are from the Development Research Center—the State Council’s think tank which compiles recommendations to policy makers—was simple: undo the restrictive deleveraging policies that China has ushered in over the past year and let things go back to normal, or as he put it, allow banks to continue to lend and extend loans. He also said state-owned firms should be encouraged to acquire projects from troubled developers to help them replenish their cash flow and build market confidence, according to the meeting summary.

  But right now, state firms are unwilling to pounce mainly because such acquisitions would add any acquired projects’ associated debts to their balance sheets, potentially hurting their ability to borrow. That has hampered the attempts by many strained developers to unload assets and repay their creditors.

  So in response, the People’s Bank of China is considering loosening the borrowing limits by enabling such acquisitions, WSJ sources said. To that end, the central bank might choose not to take into account the amount of debts the acquirers assume upon taking over the assets when measuring their ability to borrow based on their leverage ratios. That would then open up a channel for some developers to survive the current cash squeeze. In effect the “three red lines” framework would be quietly undone.

  “It would be a way to let you live,” one of the people said. “Not just die.”

  Already, financial regulators have started easing some rules on the margin to try to stabilize the market, including measures to allow some developers to sell medium-term bonds in China and steps to make it easier for them to repay dollar debt owed to foreign investors. The country’s top securities regulator is also considering renewing the application process for developers who plan to sell asset-backed securities to raise money, according to the people.

  In response to the news that Beijing may be about to blink, the market was euphoria, and shares of Chinese real estate developers soared after the Securities Times report hit: Shimao Group surged by 17% in Hong Kong, China Aoyuan +16%, Sunac China Holdings +15%, CIFI Holdings +12%, Agile Group +11%, KWG Group +11%, Seazen Group +10%, Greentown China +9%, Logan Group +8.7%, Guangzhou R&F Properties +7.7%; in mainland trading, Poly Developments jumped +7.6%, Gemdale +6.4%, China Merchants Shekou +4.9%, China Vanke +4.2% and so on.

  There is another reason why Beijing may have decided to fold: according to an article published by the China Finance 40 Forum, a Beijing-based think tank, titled “How to Prevent Hard-Landing Risks of the Real Estate Market,” a 15% plunge in property investment and sales could reduce the country’s economic growth rate by 1.5 percentage points. This is hardly a tradeoff that China’s leaders, always terrified of rising social unrest in case of an economic crisis, are willing to take.

  And if indeed Beijing has agreed to once again backstop the sector, expect this meltup to be one for the history books.

   

   

   

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 19:45

• Do Antiviral Pills Negate The Need For Vaccine Mandates?
  Do Antiviral Pills Negate The Need For Vaccine Mandates?

  Authored by Red Jahncke via RealClearPolicy.com,

  The Biden Administration’s generals are fighting the last war. Last Thursday, they mandated that large businesses and health care facilities require that their workers get vaccinated for COVID-19. On Friday, Pfizer announced an antiviral pill to treat the virus. Pfizer’s pill is 89% effective. A Merck antiviral pill for COVID-19 (with only about 50% effectiveness) is already in use in Britain.

  

  COVID-19 treatment pills destroy any vestige of logic or justification for the new mandates.

  No matter how someone contracts the virus, these pills prevent serious illness — hospitalization and death. With double lines of defense against the coronavirus — vaccination, and, now, these new antiviral treatment pills — mandates have become unnecessary.

  On Saturday, the Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals issued an emergency stay of the Biden business mandate, saying it raises “grave statutory and constitutional issues.”

  Quite apart for the legal issues, the mandates ignore science and logic.

  The logic of a vaccine mandate has always been weak and self-contradictory insofar as their implied purpose of protecting vaccinated people from unvaccinated people. If vaccines are effective (95% effective in Pfizer’s case), then, vaccinated people face little risk from unvaccinated people.

  If the vaccines are ineffective, then why should anyone get them?

  Naturally, there are minor exceptions to this logic.

  • First, a vaccine that is 95% effective is 5% ineffective.

  • Second, there have been “breakthrough cases” of largely unknown number and origin. They could represent the 5% ineffectiveness factor, and they could demonstrate that the vaccines are less effective against variants of the virus.

  • Third, studies suggest that the efficacy of vaccines diminish over time.

  All three of these minor exceptions are addressed by booster shots — in the same fashion as annual vaccines protect against the seasonal flu. Flu shots are in effect boosters, after the effectiveness of the prior season’s flu shot has waned. Each year flu shots are recalibrated for recurring and potential new variants, and, each year, they are less than 100% effective. There is always some risk.

  There is a critical difference between flu shots and COVID-19 vaccines. The flu shots have no back-up. There is no flu pill.

  The new antiviral treatment pills for COVID-19 dramatize further the original illogic of mandates: If vaccines and boosters and treatment pills are even more effective — as science and logic say they are, then unvaccinated people pose virtually no threat to vaccinated people. Now add the new corollary: Unvaccinated people do not even endanger themselves, because they can take the Merck or Pfizer pill (once approved) if they do contract COVID-19. They don’t even burden the healthcare system — remember “bending the curve” — since the pills are intended for home use.

  Now, most Americans got vaccinated as soon as they could. Most consider the vaccines a virtual godsend, an amazing demonstration of American scientific and pharmaceutical prowess. Most don’t really understand why someone would not get vaccinated.

  But we live in a country where people can do what they want if they aren’t threatening anyone else, don’t we? Without pretending to litigate the legal issues, vaccine mandates appear to be an unnecessary violation of personal liberty. What could be more invasive than the government dictating what you must do with your own body — your life and your life only?

  Parsing the issue further, there is a vast difference between government dictating vaccine policy and a business — or any organization — establishing an organizational vaccine policy. If an organization adopts a vaccine mandate, an anti-vaccine employee can quit and find another job.

  Beyond these observations, let’s leave the Fifth Circuit to begin the process of sorting out the legal and constitutional issues. The Court has ordered the Biden Administration to file its arguments to lift the stay by yesterday afternoon.

  Yet, science and basic logic would seem to be enough to decide the issue. No one who gets vaccinated, gets a booster shot and has available antiviral pills is at appreciable risk from exposure to unvaccinated people.

  That is not to say that vaccinated people will not contract the virus, nor to say that some vaccinated people will not get seriously ill and die. Until there is a life-long vaccine, such as the polio vaccine, COVID-19 will be a part of our lives.

  In the meantime, the real danger comes from a frustrated Biden Administration misusing urgent emergency powers under existing occupational health and safety law to exercise extraordinary powers. For Biden & Co., the already dissipating 20-month-old pandemic is not receding fast enough. That is neither urgent nor an emergency. It manifests that the Administration is fighting yesterday’s COVID-19 battle, without realizing that the antiviral pills have radically altered the war.

  Like it or not, COVID-19 has taken hold and is here to stay, but not as the threat to which we were originally defenseless. Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates would set a dangerous precedent. They should never take hold. Who’s to say what the next “emergency” would be that government might use as a pretext to exercise such overriding power.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 19:25

• Citadel's Ken Griffin Sees Ethereum Surpassing And Replacing Bitcoin
  Citadel’s Ken Griffin Sees Ethereum Surpassing And Replacing Bitcoin

  Back in May, when Goldman Sachs initiated coverage of crypto, it was mostly favorably inclined toward bitcoin which it nonetheless called a “one trick pony” and saw limited upside, but it was ethereum that stole Goldman’s heart. The reason: while Goldman said that bitcoin is mostly a store of value and nothing else, it said that over time, “the decentralized nature of the network will diminish concerns about storing personal data on the blockchain.” As a result, “a blockchain platform like Ethereum could potentially become a large market for vendors of trusted information, like Amazon is for consumer goods today.” And just to clarify what it means, the bank explained:

  Ethereum can also be used to store almost any information securely and privately on a decentralized ledger. And this information can be tokenized and traded. This means that the Ethereum platform has the potential to become a large market for trusted information. We are seeing glimpses of that today with the sale of digital art and collectibles online through the use of NFTs. But this is a tiny peek at its actual practical uses. For example, individuals can store and sell their medical data through Ethereum to pharma research companies. A digital profile on Ethereum could contain personal data including asset ownership, medical history and even IP rights. Ethereum also has the benefit of running on a decentralized global server base rather than a centralized one like Amazon or Microsoft, possibly providing a solution to concerns about sharing personal data.

  No surprise then that last weekend, the bank forecast that ether could hit $8,000 by year end, as a result of the token’s remarkable correlation with 2 year inflation swaps which, as everyone knows, are only going up and to the right.

  

  It’s not just Goldman that has a preference for ethereum over bitcoin. Earlier today, comments from one of the most powerful people in all of finance, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, about Ethereum’s dominance over Bitcoin are attracting even more attention to the second-largest cryptocurrency, which is outperforming many others this year by wide margins.

  Griffin, who like Jamie Dimon was a noted crypto skeptic in the past, said Wednesday at a conference that the crypto space could be disrupted by Ethereum’s blockchain.

  “We’re going to see Bitcoin be replaced conceptually by the Ethereum’s blockchain”, he said at the DealBook conference. “Replaced conceptually by the next generation of cryptocurrencies that will have the benefits of higher transaction speeds, lower cost per transaction. Perhaps people will start to think about how to deal with security and fraud prevention better.”

  

  In the coming year, Ethereum is set for a historic transformation to Ehtereum 2.0, shifting from a Proof-of-work concept to a Proof-of-stake, whose energy consumption transaction speeds and costs will be a fraction of the current ones, while also getting the blessings of the ESG community in the process. Heading into the Ethereum 2.0 transition, pundits expect the price of the token to soar.

  Griffin added he isn’t worried he missed out on crypto. “The train is, in some sense, still in the station,” he said.

  A year-long rally in Ether, which sent the coin up more than 550% for 2021, trouncing Bitcoin’s performance by more than 400 percentage points, gathered momentum toward the end of the summer after a major protocol upgrade which reduced supply increases. 

  “People are moving money into other cryptos now — not just Bitcoin,” said FTX US President Brett Harrison. “That is definitely following this trend of thinking about the future application development happening using crypto.”

  Meanwhile, on Tuesday the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, said that during the third quarter, Ether constituted 22% of transaction revenue, outstripping Bitcoin for the first time in trading volumes as well.

  

  “We’re definitely seeing a lot of bullish Ethereum flows,” Juthica Chou, head of OTC options trading at Kraken, said on Bloomberg’s “QuickTake Stock” broadcast. “Ethereum captures the tailwinds of Bitcoin — on top of that, they had the protocol upgrade in August, which burns Ether.”

  At the conference, Griffin commented further on cryptocurrencies, saying his firm doesn’t trade crypto because of regulatory uncertainties.
  “I wish all this passion and energy that went to crypto was directed towards making the United States stronger,” said Griffin. “Let’s face it — it’s a Jihadist call that we don’t believe in the dollar. I mean, what a crazy concept that is,” he said, reiterating similar comments he had made about crypto just a few weeks back.

  “When you have to value cryptocurrencies, what is the basis that you use for valuation?” Griffin asked. “It really comes down to: Will someone pay me more for it tomorrow?”

  Actually that’s not only simplistic, it’s wrong: what it really comes down to is will central banks print more fiat tomorrow than today. The answer is clearly yes, and until that changes – and it won’t – someone will always pay more for cryptos tomorrow than they are worth today.

  Some other things Griffin discussed:

  • Griffin said inflation and rising prices were no longer something that could be ignored. “The theory that this is transitory is starting to get long in the tooth,” he said. That is also affecting the stock markets, which by Mr. Griffin’s reckoning have become “frothy,” primed to overreact, particularly in stocks like Tesla that have experienced high volatility.
  • The financier defended payment for order flow, in which market makers — such as Citadel Securities — pay online brokerages like Robinhood for the right to process their customers’ trades. While the practice has been criticized for potentially leading to conflicts of interest, Griffin said that it had helped lead to lower trading costs for individual traders and that he opposed potential new regulations. “Are we going to go back to re-regulated markets and taking back the competition that has allowed Americans to save so much money when trading?” Doing so, he argued, would be “a tragedy.”
  • Griffin, a billionaire, opposed raising taxes, saying it would discourage innovation in America, citing Tesla’s Elon Musk as an example. “We don’t want tax policy to drive great entrepreneurs like Elon out of their seats,” he said.

  The hedge fund manager said his remarks likely would lead to hate mail in his inbox and on Twitter.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 19:22

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• Sprawling Tent City On EU Border Amid Freezing Temperatures In Belarus-Poland Migrant Showdown
  Sprawling Tent City On EU Border Amid Freezing Temperatures In Belarus-Poland Migrant Showdown

  After Monday’s major confrontation between thousands of mostly Middle Eastern migrants who sought to breach Poland’s border from Belarus, a makeshift tent city has emerged at the EU entry point as the standoff continues, and as temperatures plunge. 

  “Hundreds of migrants shivered in freezing temperatures and huddled round campfires on the Belarusian border with Poland on Tuesday in front of razor wire fences and lines of Polish border guards blocking their entry into the European Union,” Reuters describes of the intensifying situation. Encampments can be seen a mere meters from the barbed-wire separation fence outside Kuznica village, with a heavy Polish police and military presence on the other side. 

  Funkcjonariusze @PolskaPolicja na granicy. Czuwamy. pic.twitter.com/9kYlk61oax

  — podlaska Policja (@podlaskaPolicja) November 9, 2021

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

  Polish authorities are continuing to warn of an “armed confrontation” potentially coming, given they’ve charged Belarus with intentionally orchestrating a violent showdown on the border as retaliation for Western anti-Lukashenko sanctions. 

  On the ground video which circulated widely on social media this week has appeared to show Belarusian security services behind the migrants. They haven’t disbanded the group on their side of the border, but seem to be goading them into confrontation with the Polish guards.

  Polish Ministry of Defense published footage from the helicopter of a migrant tent camp at the Poland-Belarus border. pic.twitter.com/Bcyz0frZ3k

  — Status-6 (@Archer83Able) November 8, 2021

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

  The migrants have been reportedly shouting chants of “Germany! Germany!” – indicating their intent to make it to the Western European country known for its ample social benefits given to migrants and refugees.

  #NaStrazyGranic na ziemi i z powietrzna @PolskaPolicja @podlaskaPolicja pic.twitter.com/DMDBkn458V

  — podlaska Policja (@podlaskaPolicja) November 9, 2021

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

  After clashes which involved attempts to tear down the wire fencing on Monday, The Associated Press reported the overnight situation as follows: 

  Polish authorities reported that the situation on the border was calm overnight and earlier Tuesday, but authorities said they were bracing for any possibility. Poland’s Defense Ministry said Tuesday that a large group of Belarusian forces was moving toward the migrant camp.

  European Union headquarters is laying blame squarely on Minsk, saying Lukashenko is engaged in a form of “hybrid attack” using migrants as a weapon, with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen urging more sanctions on Belarus for the escalation.

  This is what hybrid warfare initiated by Belarus looks like: what appears to be plain clothes Belarus border guards cutting concertina wire to allow migrants into Poland and the EU. It’s caused huge anxiety in the region. Extraordinary footage! #BelarusBorder pic.twitter.com/ooqFMvYeLm

  — Michael Bociurkiw (@WorldAffairsPro) November 9, 2021

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

  Lithuania and Latvia have also beefed up military presence at their borders with Russia-backed Belarus, with the former country overnight declaring a border emergency for one month. 

  Russia’s Putin and Alexander Lukashenko are said to be in talks over the EU border situation…

  #UPDATE Russian President Vladimir Putin and his ally, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, have discussed a migrant stand-off on the border between Poland and Belarus that the EU accuses Minsk of orchestrating, the Kremlin said pic.twitter.com/n6cEMUrkXF

  — AFP News Agency (@AFP) November 9, 2021

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

  Meanwhile Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak made a Tuesday morning visit to the border where in the name of the EU he proclaimed the “effective defense of our border” to a group of police and guards. “We do not know what else Lukashenko’s regime will come up with — this is the reality,” he said.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/10/2021 – 01:00

• ​​​​​​​Gun Control Dooms Dems In Securing Rural Votes
  ​​​​​​​Gun Control Dooms Dems In Securing Rural Votes

  Submitted by Bearing Arms. 

  I don’t know about you, but though I’m a conservative (or at least conservatarian), I’d love to actually have an election where it was difficult to choose between the two major parties. Since the Second Amendment is by far the most important factor in my vote, however, it’s been really easy to decide where my vote is gonna go. But based on the absolute ass-kicking delivered to the Democrats last Tuesday in my home state of Virginia, you’d think they’d get the message that maybe it’s time to move on from their goals of disarming American citizens. Based on the reaction so far, though the Democrats are in deep denial or simply unwilling to waiver on their commitment to denying Americans their Second Amendment rights, and disparaging those who exercise them.

  Witness the reaction to Republican Winsome Sears winning election as Lt. Governor in Virginia. Sears is the first Black woman to win a statewide election in Virginia, but Democrats by and large have preferred to focus on the campaign ad with her proudly holding an AR-15. In fact, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che declared that the picture was actually good news for Democrats, because “nothing will get Republicans to support gun control faster than this picture.”

  

  Che should come hang out with me in central Virginia sometime. I guarantee that conservative white folks are far more comfortable with Winsome Sears (or himself) owning an AR-15 than his white liberal neighbors in New York City. The “tolerant Left” is never more bigoted than when it comes to conservatives of color, which is evident when it comes to the Left’s collective disdain over Sears’ embrace of the Second Amendment.

  Combine the “everyone who disagrees with me is racist” argument with a “and hell yes we’re coming for your guns” and it’s no wonder that Democrats couldn’t even muster 20% of the vote in more than a dozen rural Virginia counties. Heck, my own county, which went for Barack Obama twice before flipping to Trump in 2016, saw Democrats get less than 40% of the vote, which is a big deal. And I know firsthand how important gun control was for many of these voters, who knew that Terry McAuliffe was going to try to ram through his gun and magazine ban if elected. These folks have as much disdain for most Republicans as they do Democrats, but there was no way they were going to sit out this election.

  While there are some Democrats sounding the alarm bell, none of them are highlighting the need for the party to ghost the gun control lobby.

  “We’ve got a branding problem as Democrats in way too many parts of our country,” said Ms. Bustos, who is retiring from a downstate and heavily rural Illinois seat that Mr. Trump carried twice. She called it “political malpractice” and “disrespectful to think it’s OK to run up the score in big cities and just neglect the smaller towns.”

  There is no easy solution.

  Many of the ideas and issues that animate the Democratic base can be off-putting in small towns or untethered to rural life. Voters in Bath County, many of whom are avid hunters and conservative evangelicals, have long opposed liberal stances on gun rights and abortions. Some Democrats urge the party to just show up more. Some believe liberal ideas can gain traction, such as universal health care and free community college. Others urge a refocus on kitchen-table economics like jobs programs and rural broadband to improve connectivity. But it is not clear how open voters are to even listening.

  Representative Dean Phillips, a Democrat who flipped a Republican-held seat outside Minneapolis in 2018, said that when it comes to issues that concern rural America, his party is afflicted with a “disease of disinterest.”

  For years the Democrats’ rural outreach in many parts of the country was about as important to them as the Black, urban vote was to the GOP. But we’re in the midst of a bit of a political realignment at the moment, and it’s unclear just how seismic some of these shifts will become. It’s not just that Democrats were demolished in rural areas of Virginia. They lost ground everywhere, even if they still racked up easy wins in places like Fairfax and Arlington counties. As it turns out, even in what was supposed to be a safe state for Democrats, the strategy of treating the Second Amendment as a second-class right (along with telling parents they shouldn’t have a say in their child’s education and trying to run against Donald Trump instead of the Republican candidate for governor) doomed the party to defeat.

  Winning Fairfax County by 30+ points doesn’t mean much if you lose the state by 3, and I do think it would be wise of the Democrats to rethink their governing philosophy when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms. However, given the sincerely held anti-gun beliefs of many politicians and the deep pockets of Democratic donors and gun control activists like Michael Bloomberg, I just don’t expect the party to change course anytime soon.

  * * * 

  Here’s Bearing Arm’s Cam Edwards explaining if Democrats want to start winning, they need to back off gun control.

  Republicans should continue pushing gun-toting candidates as the Virginia gubernatorial race is a blueprint to win the midterms next year. Dems are ignoring the massive surge in Second Amendment sanctuaries at the state, county, and local levels. 

  

  With millions of new gun owners because of the pandemic and social unrest in 2020, Republicans might win back the House and Senate majorities solely because they resonate with many voters on both sides of the political aisle who bear arms. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 23:45

• Beijing Is Trapped: Chinese Producer Prices Soar At Fastest Pace In 26 Years
  Beijing Is Trapped: Chinese Producer Prices Soar At Fastest Pace In 26 Years

  China’s trade balance may have just hit a record on the back of resurgent exports and slowing inflation, but the favorable impact to China’s mercantlist economy was more than wiped out by the just released record PPI and resurgent CPI.

  China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that in October, CPI rose 1.5% Y/Y, higher than the 1.4% expected, and a 0.7% sequential increase from the September print; the CPI increase was evenly split between base effect and sequential growth.

  

  At the same time factory gate, or PPI, inflation hit a fresh all time high of 13.5%, steamrolling the 12.4% consensus estimate, and rising at the fastest pace since records began in November 1995.

  

  While the gradual increase in CPI is alarming, and the NBS said that it was affected by weather, commodities demand and costs – it was the producer price inflation that was far more alarming, soaring as a result of a tight supply of energy and resources. In reality, however, there was just one key variable – thermal coal, which as we said last month indicates that PPI will continue rising far higher, although judging by the recent sharp reversal in the price of Chinese thermal coal (if only for the time being), this may be as high as PPI gets.

  

  Or so Beijing should hope because with the spread between PPI and CPI hitting a new all time record, virtually no Chinese companies that use commodity inputs – which in China is a vast majority – are making any profits.

  

  The gap between upstream and downstream prices “continues to highlight weak consumer demand in the economy and the immense pressure on profit margins downstream firms are facing,” said Michelle Lam, greater China economist at Societe Generale SA in Hong Kong.

  The latest price jump comes against the backdrop of a weakening economy as electricity shortages, a slump in the property sector and virus outbreaks weigh on activity. Rising inflation will likely reignite the debate over whether the central bank can provide more policy easing to help support growth.

  Some more details on the latest data:

  • In year-over-year terms, food inflation rose to -2.4% yoy in October from -5.2% yoy in September, due to both a low base and a sequential increase in prices month-on-month. The increase of food inflation in October was broad-based (particularly an extreme increase in vegetable prices). Pork prices, a big driver of CPI, continued to decline in October, and that helped to mask a rise in other food costs. Deflation in pork prices eased slightly to -44.0% yoy in October from -46.9% yoy in September, primarily on a favorable base effect. Overall CPI would have risen almost 2.5% if not for the effects of falling pork prices, according to the NBS. 
  • Inflation in fresh vegetables rose to 15.9% yoy in October from -2.5% yoy in September, contributing 0.33 percentage point to the increase in CPI while the price of fresh fruits increased to 0.5% yoy in October (vs. -0.8% in September), both primarily on the back of sequential increases in prices. Prices of freshwater fish, eggs and edible vegetable oil also rose sharply in October from a year ago. Vegetable prices have jumped since mid-October following supply disruptions, prompting the government to crack down on hoarders.
  • Non-food CPI inflation increased to +2.4% yoy in October from +2.0% yoy in September, primarily on a sequential increase (especially fuel costs). Fuel costs increased by +31.4% yoy in October (vs. +22.8% yoy in September).
  • Core CPI inflation (headline CPI excluding food and energy) edged up to +1.3% yoy in October (vs. +1.2% in September), with inflation in services flat at +1.4% yoy in October. In other words, producers are passing on a growing part of their own surging costs on to consumers, but nowhere near all as the record gap between CPI and PPI shows.
  • And speaking of PPI, producer price inflation rose to +13.5% yoy in October from +10.7% yoy in September, largely on strong sequential growth. PPI inflation in producer goods rose to +17.9% yoy in October from +14.2% yoy in September, and PPI inflation in consumer goods edged up to +0.6% yoy in October (vs. +0.4% yoy in September). Among major sectors, in seasonally adjusted non-annualized month-over-month terms, inflation in coal mining increased the most (+17.2% in October from +10.5% in September), followed by upstream sectors, such as petroleum/coking and chemicals. In year-over-year terms, coal mining picked up the most due to both high sequential growth and a low base.

  Looking ahead, Goldman predicts that headline CPI inflation is likely to continue rising in the coming months as high frequency data suggest that the year-on-year decline in pork prices tightened in early November, and year-on-year inflation in fresh vegetables and fruits picked up. Needless to say, PPI inflation is expected to stay elevated in the near term, although as noted above, October may be the peak given the recent decline in coal prices.

  Xing Zhaopeng, China strategist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group agrees and writes that while the impact of vegetable prices might be short-lived, rising demand before the upcoming Chinese New Year might drive CPI higher in the next couple of months.

  Or maybe not, because while Beijing has succeeded in dragging coal prices lower now, it is only at the expense of a far bigger surge in coal in the future. And while China may be facing its first “galloping inflation” PPI print since the early 90s, it’s only downhill from there, because as Citigroup wrote recently, power cuts (with over 20 provinces, making up >2/3 of China’s GDP, have rolled out electricity-rationing measures since August) and contractionary PMI “seem to suggest China could enter into at least a short period of stagflation.”

  Local stocks were certainly not happy, with China’s CSI 300 Index sliding as much as 1.3% amid signs that producers are passing on higher costs to consumers, and that the PBOC may have no choice but to tighten financial conditions at the expense of risk assets. Several food companies have already announced price hikes of up to 15%, including Haixin Foods, Anjoy Foods and Jiajia Food, due to rising costs for raw materials.

  The stronger than expected inflation data is “bad news for the A-share market,” according to Ken Chen, an analyst at KGI Securities Co., referring to the stocks of companies listed on mainland exchanges. “The market is expecting some policy support to help the weak economy, but the CPI data may give limited room” for any stimulus, he said echoing what Zhang Zhiwei, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, said last month: “We think the risk of stagflation is rising in China as well as the rest of the world. Persistent inflationary pressure limits the potential scope of monetary policy easing.”

  Liu Peiqian, China economist at Natwest Markets expects policy makers to keep prioritizing stabilizing supplies and prices of commodities and raw materials to tame PPI inflation, while the People’s Bank of China is unlikely to tighten monetary policy, as CPI remains well below target.

  Commenting on the latest inflation data, Bloomberg’s China economist David Qu said that “the acceleration in China’s inflation in October is probably a bit of a side show for the central bank — we don’t expect the People’s Bank of China to take its eye off the need to cushion a slowdown in the economy. We still expect it cut banks’ required reserve ratio by another 50 basis points in the next month or so.”

  And so, Beijing is now trapped: if it eases, inflation – already at nosebleed levels – will soar further crushing margins and sparking a deep stagflationary recession; if it does not ease, the property market – already imploding – will crater.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 23:25

• Boston Anti-Mandates Rally Disrupted By 'Anti-Fascism' Protesters, Clashes Break Out
  Boston Anti-Mandates Rally Disrupted By ‘Anti-Fascism’ Protesters, Clashes Break Out

  Authored by Learner Liu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A rally against mask and vaccine mandates in Boston was disrupted by “anti-fascism” protesters on Nov. 7. According to Boston Police, two individuals were arrested as clashes broke out between the two sides.

  Police officers with clubs and anti-riot gear quickly reacted and divided the two groups. After that, the “anti-fascism” protesters marched to another side of the park and broke through barrier fences. Not long after that, riot control officers assembled and began to clear the field.

  

  The brief conflicts on Sunday concerned many of the rally-goers. One participant, Kevin Mackie, who held a sign that read “see people not sides,” was worried about “people blinded by hate, calling names and dehumanizing each other.”

  “I think we need to be diplomatic. We need to be respectful of each other. Listen to each other. Remember, at the end of the day, no matter what sides people are on, they are all human beings,” Mackie told The Epoch Times.

  He said that people are taking different sides because they disagree on how to achieve the common goal of keeping everyone wanted to be safe and free. Therefore, he said it is important to “look at the rationale behind everybody’s thought.”

  “Each of us is unique. We all have a unique mishmash of what we believe in. To distill it into two sides is really reductionist. And it’s not productive, it’s not the way out,” Mackie said.

  The protest was organized by Super Happy Fun America, “a right of center civil rights organization focusing on defending the Constitution,” according to their website. Their rally began around noon with a heavy police presence.

  About 100 attendees sang the national anthem, read the pledge of allegiance, and shouted slogans like “we will not comply” and “USA.”

  

  At the same time, a larger crowd of protesters congregated on the other side of police fences with communist flags and signs that read “death to fascism.”

  As the anti-mandates rally went on, the “anti-fascism” protesters tried to dismantle the barricades and rush into the rally. A few physical altercations ensued.

  The Boston Police Department said in an email that two persons were arrested.

  Samson Racioppi, a Super Happy Fun America organizer, told CBS that their rental van’s front window was smashed.

  Racioppi said he was right by the van when the incident happened. He also said he was pepper-sprayed by the other group of protesters.

  Super Happy Fun America said in an email that “Antifa” smashed the windshield and started beating the van and driver, forcing the driver to desperately try to escape by driving through barriers.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 23:05

• Rolls-Royce To Develop Mini Nuke Reactors To Decarbonize Power Grid 
  Rolls-Royce To Develop Mini Nuke Reactors To Decarbonize Power Grid 

  In a world where ESG is all the rage, and the transition from coal to cleaner energy sources is paramount, the UK has become the latest country to embrace nuclear power. 

  According to a company press release, Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc raised $617 million to fund “the next generation of low cost, low carbon nuclear power technology.”

  Rolls-Royce Group, BNF Resources UK Limited, and Exelon Generation Limited will develop small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) that will allow the country to meet net-zero commitments. SMRs will be built in the UK and open for export to customers worldwide. 

  

  With every passing week, our core thesis set here last December (see “Uranium Stocks Soar: Is This The Beginning Of The Next ESG Craze“) is that nuclear would be widely embraced as a net-zero enabling technology for power grids.

  Warren East, the Rolls-Royce CEO, adds, “the SMR program is one of the ways that Rolls-Royce is meeting the need to ensure the UK continues to develop innovative ways to tackle the global threat of climate change.

  “With the Rolls-Royce SMR technology, we have developed a clean energy solution which can deliver cost-competitive and scalable net-zero power for multiple applications from grid and industrial electricity production to hydrogen and synthetic fuel manufacturing,” East said. 

  SMRs are a much cheaper solution than big nuclear power plants that have been in use for more than half a century. Nuclear power will be at the heart of Britain’s strategy to reach net-zero carbon emissions in the coming decades, along with the rest of the world. 

  A combination of nuclear power via SMRs, renewables, carbon capture, and storage could be part of a balanced net-zero grid. 

  Last month, we noted that France was also adopting nuclear as part of President Macron’s strategy for decarbonization.   

  Recall, Germany is trying to stop the decommissioning of its nuclear reactors. A recently penned letter to the FT, signed by professors from Oxford, Harvard, and American University alongside a group of environmentalists, urged Germany to postpone its exit from nuclear energy for the benefit of the environment.

  Also, last month, Poland’s second-largest energy consumer was considering a move to SMRs to help generate green energy. 

  And just days ago, China has emerged as the world’s great believer in nuclear power with plans for 150 new reactors in the next 15 years, in a bid to transition from coal to cleaner sources of energy. 

  One of the biggest stories is the company that will power the green nuclear revolution, such as the world’s largest publicly traded uranium company, Cameco Corp. 

  

  Today’s nuclear ambitions by companies and countries to fuel the ESG craze will be rewarding for those who bought uranium stocks. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 22:45

• Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Sells Shares At 93% Discount To May Price
  Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Sells Shares At 93% Discount To May Price

  By Sofia Horta e Costa, Bloomberg commentator and TV anchor

  What a difference six months make for Evergrande’s cash-strapped electric vehicle unit.

  With its parent all but shut out of the dollar bond market, China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle is tapping equity investors for fresh funds by selling 174.8 million new shares at HK$2.86 apiece. That’s 93% lower than the price of its additional offering in May.

  

  At HK$500 million ($64 million), the amount of funds the company seeks to raise is modest compared with two previous share sales this year. The May placement raised HK$10.64 billion, while in January six investors — who are locked up with the shares for 12 months — bought HK$26 billion worth of the stock at HK$27.30 a share.

  Shares in Evergrande’s electric car unit have tumbled almost 90% this year amid concern over the group’s liquidity crunch. Evergrande NEV said in September it couldn’t guarantee it could meet its financial obligations. At its peak, Evergrande NEV was one of the most valuable assets in Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan’s empire, and a potential source of funds to prop up the parent company.

  Parent Evergrande Group needs to pay interest of $148.1 million on three bonds Wednesday as grace periods expire. Failure to pay could trigger cross-default clauses among the builder’s $19.2 billion of outstanding dollar notes.

  While Evergrande NEV bills itself as a carmaker, much of the money it does bring in comes from its community health service business and nursing home facilities — a legacy of when the unit was a health-care company.

  Evergrande NEV’s shares closed Tuesday at HK$3.57.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 22:25

• Trust Issues And Climate Scientists
  Trust Issues And Climate Scientists

  Judging by the sound and fury from the media, climate change and its current and future effects is the most pressing issue of our time.

  But, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, as world leaders gather at the COP26 climate change conference to discuss and negotiate solutions to the crisis, in some regions of the world, there are significant shares of the population that have little or no trust in what ‘scientists’ are warning us about the environment.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  According to a new survey by the World Economic Forum, 16 percent of North Americans admit to trust issues when it comes to climate science.

  This group is smaller in East Asia & the Pacific and Western Europe but still amounts to 9 percent according to the survey conducted in the fall of 2021.

  Globally the figure is 7 percent, although 68 percent say they have a lot or a great deal of trust.

  

  South Asia was the stand-out region for trust in climate scientists – here just 3 percent signified a lack of trust compared to a massive 84 percent on the other side of the climate change fence.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 22:05

• Bubbles Weren't Built In A Day, So Bond Purchases Will Continue
  Bubbles Weren’t Built In A Day, So Bond Purchases Will Continue

  By Ven Ram, Bloomberg Markets live commentator and analyst

   U.S. employers added more than half a million jobs in October, sending stocks to yet another record high on Friday. Over the weekend we also learnt that China exported much more than economists had penciled in — suggesting that demand to consume goods and services from around the world is robust. And most economies around the world are on track to grow at a pace that is well above trend growth next year.

  Yet, if you looked at key yields across much of the developed world, you could be forgiven for thinking that the global economy is in dire straits.

  And we still have central banks actively buying bonds, supposedly meant to support their economies. There is no question that monetary policy is too loose relative to where most of the developed-market economies are, spawning imbalances in financial markets and providing a backdrop conducive for asset bubbles to build.

  

  Central banks are behind the curve, and seem to be willingly so: we got a taste of that with the Bank of England, which after weeks of warning about the dangers of runaway inflation, failed to walk its talk.

  Raising rates, we were told, will not produce more gas or more semiconductor chips — meaning central banks can’t battle a supply problem. But how is that when the economy is hit with a pandemic and people are reluctant to travel and fill hotel rooms, central banks find it convenient to slash rates?

  Do lower rates — or worse, central bank bond purchases — cure either of those? And therein is the big lesson for traders: monetary authorities will give us cockamamie excuses to lower rates with impunity, but will always be reluctant to raise them with anywhere near the same level of urgency — simply because that’s just politically convenient. After all no one gets blamed for keeping rates artificially low.

  Unfortunately, that means that financial markets are destined to lurch from one bubble to another.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 21:45

• How Does Your Personality Type Affect Your Income?
  How Does Your Personality Type Affect Your Income?

  You’ve just finished giving a presentation at work, and an outspoken coworker challenges your ideas. Do you:

  a) Engage in a friendly debate about the merits of each argument, or

  b) Avoid a conflict by agreeing or changing the subject?

  As Visual Capitalist’s Jenna Ross details below, the way you approach this type of situation may influence how much money you earn.

  Today’s infographic comes to us from Truity, and it outlines the potential relationship between personality type and income.

  

  Through the Myers-Briggs Lens

  The Myers-Briggs personality test serves as a robust framework for analyzing the connection between personality and income, in a way that is easily understood and familiar to many people.

  The theory outlines four personality dimensions that are described using opposing traits.

  • Extraversion vs. Introversion: Extroverts gain energy by interacting with others, while introverts draw energy from spending time alone.

  • Sensing vs. Intuition: Sensors prefer concrete and factual information, while intuitive types use their imagination or wider patterns to interpret information.

  • Thinking vs. Feeling: Thinkers make rational decisions based on logic, while feelers make empathetic decisions considering the needs of others.

  • Judging vs. Perceiving: Judging types organize their life in a structured manner, while perceiving types are more flexible and spontaneous.

  For example, someone who aligns with extraversion, sensing, thinking, and judging would be described as an ESTJ type.

  The researchers surveyed over 72,000 people to measure these four personality preferences, as well as 23 unique facets of personality, income levels, and career-related data.

  Traits With the Highest Earning Potential

  Based on the above four dimensions, extroverts, sensors, thinkers, and judgers tend to be the most financially successful. Diving into specific personality characteristics, certain traits are more closely correlated with higher income.

  

   

  For instance, extroverts are much more likely to have higher incomes if they are quick to share thoughts, have high energy, and like being in the public eye. Thinkers also score high on income potential, especially if they enjoy debates, make rational decisions, and moderate their emotions.

   

  The Top Earners

  Which personality types earn the highest incomes of all? Extroverted thinking types dominate the ranks again.

  

  Source: Truity

  The one exception is INTJs, with 10% earning an annual salary of $150K or more in their peak earning years.

  Personality and the Gender Pay Gap

  With all these factors in mind, the researchers analyzed whether personality differences would affect the gender pay gap.

  When the average salaries were separated for men and women, the results were clear: men of almost all personality types earn more than the average income for the sample overall, while all but two personality types of women earned less than the average.

  

  Source: Truity

  In fact, women with high-earning personality types still earn less than men who do not possess those traits. For example, extroverted women earn about $55,000 annually, while introverted men earn an average of over $64,000.

  Maximizing Your Potential

  Are the introverted personalities of the world doomed to lower salaries? Not necessarily—while personality does play a role, many other factors contribute to income levels:

  • Level of education

  • Years of experience

  • Local job market

  • Type of industry

  • The particular career

  Not only that, anyone can work on the two specific personality traits most aligned with higher incomes: set ambitious goals, and face conflict head-on to ensure your voice is heard.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 21:25

• Feds Seek To Block Promotion Of Nasal Spray Against COVID-19
  Feds Seek To Block Promotion Of Nasal Spray Against COVID-19

  Authored by Alice Giordano via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The leading U.S. manufacturer of xylitol-based products says the federal government is deliberately trying to conceal a nasal spray it developed that it says has been scientifically proven to be effective in treating and preventing COVID-19.

  

  The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in federal court against Utah-based company Xlear on Oct. 28, saying it has deceptively advertised its nasal spray as a treatment and preventative of COVID-19.

  The lawsuit asks a federal court to permanently ban the company from promoting the nasal spray as a treatment for COVID-19 and also asks that monetary penalties be levied against it.

  COVID-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

  The DOJ filed the complaint on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, which alleges the company has violated the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Consumer Protection Act by making false claims about the benefits.

  The spray’s main ingredients are saline, grapefruit seed extract, and xylitol, a plant-derived sweetener commonly used in oral care products.

  “Companies can’t make unsupported health claims, no matter what form a product takes, or what it supposedly prevents or treats,” said Samuel Levine, director of the trade commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release on the lawsuit.

  “That’s the lesson of this case and many others like it, and it’s why people should continue to rely on medical professionals over ads.”

  The commission and the Justice Department declined to make any further comment.

  Xlear’s attorney Robert Housman, of the Washington firm Book Hill Partners, told The Epoch Times that the commission is “flat out lying” about the company’s claims being unsupported.

  Housman pointed out that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services—funded clinical studies of the use of nasal sprays like Xlear’s and published findings last year that found they were an effective treatment and method of prevention for COVID-19.

  “When Xlear tells people about scientific studies, even ones republished by the NIH, we are somehow misleading people and making false claims. It’s nonsensical,” Housman told The Epoch Times.

  “Rather than embrace nasal interventions, the government is trying to eliminate their use because they don’t fit the government’s highly flawed, vaccine-only agenda.”

  On Sept. 20, 2020, the NIH and NIAID published the findings of a random clinical trial they funded at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee on the merits of using hypertonic nasal saline irrigations to combat the CCP virus.

  The researchers in that study wrote that the “effect of nasal irrigation on symptom resolution was substantial,” reporting that “nasal congestion and headaches in COVID patients resolved an average seven to nine days earlier” in the study group.

  “Our analysis suggests that nasal irrigations may shorten symptom duration and may have potential as a widely available and inexpensive intervention to reduce disease burden among those affected,” the researchers wrote in their findings.

  “We would advocate the use of hypertonic nasal saline irrigations in non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients as a safe and inexpensive intervention to reduce symptom burden.”

  Housman pointed out that the NIH also published the results of a clinical trial, held a few months later in November at the Larkin Community Hospital in Florida, that found the Xlear nasal spray specifically cleared symptoms of the disease in half the time.

  In addition to the Tennessee and Florida trials, another random clinical trial—more recently conducted at Augusta University’s Emergency Department in Georgia—also concluded that the use of nasal spray was beneficial in treating COVID-19.

  Researchers in the university trial, which is still ongoing, have so far found that patients with the CCP virus that participated in daily nasal irrigation were eight times less likely to be hospitalized than the national rate.

  The Justice Department didn’t specifically cite the Larkin, Vanderbilt, or Augusta trials in its lawsuit.

  It instead cited the results of lab studies conducted earlier at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and the University of Tennessee involving in vitro and animal testing, neither of which the DOJ and FTC argue is a viable way to test nasal spray for live, human COVID-19 patients.

  The lawsuit additionally pointed out that the University of Tennessee study is based on a nasal spray containing iota-carrageenan, which the Xlear spray does not contain and, therefore, cannot be used as scientific evidence to support Xlear’s claims.

  The lawsuit also stated that researchers at Chapel Hill admitted that without further research it couldn’t conclusively determine that  “administering treatment through the nose is the best way to treat COVID-19.”

  Housman said the trade commission cherry-picked findings within the lab studies to make them fit its agenda.

  The federal government has warned companies against promoting nasal sprays for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19.

  BlueWillow Biologics, a Michigan biopharmaceutical company that manufactures a nasal antiseptic, and the Miami-based company Halodine, which created a proprietary iodine-based nasal antiseptic swab, both received warning letters earlier this year from the FDA to discontinue their promotion of their nasal products as a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 21:05

• Mastercard Launches Bitcoin Payment Cards in Asia-Pacific
  Mastercard Launches Bitcoin Payment Cards in Asia-Pacific

  Authored by ‘Namcios’ via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  The card giant partnered with three bitcoin service providers in the region to enable consumers to spend BTC anywhere that accepts Mastercard…

  

  • Consumers and businesses in the Asia Pacific region can now apply for bitcoin-linked Mastercard credit, debit, and prepaid cards.

  • The card giant partnered with cryptocurrency service providers Amber, Bitkub, and CoinJar to enable customers to pay for regular purchases with BTC.

  • On the backend, cryptocurrency in the user’s account is instantly converted into fiat currency to allow the payment.

  Card giant Mastercard has partnered with cryptocurrency service providers Amber Group, Bitkub, and CoinJar to offer bitcoin-linked payment cards across the Asia Pacific region, the company said in a statement on November 8. These firms are the first APAC-based platforms to join the card issuer’s global Crypto Card Program, which seeks to make it easier for bitcoin and cryptocurrency firms to offer payment cards to their customers.

  “For the first time, consumers and businesses in the Asia Pacific region will be able to apply for crypto-linked Mastercard credit, debit or prepaid cards that will enable them to instantly convert their cryptocurrencies into traditional fiat currency, which can be spent everywhere Mastercard is accepted around the world,” per the announcement.

  Cardholders will be able to use their Mastercard through the arrangement established between the card issuer and the bitcoin service providers, which entails having the corresponding amount of BTC or other cryptocurrency be deducted from the user’s account and instantly converted into fiat currency.

  “Cryptocurrencies are many things to people — an investment, a disruptive technology, or a unique financial tool. As interest and attention surges from all quarters, their real-world applications are now emerging beyond the speculative,” said Rama Sridhar, Mastercard’s Asia Pacific executive VP of digital and emerging partnerships.

  In July, Mastercard announced the creation of a simplified payments card offering for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency companies. The product sought to reduce friction in experience and provide greater choice for consumers by helping facilitate the conversion between BTC and fiat currency.

  “In collaboration with these partners that adhere to the same core principles that Mastercard does…Mastercard is expanding what’s possible with cryptocurrencies to give people even greater choice and flexibility in how they pay.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 20:25

• Cheese Prices Crumble After Cyberattack Hits Top Wisconsin Dairy Producer 
  Cheese Prices Crumble After Cyberattack Hits Top Wisconsin Dairy Producer 

  A cyber attack disrupted dairy distribution in Wisconsin late last month, resulting in a big plunge in cheese prices. 

  A spokesman for one of the state’s largest milk processors, Schreiber Foods, told local newspaper, Wisconsin Farmer, that a five days “cyber event” halted operations as hackers demanded a rumored $2.5 million in ransom.

  The ransomware attack began on Saturday (Oct. 23) and limited the company from buying 500-pound barrels of cheese, which are turned into slices and sold at supermarkets. 

  In a recent statement, the company said, “we had a systems issue that impacted our plants and distribution centers. It did impact our ability to receive raw materials, ship product and produce product. We’ve made good progress in resolving the issue and our plants and distribution centers have begun to start up again.”

  The five-day ordeal triggered spot prices for cheese barrels traded in Chicago to plunge 19% in the last week or so. 

  

  The cyberattack on the dairy processor comes as hackers have targeted food supply chains. JBS SA, the world’s largest meat producer, was hit with a ransomware attack by hacker group REvil in June. 

  Compound cyberattacks with supply chain woes, including port congestion, higher transportation costs, labor woes, and soaring commodity prices, it’s never been harder to be in the food industry.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 20:05

• John Durham Is Getting Close To The Jugular
  John Durham Is Getting Close To The Jugular

  Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics.com,

  Last week, John Durham’s grand jury issued its third criminal indictment in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The person who was arrested may be obscure; the news may have been buried after Virginia’s bombshell election results; but Durham’s move is a big deal. It shows that the special counsel’s probe is methodically unraveling a huge conspiracy, seemingly engineered by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and implicating James Comey’s FBI, either as a willing participant or as utterly incompetent boobs.

  

  The latest indictment also damages the mainstream media, which is why so many news outlets have ignored or underplayed it. After all, they broadcast a false story for years and are none too eager to revisit it. Other losers are the prosecutors assembled by Robert Mueller, most of them Democrats, who had reams of this damaging information and ignored it.

  What Durham and a few intrepid reporters are uncovering may well be the most ambitious dirty trick pulled in an American election and its aftermath. The question now is whether Durham can expose the full extent of this malfeasance and charge those who planned and executed it.

  Durham’s latest indictment charges Igor Danchenko (pictured) with lying multiple times to the FBI. Danchenko, who worked at the Brookings Institution as a Russian expert, may not be a household name, but he was a crucial player in concocting the false story that Donald Trump was collaborating with the Kremlin to win the White House. The real conspiracy, it turns out, was aimed at Trump and was conducted by the Clinton campaign and her longtime associates. It was financed jointly by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Some leaked emails suggested it was approved by the candidate herself. The FBI continued running with it long after it had ample evidence to know it was a concoction. House Democrats ran with it even longer, basking in fulsome, uncritical media coverage. All of it was false.

  The Danchenko indictment matters because his bogus information was the heart of the “Steele dossier,” which, in turn, was the heart of the anti-Trump investigation. The dossier was compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who had been hired by people working for Clinton. Steele claimed his information about Trump, including salacious sexual allegations, came from Russian sources. It didn’t. It came from Danchenko, who was working at a Washington think tank. As Danchenko admitted to the FBI, much of what he told Steele was old rumors or exaggerations. Some of it appears to have  been simply fabricated. Steele incorporated it, and the Democrats deployed it.

  The FBI interviewed Danchenko multiple times in January 2017, around the time Trump was taking office. Comey’s FBI had already received the dossier and his agents were trying to verify its allegations. They couldn’t do so, and Danchenko’s admissions told them why. His interrogation should have immediately stopped the FBI from using the dossier to investigate Trump. So should a warning from Bruce Ohr, the highest-ranking career official in the Department of Justice, that Steele was strongly biased. The FBI blew right through these red lights.

  The bureau continued to use the bogus information in applying for secret warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Carter Page and, through him, on others connected with Trump. Officials told the court, falsely, that the warrant information was reliable and verified when they knew it was neither.

  What the warrants say, in essence, is, “We need to spy on Carter Page because we think he’s an enemy agent.” But the FBI already knew he wasn’t. That means they were trolling for other information. How did the FBI know Page was on our side? Because they asked the CIA and were told, quite explicitly, that Page was helping them, not the Kremlin. The CIA gave that exculpatory information to FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, who altered the message to say Page was not working for the CIA. His alternation was criminal, and he plead guilty after Durham charged him.

  The story gets worse. Although Clinesmith altered the CIA message for FBI use, he also gave his superiors the CIA’s true communication. So, his bosses knew the real story. They weren’t interested in the truth, which they kept secret from the FISA court to continuing spying on Page. If there is any justice left in Washington, those responsible for this travesty will be held criminally liable. Page may well have a civil case against them, too.

  As the FBI blundered forward on its political mission, it made other revealing missteps. The most important was Director Comey’s meeting with the incoming president in early January 2017. Comey told Trump the FBI had acquired some damning materials about him but emphasized they were still unverified. As Comey’s own aides warned him, that communication could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.

  Comey’s meeting with the president had another major consequence. Until then, even anti-Trump news outlets had been wary about mentioning the dossier (which the Clinton team had been shopping to them) because they couldn’t actually verify any of the vital details. That reticence changed with Comey’s briefing, which was news in its own right. The story now became, “FBI chief briefs president-elect Trump about salacious dossier, revealing damning info Kremlin could use to blackmail Trump.” One online outlet, BuzzFeed, went further. It published the full Steele dossier, and the media frenzy began.

  Remember, this whole story was concocted and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and fed to the FBI and the media by her attorneys and associates. The FBI, which should have been able to quickly prove the story was false, plodded on with its investigation and fed the frenzy.

  Although the dossier was commissioned to sink Trump in November, it was still useful after he won the election. Trump’s adversaries could exploit it to hamstring his embryonic administration, and that’s exactly what they did. With the whole-hearted backing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff spent three years beating the drum of the “Russia collusion” hoax. Schiff’s constant media appearances claiming he had conclusive evidence of Trump-Russia collaboration continued long after he had received classified briefings that demolished his story. The briefer was former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, and he has confirmed those meetings with Schiff and his Senate counterpart, Mark Warner. No matter to Schiff, who kept repeating his claims and pursuing his full-scale investigation. First the verdict; then the inquiry. It was all part of a four-year-long battle, first to prevent Trump’s election, then to undermine his presidency, and finally to damage his chances for reelection.

  The Clinton team launched this operation with professional expertise. The goal was to produce a powerful anti-Trump story, using whatever materials they could, then share it with the media (to smear Trump) and the FBI (to launch a major investigation and ensnare Trump). Ideally, the campaign’s involvement would be hidden, removed from the damning report by several layers of lawyers, opposition researchers, camp followers, and flacks.

  To provide that insulation, the campaign used attorney Marc Elias, then at Perkins Coie law firm in Washington (where the recently indicted Michael Sussmann was a colleague), to hire an opposition-research firm, Fusion GPS. That firm, headed by former reporters Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, in turn hired Steele, a Brit who had formerly worked for his country’s intelligence services, to produce the damning dossier. To translate some Russian materials, Fusion GPS hired Nellie Ohr, whose husband, Bruce, learned how biased Steele was and told the FBI to treat Steele and his information warily.

  Bureau agents ignored that early warning and all the others. They quickly learned Steele’s material was a mirage, thanks to their interviews with Danchenko. They also confirmed that Steele’s dossier depended on Danchenko, so its claims of “Russian sourcing” were false. By interviewing Danchenko’s own sources, they learned that their third-hand statements, which were used in the dossier, were mainly rumors and “bar talk.”

  The prosecutorial team assembled by Robert Mueller should have known all this, too. They had complete access to this exculpatory FBI material on day one and ignored it. A year and a half later, when Mueller himself finally testified before Congress, he didn’t even know what Fusion GPS was. By that point, Mueller seemed to have genuine difficulty remembering the details of his own investigation. His team of attorneys had no such excuse. Hired by Mueller’s top deputy, Andrew Weissmann, they were among the country’s sharpest and toughest prosecutors — and the most partisan. The more Durham uncovers, the worse the Mueller team will look.

  Reviewing this evidence, Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has concluded the Steele dossier is misnamed. It should be called the “Clinton dossier,” she says, since Hillary commissioned it, paid for it, and had her aides feed it to the media, the State Department, and the FBI. It was a full-scale disinformation campaign — coherent, well-organized, and well-funded. It was rotten to the core.

  The question now is whether John Durham can find enough evidence to charge the ones who planned and executed it. The charging documents he filed for Danchenko and Sussmann are far more extensive than the necessary minimum. They suggest that Durham has compiled extensive evidence about a broader conspiracy. Will he settle for the capillaries now that he has the jugular in view?

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 19:45

• Americans Are The Most "Miserable" In Decades
  Americans Are The Most “Miserable” In Decades

  In his latest economic daily, BofA’s chief economist Ethan Harris eyes the recent article from the New York Times which summarized the foul mood Americans are in as follows “Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs. They Also Think the Economy Is Awful,” and lays out his view as to why this is happening. In a nutshell:

  • The growth outlook is very strong, but this is offset by the first serious bout of inflation in decades.
  •  The “misery index”, a simple sum of the unemployment rate and consumer price inflation, has moved sharply higher.
  • This “misery” is expected to fall in the months ahead as easing supply constraints lower both unemployment and inflation.

  First, a quick primer: in the late-1960s, Arthur Okun created a simple statistic to capture the cost of stagflation. His “misery index” simply added the unemployment rate to headline inflation. Over time the index dropped off the radar screen, but in the past year it has staged a dramatic comeback.

  

  Putting the index in context, after today’s record PPI print tomorrow consensus expects year-over-year CPI inflation to rise from 5.4% to 5.9% for October, more than offsetting the drop in the unemployment rate, and boosting the misery index to 10.5%. That, according to Harris, is the highest in recent decades, outside of a couple years around the Great Financial Crisis, and the 1990 recession and oil price spike.

  Of course, some positive spin is mandatory here, and the BofA chief economist writes that “the good news is that a big chunk of this is the temporary impact of supply constraints. Worker shortages and capacity issues have both slowed the drop in the unemployment rate and caused many prices to spike higher.” Furthermore, with the Delta wave receding, BofA expects the labor market to pick up speed even as headline inflation cools. It’s why the bank expects the Misery Index to drop to 6.3%, with a 3.5% unemployment rate and 2.8% inflation.

  That said, such an optimistic forecast is hardly encouraging to those Americans who are suffering from runaway inflation now.

  It’s also why besides the obvious social implications, this index is important to both the economic and political outlook. On the economic front, high inflation acts as “tax” on real spending power, although this is currently offset by massive cash balances (which benefit mostly the top 10%) and a recovering labor market.

  On the political front, BofA notes that a standard model of elections includes three variables: high inflation and weak growth in the election year hurts the party in control of the White House, and there is a tendency for the incumbent party to do poorly in the midterms regardless of the economy.

  As BofA concludes, if these models are correct, then Democrats may be in better shape by next fall when the misery index is expected to dip, although as Harris admits, “split government is probably still the most likely outcome.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 19:25

• Virginia's Become 'Ground Zero' For Backlash Against Critical Race Theory Madness
  Virginia’s Become ‘Ground Zero’ For Backlash Against Critical Race Theory Madness

  Op-Ed authored by Eric Louw via The Epoch Times,

  The election of a Republican governor in Virginia points to a winning formula in the upcoming mid-terms, a key component of which is empowering parents to fight back against Critical Race Theory’s (CRT) indoctrination of their children.

  Gov-elect Glenn Youngkin’s victory was unexpected because the Democrats had won the governorship of Virginia for the last 12 years and the Democrat candidate, Terry McAuliffe, was popular.

  More importantly, it looked like a major demographic shift had forever changed Virginian politics in favour of the Democrats, given the growth of a huge suburban population of Washington D.C. bureaucrats in northern Virginia.

  For many Republicans, it felt like Virginia’s political game had forever been rigged against them by the arrival of these D.C. immigrants.

  

  But 2021 showed that even with this northern demographic challenge, Republicans can win Virginia if they can develop a powerful enough message.

  Youngkin built such messages by exploiting the hubris, arrogance, and incompetence that has characterized the Democrats since Biden moved into the White House.

  Essentially, he pledged to: support parents in their fight against CRT, fund the police, and cut red tape and tax.

  So appealing were these pledges that they switched hundreds of thousands of votes from Democrat to Republican, especially independent voters.

  Youngkin was also helped by Biden showing up to campaign alongside McAuliffe. This served to remind voters of the struggles of Biden’s administration, plus how it has empowered the woke-left’s CRT and police defunding agendas.

  Additionally, Biden’s appearance also reminded voters that Biden does not look in charge.

  

  His $3 trillion “remake U.S. plan” is gridlocked in Washington. His migration policies caused chaos on the border. And anti-right-wing security on Washington’s streets only serves to make it look as if he does not even control his own capital.

  But it would seem the core vote shifter was Youngkin’s standing up for parents’ rights to say no to the CRT bullies and to those teachers who want to indoctrinate students with it.

  Youngkin correctly read the anti-CRT mood across his state.

  After all, even in the blue northern suburbs of Loudoun County, some parents mobilized against their schools teaching CRT.

  And so Youngkin has been rewarded with the governorship because he paid attention to the voices of Virginia parents, telling CRT-activists and woke-teachers: “I am not an oppressor, and I am not going to allow you to teach my children your toxic anti-white racism anymore.”

  Essentially he produced a swing towards the Republicans in every part of Virginia by promising to ban CRT in Virginia schools.

  Given the mounting parental backlash against the theory across America, it might be helpful to summarize the CRT worldview and objections to this radicalism. 

  CRT objects to how mainstream (white) Americans see themselves, their country and their history. CRT has the same objection to history as taught in Canada, Australia, and Europe.

  Its solution is to teach a new kind of history.

  Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard called this new history “the black armband view” in which everything before European colonialism was apparently wonderful, and everything since has been evil.

  CRT argues Europeans invented race and racism to justify colonialism and slavery and effectively invented a new updated version of the old Marxist villain-victim idea. For Marxists, capitalists were villains, and workers were victims. For CRT, whites are villains, and blacks are victims.

  Both models grow out of the resentments of the unsuccessful, but CRT’s answer is to tear down the successful and what they built.

  The emergence of parental opposition to CRT in the schools reflects a growing realization that the theory represents a truly existential and revolutionary threat to the American way of life.

  But CRT goes further than just wanting to deconstruct and reconstruct America and its way of life or take down statues. They demand all white individuals must recognize they are racists, which is built into them through language. They also demand that whites must apologize (and recompense black victims) for white racism, for white privilege, and for oppressing black people.

  Within CRT logic, whites are apparently always inherently racist and inherently privileged. Blacks are always apparently oppressed and can never be racist.

  If any white person points to the absurdity of these claims, this is taken a proof such a person is racist and “fragile.” CRT allows no escape from its closed circular argument.  

  Re-education appears to be the only solution, according to the theory.

  Whites must be taught to recognize their individual “sickness” and the pathology of their society. Then taught to “be sorry,” to take the knee, and to be co-opted into CRT’s plan to deconstruct existing American society.

  This re-education will take place in schools, universities and through compulsory staff training workshops.

  Conveniently, CRT activists have created many jobs for themselves by running these workshops. Apparently, revolution can be profitable for some.

  CRT is a revolutionary project designed to actively disrupt and break the language we use. It is enmeshed with another left-wing project called the “decolonization” of education and the “decolonization” of society.

  These projects aim to undo the so-called evil of European colonialism plus deconstruct the work of the apparently evil white men who colonized and built America, Canada, and Australia.

  Building CRT’s postcolonial world is a project as profoundly revolutionary as was Stalin’s communist project of building the “Soviet Man.”

  Americans need to become aware of what such a project of re-writing their culture; their history, and their language will mean for them. If Americans want to see what “decolonization” of education and society means, just look at what the African National Congress has done in South Africa.

  This is a project of erasure that is totalitarian in its vision.

  What is remarkable is that left-leaning liberals cannot see how Orwellian this CRT re-education project is in the way it wants to replace “bad language” and “bad thinking” with new sanitized “social justice” words and “good thinking.” Similarities can be found with Mao Ze Dong’s Cultural Revolution when communist witch hunts forced people to confess their “guilt.”

  Youngkin’s victory in Virginia should give us all hope.

  Let this be the beginning of an alliance of Republican politicians and parents who say they are tired of having their children come home from school brainwashed by CRT.

  Let the message from Virginia be that enough is enough.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 19:05

• Michael Burry Claims Musk Selling Tesla Shares To Cover Personal Debts
  Michael Burry Claims Musk Selling Tesla Shares To Cover Personal Debts

  Famous short seller Michael Burry of The Big Short game briefly emerged from a his latest self-imposed twitter exile to offer his thoughts on why Elon Musk might now all of a sudden be in the mood to start selling stock. Shortly thereafter, on Tuesday, Tesla shares plunged 10% in just minutes, leading many to speculate as to whether or not Elon Musk had started selling his personal stock. 

  Burry jabbed at Musk this week, suggesting that the Tesla CEO may need to sell his shares because he had 88 million of them pledged as loan collateral. 

  “Regarding what @elonmusk NEEDS to sell because of the proposed unrealized gains tax, or to #solveworldhunger, or … well, there is the matter of the tax-free cash he took out in the form of personal loans backed by 88.3 million of his shares at June 30th,” Burry wrote in a now deleted Tweet that was captured by the Business Insider tabloid. 

  

  Burry also suggested that Musk’s narratives about “solving world hunger” or “unrealized tax gains” are diversions from the real reason the Tesla CEO is selling stock. Instead, the iconic investor insinuated that Musk needs to service the loans he took out against his shares.

  Musk had 41% of his shares pledged as collateral as of December 2020 and 48% as of June 2020, Insider reported.

  As he usually does, Burry also drew comparisons between today’s market and the Dutch Tulip bubble. He has made his Twitter header a Brueghel painting called “Satire of the Tulip Mania,” which shows tulip “investors” as monkeys, speculating, taking on debt, and fighting – all over the “mania” in tulips that took place. 

  

  Burry has been vocal about warning about our current stock market bubble.

  “People say I didn’t warn last time. I did, but no one listened. So I warn this time. And still, no one listens. But I will have proof I warned,” he Tweeted about markets about a year ago. 

  He also commented on Tesla golden child Cathie Wood, earlier in the year, Tweeting: “It is too early, she is too hot, and, today, short sellers are timid, but Wall Street will be ruthless in the end.”

  Burry, recall, revealed a huge Tesla short earlier in 2021 but as of one month ago he was no longer betting against Tesla and said that his position was just a trade.

  Burry has also been vocal warning against a bitcoin bubble. Of course, if he was also short the crypto space in addition to TSLA, his losses in 2021 could be Jess Livermore-sized….

   

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 18:55

• China Initiates 'Combat Readiness Patrol' Near Taiwan, Outraged Over "Surprise" Large US Delegation Visit
  China Initiates ‘Combat Readiness Patrol’ Near Taiwan, Outraged Over “Surprise” Large US Delegation Visit

  China state media on Tuesday announced that the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Eastern Theater Command has initiated combat patrols near the Taiwan Strait in response to what it dubbed “secessionist activities”. 

  This on the heels of China’s Defense Ministry condemning the “surprise” latest trip by a US Congressional delegation to Taipei, which Beijing officials denounced as “rude interference in China’s internal affairs.” The apparently large number of officials that touched down at Taipei’s international airport has outraged Chinese leaders as it’s looking like the single largest US group to visit the island in years.

  The South China Morning Post is reporting of the Tuesday visit to the democratic-run island, which was organized by the US de facto embassy (the American Institute of Taiwan, or AIT), that “The group boarded a US Navy C-40A plane from Manila and arrived at Taipei Songshan Airport at around 6pm, according to Taiwanese news reports.”

  

  Though the names included in the Congressional delegation weren’t immediately disclosed, Taiwan media is reporting that the group includes four senators, two members of the House of Representatives and seven aides.

  Providing confirmation, Taiwan’s residential Office Spokesperson Xavier Chang was cited by CNA as describing that the visit involving “US. senators and congressmen was based on mutual trust and coordination between Taiwan and the US.”

  China’s immediate response is detailed in Reuters as follows: 

  China’s military said on Tuesday it conducted a combat readiness patrol in the direction of the Taiwan Strait, after its defense ministry condemned a visit to Taiwan by a U.S. Congressional delegation it said had arrived on a military aircraft.

  The patrol was aimed at the “seriously wrong” words and actions of “relevant countries” on the Taiwan issue and the activities of pro-independence forces in Taiwan, a Chinese military spokesperson said in a statement.

  “We firmly oppose and strongly condemn this,” China’s defense ministry said further in response. “We urge the US to immediately stop its provocative moves and all destructive actions that escalate tensions across the Taiwan Straits, and not send a wrong signal to ‘Taiwan independence” forces. We warn the DPP authorities not to misjudge the situation or act in a desperate way; otherwise, it will only lead Taiwan into a grave disaster,” the spokesperson of the defense ministry added. 

  Jet carrying US senators, congressmen makes surprise visit to Taiwan https://t.co/gv4YY0uZQ6 pic.twitter.com/67EeUpsCN8

  — Taiwan News (@TaiwanNews886) November 9, 2021

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

  Further as state-run Global Times relates, the PLA patrols near the Taiwan Strait have been put on “high alert”:

  The command will stay on high alert, take necessary measures and strike back on any move that endangers China’s core interests and any provocation that threatens the peace and stability in the Taiwan Straits, and firmly safeguard the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, said Shi. 

  Chinese defense ministry lodged firm opposition and strong condemnation against some #US congressmen’s visit to the island of Taiwan, urging the US to stop provocative actions that escalate tensions across the #TaiwanStraits. pic.twitter.com/oDGKTiVUgR

  — Global Times (@globaltimesnews) November 9, 2021

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

  Given the large numbers of Congressional leaders and senators in the US delegation, and pending the details of the trip, this is looking to be the largest high-level American government group to visit the island in recent memory.

  Likely we are also about to once again witness ramped-up Chinese aerial formations breach Taiwan’s air defense identification zone – which have greatly increased in numbers of aircraft of late, sending a further message to pro-independence forces and their external backers. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 18:45

• Infrastructure: What's The Bang For The Buck?
  Infrastructure: What’s The Bang For The Buck?

  By Philip Marey, Senior US Strategist at Rabobank

  Summary

  • Last Friday, the House of Representatives finally approved the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Although long overdue given the state of US infrastructure, it will hit the economy at a time of full employment and after a couple of years of high inflation. This means that the bang for the buck will be substantially eroded.

  • The attention of Congress now turns to the health care, education and child care bill that the Democrats want to pass through reconciliation, i.e. without Republican support. However, so far Democratic unity on this bill has been more difficult to find than a bipartisan majority for infrastructure spending.

  • Meanwhile, the December 3 deadline for the debt ceiling and government funding is approaching rapidly.

  Introduction

  Last Friday, Nancy Pelosi made a U-turn and surprised everybody with the announcement that the House of Representatives would vote on the infrastructure bill and then take a procedural vote on the reconciliation bill, holding it for final passage until there was a CBO score. Until then, the two bills were tied together, as progressive Democrats were not willing to approve the infrastructure bill before the reconciliation bill (aimed at health care, education, child care), and moderate Democrats did not want to pass the reconciliation bill before the infrastructure bill. In order to break the deadlock, Pelosi called the progressives’ bluff and offered the CBO-contingent solution proposed by the Black Caucus. Although the progressives were not happy about this, they folded. While 6 Democrats defected, 13 Republicans more than made up for them. A victory for centrists in both parties, but those in the Democratic Party now have their hands tied to the numbers that the CBO comes up with for the reconciliation bill. And of course a victory for Nancy Pelosi, who finally took the risk of challenging the progressives. Ironically, she needed moderate Republicans to save the infrastructure bill from defecting progressive Democrats such as AOC.

  

  Economic impact: what’s the bang for the buck?

  While the law is presented as a $1 trillion infrastructure package, this includes spending on infrastructure the government had already planned for the next decade. The additional spending amounts to about $550 billion for roads, passenger railways, subway systems, airports, ports, power facilities, and broadband networks. The funds are expected to start flowing in the second half of 2022, but the bulk would be spent in 2024 and later.

  If an infrastructure plan arrives during a slowdown or recession, the bang for the buck is relatively high. Unemployed construction workers can get a job and idle machines are put to use. However, this time the recession is already behind us and we are even experiencing labor shortages. By the time the bulk of the infrastructure activities should start, the economy is expected to be at full employment. Note that the Fed expects to hike before the end of 2022 because of full employment. This means that the infrastructure builders will compete for workers and machines that are expected to be short in supply to begin with by 2024. This will make the projects more expensive, so the bang for the buck is much lower than in case of a recession. What’s more, with high inflation in 2021 and a large part of 2022, higher prices of materials and equipment will also erode the purchasing power of the infrastructure package. This comes on top of monopoly power in for example freight railroads and broadband, which is reducing the bang for the buck in any phase of the business cycle.

  So after Trump slashed taxes during an economic expansion, Biden now launches an infrastructure spending package into full employment. The timing of US economic policies seems a bit off in recent years. Instead of counter-cyclical fiscal policies they have turned cyclical. Evidently, the political cycle trumps the business cycle in DC. Still, infrastructure spending has long-term benefits that will outlive the business cycle. Especially, in the US which has an outdated infrastructure compared to some other industrialized nations. What’s more, from a cyclical perspective the next recession could still hit the economy before the decade of additional infrastructure spending is over. In terms of additional annual GDP growth, estimates reach at most 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points in the coming years and even less in later years. So not a major change in economic growth.

  

  Electoral impact: too late for this and next year’s elections

  The electoral limitations of the infrastructure plan for the Democrats are twofold. In the first place, this is a bipartisan bill, supported by a minority of Republicans. Although most Republicans voted against it, the yes voters were predominantly from swing districts, increasing their electability next year. Meanwhile, the majority of Republicans will continue to claim that only a small portion of the infrastructure package ($110 billion) goes to traditional infrastructure, and that the package is not paid for (the CBO estimated that it would increase federal borrowing by $256 billion over 10 years).

  In the second place, the bulk of the benefits will not arrive until 2024. Democrats will argue that the infrastructure package will alleviate supply chain bottlenecks, but voters are not likely to reap the benefits prior to the November 2022 midterm elections. Meanwhile, rampant inflation is eroding the purchasing power of middle and lower class voters, while the Fed continues to pump up the stock portfolios of wealthy voters until June next year. (Note that tapering is not tightening.) This means that the voters will mostly experience higher prices and constrained supply before the midterm elections in November next year.

  But at least Biden can claim he has delivered a bipartisan bill, which swing voters may appreciate more than the progressive reconciliation bill. This could help rebuild his tarnished image. However, the passage of the infrastructure bill came too late to help Democratic candidates in last week’s elections, which did not go very well for them.

  Reconciliation is next

  Congress is on recess this week and returns on November 15. On top of the agenda will be the $1.75 trillion reconciliation bill. It is difficult to keep track of what’s in the reconciliation bill. Last Wednesday, Pelosi put the four weeks of paid family leave and negotiated changes on prescription drugs and immigration back in the reconciliation bill. These changes are likely to be rejected by the Senate, but Pelosi seems done waiting for what Manchin and Sinema exactly want before starting the process on the reconciliation bill. We are likely to see more changes, especially after the bill has been sent to the Senate. It is interesting to note that these days it seems easier to pass a bipartisan bill than a Democrats-only reconciliation bill. In fact, if moderate Republicans had not come to the rescue, the infrastructure bill would have failed in the House because of Democratic defections. While the bipartisan infrastructure bill had already passed the Senate prior to Friday’s passage in the House, the reconciliation bill still has to be approved by both the House and the Senate. It could take weeks before the CBO has finalized its full analysis of the reconciliation bill, but lawmakers may be satisfied with a few preliminary projection tables. So Congress will be focused on the reconciliation bill during the remainder of November.

  Don’t forget the deadlines

  However, there is a December 3 deadline for the debt ceiling and government funding. McConnell already said last month the Democrats were on their own next time. It remains to be seen if he will blink again in this game of chicken, but if he does not, the Democrats would have to include a raise in the debt ceiling in the reconciliation bill. However, the Democrats are again betting on a bipartisan increase in the debt limit. If the debt ceiling is not raised in time, the extraordinary measures taken by the Treasury Department are expected to run out after December 3 and a federal government default would become inevitable sometime between mid-December and mid-February according to estimates by the Bipartisan Policy Center. What’s more, if no government funding bill or continuing resolution is passed by December 3, the federal government will have to shut down partially in early December. Note that a continuing resolution would prevent a shutdown, but imply a substantial cut in defense spending. Unfortunately, the reconciliation bill may take up most of Congress’ time in coming weeks, leaving little time for the two fiscal deadlines.

  Conclusion

  While this bipartisan infrastructure law was long overdue given the state of US infrastructure, it will hit the economy at a time of full employment and after a couple of years of high inflation. This means that the bang for the buck will be substantially eroded. The attention of lawmakers now turns to the health care, education and child care bill that the Democrats want to pass through reconciliation, i.e. without Republican support. So far this has been more difficult than reaching bipartisan agreement on an infrastructure bill. As we noted earlier, President Biden is trying to hold together a broad and shaky coalition.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 18:25

• Taliban Inaugurates "Islamic Emirate Army" With Largest-Ever Convoy Of US Armored Vehicles
  Taliban Inaugurates “Islamic Emirate Army” With Largest-Ever Convoy Of US Armored Vehicles

  The Taliban on Tuesday inaugurated its “Islamic Emirate Army” in the large city of Kandahar in Afghanistan’s south by showcasing a lengthy parade of armored vehicles taken from US and NATO forces.

  While it’s not the first time since conquering the country in August amid the rapid US troop withdrawal that the Taliban has held military parades touting its newly acquired Western hardware and weaponry, the Kandahar parade did appear to involve the most US-supplied vehicles ever on display at once. 

  VIDEO: The Taliban hold a military parade in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the militants’ spiritual heartland, using former Afghan and international forces vehicles and helicopters to inaugurate their new “Islamic Emirate Army” pic.twitter.com/IsH4z9tRL2

  — AFP News Agency (@AFP) November 9, 2021

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

  Helicopters could also be seen flying overhead, suggesting that the Taliban has to some degree resolved its lack of pilots problem. The Pentagon in its earlier evacuation said it attempted to destroy and disable many aircraft it left behind, but clearly they didn’t get to everything.

  According to the AFP description of the event which featured what looked like hundreds of US military vehicles in a line that stretched as far as one can see:

  The Taliban hold a military parade in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the militants’ spiritual heartland, using former Afghan and international forces vehicles and helicopters to inaugurate their new “Islamic Emirate Army”.

  A convoy of military vehicles drove down Kandahar’s main road, which links the airport to the city center, past onlookers while religious music blasted from loudspeakers. The Taliban defense minister recently announced military units would be reorganized and renamed.

  The Taliban’s army appeared to be much more organized and professional in its presentation than in prior months…

  #Taliban release video of their military parade in Kandahar, #Afghanistan‘s second largest city and the Islamist group’s birthplace. Military vehicles and helicopters of former Afghan as well as US-led foreign troops were used in the event. pic.twitter.com/slriGBko9F

  — Ayaz Gul (@AyazGul64) November 9, 2021

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

  Also on Tuesday the Pakistani government and a local Taliban group have confirmed a ceasefire that could see the notoriously restive Af-Pak border area eventually become more stable. Pakistan’s Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry initially announced Monday a “complete ceasefire” with the group known as the Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is based in South Waziristan.

  As CNN reviews, “The TTP is a banned Islamist group that is responsible for some of the deadliest attacks in Pakistan’s history, including an assault on an army-run school in 2014 that killed 132 children, as well as the 2012 attempt to kill schoolgirl Malala Yousufzai, who became a Nobel laureate and education rights activist.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 18:05

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• American Defense Policy After Twenty Years Of War
  American Defense Policy After Twenty Years Of War

  Authored by Jim Webb via NationalInterest.org,

  America has always been a place where the abrasion of continuous debate eventually produces creative solutions. Let’s agree on those solutions, and make the next twenty years a time of clear purpose and affirmative global leadership.

  

  The American scorecard for foreign policy achievements over the past twenty years is, frankly, pretty dismal. And without talking our way all around the globe, it’s clear that the most dismal score goes to the stupidest mistakes. We fought one war that we never should have fought and another war whose objectives grew so out of control that no amount of battlefield proficiency could overcome the naïve mission creep of the political and military leadership at the top that was defining what our troops were supposed to do. So, let me start with a couple of quotes from two pieces I wrote, one at the beginning of this twenty-year period and the other at the end.  

  On September 4, 2002, five months before the Bush administration ordered the invasion of Iraq, I wrote the following as part of a larger editorial for the Washington Post, warning that an invasion would be a strategic blunder:

  Nations such as China can only view the prospect of an American military consumed for the next generation by the turmoil of the Middle East as a glorious windfall. Indeed, if one gives the Chinese credit for having a long-term strategy — and those who love to quote Sun Tzu might consider his nationality — it lends credence to their insistent cultivation of the Muslim world. An “American war” with the Muslims, occupying the very seat of their civilization, would allow the Chinese to isolate the United States diplomatically as they furthered their own ambitions in South and Southeast Asia.

  Almost exactly nineteen years later as the military planners serving the Biden Administration executed a shamefully incompetent final withdrawal from Afghanistan, I wrote the following for The National Interest, excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, in a piece entitled “Requiem for an Avoidable Disaster:”

   …the war that we began was not the same war that we are finally bringing to an end. When we went into Afghanistan in 2001 our national concern was to eliminate terrorist entities who desired to attack us. The common understanding at the time was that we would operate with maneuver elements capable of attacking and neutralizing terrorist entities. It was never to occupy territory with permanent bases or to attempt to change the societal and governmental structure of the Afghan people. This “mission creep” began after a few years of successful operations and was obvious in 2004 when I was in the country as an embed journalist. The change in mission eventually increased our troop presence tenfold and sent our forces on an impossible political journey that no amount of military success could overcome.

  Why did all this happen? And how can we rectify the damage that has been done to the institutions that were involved, and to our international credibility?

  There’s an old saying that “success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan.” In this case, there were two entirely different categories of orphans, some of whom were not touched personally or even professionally, and some who gave up lives, limbs, and emotional health.

  For the policymakers in Washington, these were wars to be remotely managed inside the guide rails of theoretical national strategy and uncontrolled financial planning. As with so many other drawn-out military commitments with vaguely defined and often changing objectives, America’s diplomatic credibility steadily decreased while the price tag rose through the roof, into trillions of dollars and thousands of combat deaths. There is no way around the reality that these hand-selected policymakers, military and civilian alike, failed the country, even as many of them were being lionized in the media and offered lucrative post-retirement positions in the private sector. Their immediate strategic goals, vague as they were from the outset, were not accomplished. The larger necessity of meeting global challenges, and particularly China’s determined expansion, was put on the back burner as our operational and diplomatic capabilities were diverted into a constantly quarreling region with the deserved reputation of being the “Graveyard of Empires.”

  In the context of history, the human cost on the battlefield as viewed by those at the top was manageably small, and carried out by an all-volunteer military. Indeed, despite the length of twenty years of war and many ferocious engagements, the overall casualty numbers were historically low. DOD reports the total number of American military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan combined over twenty years as 7,074, of which 5,474 were killed in action. This twenty-year number was about the same as six months of American casualties during any one of the peak years of fighting in Vietnam.

  Emotionally, although there was much sympathy and respect for our soldiers we were not really a nation in a fully engaged war. As the wars continued, life in America went on without disruption. A very small percentage of the country was at human or even family risk. The wars did not interfere on a national scale with the lives of those who chose not to serve. The economy was largely good. In places like my home state of Virginia it absolutely boomed with tens of billions of dollars going to Virginia-based programs in the departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

  This societal disconnect gave the policymakers great latitude in the manner in which they ran the wars. It also resulted in very little congressional oversight, either in operational concepts or in much-need scrutiny of DOD and State Department management and budgets. Powerpoint presentations replaced vigorous discussion. Serious introspection by Pentagon staff members gave way to bland reports from Beltway Bandit consultants hired to provide answers to questions asked during committee hearings. An “Overseas Contingency Fund” with billions of unlabeled dollars allowed military leaders to fund programs that were never directly authorized or specifically appropriated by Congress. To be blunt, the Pentagon and the Joint commands were basically making their own rules, and to hell with everybody else.

  This was not the Congress in which I had worked as a full committee counsel during the Carter Administration. Nor was it the Pentagon in which I had served as an assistant secretary of defense and Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan.

  At the other end of the pipeline, it was different. For those who did serve, and especially for those who served in ground combat units and in special operations, being thrown into the middle of a region where violence and bitter retribution is the norm was often a life-altering experience. Repetitive combat tours pulled them away from home, from family, and from the normal routines of their peers again and again, creating burnout from unresolved personal issues of stress and readjustment to civilian life. So-called “stop loss” programs kept many soldiers on active duty after their initial terms of service were supposed to end, a policy that brought the not-unreal slogan that stop-loss was, in reality, nothing more than a back-door version of the draft: We have you. And we are going to keep you until we no longer need you. The traditional policy of allowing troops a two-to-one ratio of “dwell time” at home between deployments was repeatedly shortened until, for the Army, the ratio was less than one-to-one, requiring soldiers to return to combat for fifteen months with only twelve months at home to recuperate, refurbish, and retrain. Those who left the military after one enlistment rather than choosing a career were largely ignored by commands that provided little post-military guidance and sent battle-weary young soldiers home without much more than a goodbye.

  But along the way, as with those who have served our country in uniform in every other war, our young military did the job that they were sent to do, no matter the overall wisdom of the mission itself.

  With respect to these capable and dedicated young Americans who stepped forward to serve, I feel fortunate to have been able to play a part in making sure that the public was aware of the contributions they made, and to put into place policies that recognized and properly rewarded their service. And as a writer, journalist and later a Senator I was able to use whatever pulpit was available in order to emphasize that our greatest strategic challenges were not in the places where our elites had decided to invest our people and our national treasure, and to call for the country’s leadership to cease its unfortunate obsession with a region that has never needed a permanent American ground presence as a means of mediating, much less resolving, its centuries-old conflicts. You don’t take out a hornet’s nest by sitting on top of it. We’re smarter than that, and also more capable. 

   In addition to working on strongly felt issues such as economic fairness and criminal justice reform, once I was elected to the Senate I took a two-pronged approach to resolving the mess that had been made in our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  The first involved our larger strategic interests. I immediately gained a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and two years later was named Chairman of the Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs. From our immediate office, I designed a staff—and a legislative approach—that would energetically re-emphasize our commitment to relations in East Asia, and recruited good people to carry out that approach. My mission to my staff was that we were going to work to invigorate American relations in East Asia, particularly in South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines, and we were going to open up Burma to the outside world. We did more than talk about this, averaging three intense trips every year where I was able to meet with top leaders in those countries as well as almost every other country in ASEAN.

  Barack Obama later announced a similar policy after he was elected two years later, calling it the “Pivot to Asia.” Unfortunately, his administration’s approach skirted the largest issue in the region by avoiding any major confrontations with China. The pivot was largely abandoned at a crucial period in 2012 after China claimed sovereignty over a two million square kilometer area of the South China Sea, and began militarizing numerous contested islands claimed by several other countries. The Obama administration declined to criticize China’s actions, saying that the United States would not take a position on sovereignty issues. Quite obviously, not taking a position in this matter was defaulting to China’s aggressive acts. I responded by introducing a Senate resolution condemning any use of military force in the resolution of sovereignty issues in the South China Sea, which passed with a unanimous vote.

  The second involved the day-to-day manner in which our wars were being fought, and the way that our younger military people were being treated by those at the top.

  I participated in numerous hearings on all aspects from my seats on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, becoming even more concerned about the lack of serious congressional oversight. During one Foreign Relations Committee hearing on post-invasion reconstruction efforts, an assistant secretary of state testified that the United States had spent 32 billion dollars on different smaller-scale projects.  I asked him to provide me and the committee a complete list of every project, as well as the cost. That was in 2007. I’m still waiting for his answer. This was clearly not the way things worked when I was a counsel in the House, where such requests were often answered within a day or two, from information that had already been compiled. In fact, the lack of an answer, despite follow-up calls from my staff, followed a broader pattern that had evolved after 9/11 when vague answers and delayed responses had become the norm, a deliberate and increasingly routine snub of the Congress by higher-level members of the executive branch.

  Take your choice. This was either incompetent leadership or deliberate obstruction. If the congressional liaisons from DOD were able to provide specific, complicated data within a day or two in 1977, certainly the computers of 2007 were capable of doing so after thirty years of technological progress.

  I responded by co-authoring legislation along with Senator Claire McCaskill that created the Wartime Contracts Commission, modeled after the Truman Commission of World War Two. After three years of investigations, the commission’s final report estimated that due to major failures in our contracting system the United States had squandered up to 60 billion dollars through contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the commission lacked subpoena power or criminal jurisdiction over actions taken in the past, but it certainly got the attention of would-be fraudsters, led to better record-keeping, improved the oversight process, and put a marker down for contracts from that point forward.  

  Having grown up in the military, and serving as an infantry Marine in Vietnam, and with a son who had left college to enlist in the Marine Corps infantry and fought in Ramadi, Iraq during one of the worst periods in that war, I seized the opportunity – and undertook the obligation – to properly reward the contributions of those who had stepped forward to serve.

  Immediately after I won the election to the Senate, and two months before actually being sworn in, I sat down with the Senate legislative counsel and drafted the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Having spent four years as a full committee counsel on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, my legislative model was the GI Bill that had been given to our World War Two veterans, the most generous GI Bill in history up to that time: pay for the veteran’s tuition and fees, buy the books, and provide a monthly living stipend. For every tax dollar that was spent on the World War Two GI bill, our treasury received eight dollars in tax remunerations from veterans who had gone on to successful lives. By contrast, the Vietnam Era GI Bill had provided only a monthly payment that in almost every case was far less than the costs of higher education, beginning in 1966 at a paltry rate of 50 dollars a month and ending in the early 1970s at $340 a month.

  I introduced the Post-9/11 GI Bill on my first day as a Senator. I put together a bipartisan leadership team—two Republicans, John Warner and Chuck Hagel; two Democrats, Frank Lautenberg and myself; two of them World War Two veterans, and two of them Vietnam veterans. Sixteen months later in a modern-day Congressional miracle, the bill became law, ironically over the strong opposition of the Bush Administration to the very end. The White House and the Pentagon claimed that such a generous bill would affect retention, causing too many people to leave the military. The obvious but implicit message was, Don’t treat them too good; they’ll leave. This position was taken by general officers who were going to receive a couple of hundred thousand dollars every year in military retirement when they themselves decided to leave. Having spent five years in the Pentagon and being intimately familiar with manpower issues, I held a completely different belief, that the generosity of the new GI Bill would enhance enlistments and help broaden the base of our overall military. In a back-handed compliment, at least in my view, I was not invited to the White House for the ceremony when the President signed the bill. But to date, millions of post-9/11 veterans have used this Bill, which is beyond cavil the most generous GI Bill in history. It has created opportunities and empowered the careers of people who are now making their way into positions of leadership and influence throughout the country.

  Shortly after I introduced the GI Bill, I introduced legislation to mandate a proper ratio for dwell time between overseas deployments. The legislation would have required that military members not be returned to combat unless they had been home for at least the amount of time that they had previously been gone. This was not unreasonable. A two-to-one ratio was a simple formula that reflected traditional rotation cycles. With the continuous deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan it had fallen to less than one-to-one, which meant that for years our soldiers would be gone longer than they were at home, and when they were at home they would be spending much of their time getting ready to go back. This reality was clearly affecting not only morale but also the potential for long-term emotional difficulties such as post-traumatic stress.

  Predictably, the White House and the Pentagon opposed the legislation. Some claimed that I had designed it with a hidden agenda to slow down the war in Iraq. Others, led by Senator Lindsey Graham, claimed that the legislation was unconstitutional, that Congress could not intervene in the operational tempo of the military since the President was the Commander in Chief. But a precedent was already set. During the Korean War, Congress had ceased the deployment of soldiers who were being sent to the war zone without proper training by mandating that no military members could be deployed overseas unless they had spent 120 days on active duty. If the military leaders weren’t going to take care of their people, it was only right that Congress should set proper boundaries.

  The Republicans filibustered the legislation, which then required sixty votes for passage. Although the bill twice received a fifty-six vote majority, with several Republican votes for passage, we did not break the filibuster.  But we did put the issue of dwell time firmly before Congress and the public, and the two-to-one deployment cycle eventually became the express goal inside the Department of Defense.

  All of that is history. I put it before you as something of a template to show the patterns that evolved and have continued over the past twenty years, as well as evidence that strong and informed leadership in Congress can turn things around. In many ways, this dislocation is between those who make policy—including military leaders—and those who carry it out. It continues due to the group mentality of a foreign policy aristocracy seeking common agreement rather than original thought. And it has exacerbated this ever-growing dislocation by freezing out those who are not, basically, in the club because their thinking does not fit the usual mantra and their ideas threaten the prevailing orthodoxy.

  We need these other voices. There are lessons to be learned and unavoidable questions that need to be answered at every level. Some involve the articulation of our national security objectives and how we define national strategy. Some involve when and how we should use the military for operational missions in harm’s way. And some involve the actual makeup of these military missions, from their remote or covert or overt nature, and if deployed in large numbers how large that footprint should be, and what portion should consist of military contractors along the lines of the past twenty years. And for those who want to repair the damage, it challenges us to find clear ways where we can move forward.

  Who do we hold accountable for the random and often changing strategic mistakes that have damaged our strength and our reputation? How do we move forward in the way we articulate and implement our national strategy here at home? How do we regain our respect in the international community, both among our friends who need us, and from potential adversaries who pray every day that America will lose its willpower, that we would be so overcome by military failures abroad and turbulence at home that the nation itself will atrophy and descend into the ranks of an also-ran, second-rate power?  

  We should begin with a vigorous and open discussion about the makeup, power, and influence of America’s massive defense establishment. And here I’m talking about the highest levels of our uniformed military, the civilian government officials, the powerful defense corporations, the numerous think tanks funded heavily by the defense industry, the hugely influential lobbying organizations, and—if not at the bottom, certainly in the bullseye of the efforts of all of these entities—the authorizing and appropriating committees in the Senate and House of Representatives. Couple that with the media of all sorts, particularly the huge growth of the internet and social media, and one can see how complicated the debate over any controversial issue can become.

  We were warned about this, sixty years ago, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his well-remembered speech about the “military / industrial complex.” The speech was the president’s carefully placed farewell message to the American people, made just three days before he left office. His words resonate, symbolic in their timing as his final shot across the bow, and coming as they did from this former five-star general who knew the military with a completeness that no other American president could ever match.

  After commenting that in the aftermath of World War Two the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” Eisenhower expressed his concern about the “total influence – economic, political, even spiritual” of this new reality “in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.”  

  The outgoing, immensely popular President then bluntly called out the members of his own professional culture—the military itself—and the bond its top leaders were increasingly forming with America’s defense corporations. “In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military / industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

  Looking at the decades following his speech and particularly the past twenty years, I believe President Eisenhower would be amazed at how massively this military-industrial complex has grown, how entangled the relationships between the military and the industrial complex have become, and how much it has affected the career paths of civilian “experts,” as well as the positions taken by many senior flag officers facing retirement.

  Lucrative civilian careers have been made through the “revolving doors” of serving for a few years in appointed posts in the Departments of Defense and State, or by working on committee staffs in the Congress, then rotating over the space of many years in and out of government into the defense-oriented industry and in the ever more influential think tanks, some of them heavily funded by corporations with major financial interests in defense contracts. The number of people involved in such revolving doors and the amount of money flowing back and forth would have stunned the understanding of people in Eisenhower’s era.

  Likewise, many military officers have made similar career moves, taking advantage of skills and relationships that were developed while on active duty. Those in uniform and others who work in the area of national defense regularly comment about the potential for conflicts of interest among the most senior flag officers as they carry out their final active duty positions before retiring and prepare for their next career in the civilian world. Critical issues ranging from the procurement of weapons systems to carrying out politically sensitive military operations often comprise the way in which potential civilian employers decide on the next chapter in their lives. A hand played well can bring large financial benefits. A hand played poorly can result in media stigma or even being relieved of their duties, and a beach house in Tarpon Springs.

  As with other areas of public service, it would be useful for Congress to examine the firewalls in place in order to maintain the vitally important separation of the military, on the one side, and the industrial complex on the other, just as President Dwight Eisenhower so prophetically pointed out sixty years ago.

  Dwight Eisenhower would have liked General Robert Barrow, the twenty-seventh commandant of the Marine Corps. His leadership example personally inspired me, both during and after my service in the Corps. We had many personal discussions over the years, until he passed away in 2008. He was a great combat leader. He mastered guerrilla warfare while fighting Japanese units alongside Chinese soldiers in World War Two. In the Korean War, he received the Navy Cross, our country’s second-highest award, for extraordinary heroism as a company commander during the historic breakout from the Chosin Reservoir. And in Vietnam, he was known as one of the war’s finest regimental commanders. He knew war, he knew loyalty, and he knew his Marines.

  General Barrow was fond of emphasizing that moral courage was often harder, and more exemplary, than physical courage. On matters of principle, he would not bend. During one difficult period when he was dealing with serious issues in the political process, the four-star Commandant calmly pointed out to me that his obligation was to run the Marine Corps “the same way a good company commander runs his rifle company: I’ll do the best job I know how to do, and if you don’t like what I’m doing, then fire me.”

  It is rare these days to see such leaders wearing the stars of a general or an admiral. And thinking of President Eisenhower’s prescient warnings about what he termed the “the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals,” I have no doubt that he and General Barrow shared the same concerns. General Barrow held another firm belief. Having served as Commandant of the Marine Corps, he believed it would soil the dignity of that office by trading on its credibility for financial gain through banging on doors in Washington as a lobbyist or serving as a board member giving a defense-related corporation his prized insider’s advice on how to sell their product.

  The Japanese have a saying that “life is a generation, but reputation is forever.” And General Barrow’s pristine motivation will forever preserve his honor.

  I grew up in the military. I know the price that families must pay when their fathers or now even their mothers are continuously deployed, because I lived it as a very young boy. My father, a pilot who flew B-17s and B-29s in World War Two and cargo planes in the Berlin Airlift, was continually deployed either overseas or on bases with no family housing, at one point for more than three years. I know the demands and yet the honor of leading infantry Marines in combat and then spending years in and out of the hospital after being wounded. I know what it is like to be a father with a son deployed in a very bad place as an enlisted infantry Marine. And most of all I know the pride that comes from being able to say for the rest of my life that when my country called, I was there, and I took care of my people.

  My other major point today is that our top leaders in all sectors of national defense need to get going and develop a clearly articulated foreign policy. We have lost twenty years, unfortunately fulfilling the prediction that I made in the Washington Post five months before the invasion of Iraq that “Nations such as China can only view the prospect of an American military consumed for the next generation by the turmoil of the Middle East as a glorious windfall.” And for China, indeed it was.

  It’s ironic that we are now hearing frantic warnings from our uniformed leaders about China’s determined expansionism, both military and economic, and particularly about how recent reports of Chinese technological leaps might be something of a new “Sputnik” moment where America has been caught off-guard and now must rush to catch up. Too bad they weren’t following this as these policies and technological improvements were developed by the Chinese over at least the past two decades, while our focus remained intently on the never-ending and never-resolved brawls in the Middle East.

  The very people who now are wringing their hands and calling for a full-fledged effort to counter such threats are the same people who should have been warning the nation of their possibility ten or even twenty years ago.

  So, ask yourself: If things go wrong, who then shall we blame?

  Much of the world is now uneasy with China’s unremitting aggression on its home turf in Asia. Over the past decade, China has been calling its own shots, rejecting international law and public opinion while flexing its muscle to signal its view that it will soon replace the United States as the region’s dominant military, diplomatic and economic power. Beijing has taken down Hong Kong’s democracy movement; started military spats with India; disrupted life for tens of millions by damming the headwaters of the Mekong River; conducted what our government now deems a campaign of genocide against Muslim Uighurs; escalated tensions with Japan over the Senkaku Islands; consolidated its illegal occupation and militarization of islands in the South China Sea; and made repeated bellicose gestures designed to test the international community’s resistance to “unifying” the “renegade province” of Taiwan. China’s military is expanding and modernizing and its Navy is becoming not only technological but global.

  While we expended a huge portion of our human capital, emotional energy, and national treasure on two wars, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has had a major economic impact in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and with individual governments on other continents. In Africa, whose population has quadrupled since 1970 and which counts only one of the world’s top thirty countries in Gross National Product, more than forty countries have signed on to China’s BRI.

  Let’s get going. We have alliances to enhance, and extensive national security interests to protect. We need to address these issues immediately and with clarity. America has always been a place where the abrasion of continuous debate eventually produces creative solutions. Eventually is now. Let’s agree on those solutions, and make the next twenty years a time of clear purpose and affirmative global leadership.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/09/2021 – 00:00

• Man Soaked In Hand Sanitizer Ignites After Being Tased By Cops 
  Man Soaked In Hand Sanitizer Ignites After Being Tased By Cops 

  A 29yo Upstate New York man walked into a police station last week, stripped off his clothing, and, at some point, doused himself with hand sanitizer. Local reports say the man was intoxicated and started a confrontation with officers. The combination of electricity from the taser and the flammable liquid caused the man to ignite into flames. 

  According to the local news Times-Union, Catskill Village Police Department said Jason Jones, 29, walked into the police station and sparked a “confrontation with officers.” The man stripped his clothing off and doused himself with hand sanitizer. Chief Dave Darling, a former State Police senior investigator, said officers tased Jones to subdue him. 

  

  “I think they were afraid he was going to hurt himself, and that’s what started it,” Darling told the Times Union. “There are still details that we’re trying to develop.”

  It was at that moment when Jones burst into flames. The local paper said he “is in an intensive care unit at Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse. His condition is grave, according to people briefed on the matter.” 

  Darling described the incident as “horrible” and said Greene County district attorney’s office is investigating what happened on Friday night, Oct. 29. 

  Jones’ attorney, Kevin Luibrand, told CBS 6, “his client is in a burn unit in Syracuse in a medical situation of the most serious type.” He said the incident was caught on video. 

  “In a letter to Darling dated Thursday, Luibrand requested that the department preserve all evidence in the case, including audio and video recordings from street cameras and other devices, as well as any computer data from any Tasers that were used during the encounter,” the Times Union wrote. 

  The lessons learned are three things: 

  1. Please don’t start a confrontation with officers in their police station.
  2. Know your limits when it comes to alcohol consumption. 
  3. And most importantly, don’t douse yourself with hand sanitizer that contains alcohol because you’ll light up like a Christmas tree upon being tased. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 23:40

• COVID Boosters Likely To Be Annual "For The Foreseeable Future": Aussie Pharmacists Guild
  COVID Boosters Likely To Be Annual “For The Foreseeable Future”: Aussie Pharmacists Guild

  Via The Epoch Times,

  Australians will need to get COVID booster shots annually “for the foreseeable future” to combat CCP Virus, according to the country’s Pharmacy Guild.

  

  Trent Twomey, the president of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia (PGA), warned that people may need to get booster shots every 6 to 12 months to keep more deadly variants at bay.

  “The question is what booster and what interval we need to get that booster, whether it’s every six, nine or 12 months. Those decisions need to be based on evidence and facts and at the moment that is an evolving space,” he told Nine newspapers.

  Twomey noted that Australians may need to wait until 2023 to “reach some sort of steady-state vaccination program,” which will be similar to the annual flu shot.”

  “In time, we will treat COVID like many other viruses that have been around for decades, and a COVID-19 shot will just be another element of the Australian vaccination program,” he said.

  

  Students wait to receive the Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19 at Qudos Arena in Sydney, Australia, on Aug. 9, 2021. (Dean Lewins-Pool/Getty Images)

  From Nov. 8, COVID booster shots will be available for all adult Australians six months after they got their second dose. Around 1.7 million people will be eligible for a booster dose by 2022, a move making Australia the second country in the world after Israel to offer boosters to all ages.

  Australia has reached the 80 percent full vaccination rate last week, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison praising it as “another magnificent milestone.”

  At the state level, however, only New South Wales, Victoria, and the Australian Capital Territory have reached this number.

  The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the country’s medicine and therapeutics regulator have approved Pfizer as a booster dose.

  Pfizer booster shots will be given to people even if they had other vaccines for their first two doses. For those who have an allergic or adverse reaction to Pfizer, the AstraZeneca vaccine will be given instead.

  While boosters are not required for international travel, states and territories will decide whether to make it mandatory for residents to be fully vaccinated.

  

  Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews looks on during a press conference in Melbourne, Australia, on Sept. 1, 2021. (Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)

  Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews suggested last month that booster shots may be needed for those who are fully vaccinated to retain their freedoms.

  “A month before your six months is up, then you will get a message and your vaccination certificate, the thing that gets you the green tick. You’ll be prompted to go and book a time to go and have your booster shot,” Andrews said.

  “There may be state clinics in that or it might be all done through GPs and pharmacies, that hasn’t been worked through yet. We’re happy to play our part, though. So it’ll be about the maintenance of your vaccination status.”

  Meanwhile, South Australia Premier Steven Marshall has announced that eligible residents in the state will be able to get COVID boosters at government vaccination hubs from December.

  “Access to a booster dose of the lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine is yet another layer of protection available to South Australians,” he said on Friday.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 23:20

• Satellites Capture Fake US Aircraft Carrier In China Desert Used For Target Practice 
  Satellites Capture Fake US Aircraft Carrier In China Desert Used For Target Practice 

  China’s military has constructed mock-ups of U.S. warships in a remote desert missile testing range as training targets amid the threat of conflict in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait. 

  U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) said satellite images by Maxar Technologies Inc., a U.S. firm with more than 80 satellites in low Earth orbit, show mock-ups of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier and two Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers at the test facility in the Ruoqiang area of Xinjiang’s Taklamakan desert. 

  “This new range shows that China continues to focus on anti-carrier capabilities, with an emphasis on U.S. Navy warships,” USNI said. 

  One of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers can be seen below. 

  

  The facility also has a mock-up of a U.S. aircraft carrier mounted on rails to simulate a moving vessel. 

  

  For reference, here’s the mock-up of the carrier versus the real thing—very similar dimensions. 

  

  The signs are clear that China is focusing on its anti-ship missile program, managed by the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF). 

  Here’s an overview of the entire range. 

  

  This range is not far from another missile range that was used to test the so-called carrier killer DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missiles.

  There are questions on the types of weapons tested or will be tested at the new facility, including hypersonic weapons. 

  Even though China-U.S. ties have improved in recent months, both global powers are locked in a great power competition. The Pentagon has raised concern over China’s rapidly expanding nuclear and hypersonic weapons programs. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 23:00

• Victor Davis Hanson: Trickle-Down Bidenism
  Victor Davis Hanson: Trickle-Down Bidenism

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

  Can 10 months really make a real difference in America? Not normally.

  But weld together a hard-left socialist agenda with the control of the White House and Congress onto the combined forces of progressive woke media, Silicon Valley, the corporate boardrooms, the entertainment industry, academia, and the Wall Street borg – all in the age of instant and intrusive communications—and it’s no wonder a country, even a nation as resilient as the United States, can descend quite quickly in ways that make America almost unrecognizable.

  In other words, 40 weeks of relentless Bidenism finally permeates most of the nation.

  

  Fuel Prices, Inflation, and Border Chaos

  Out in the California foothills and Central Valley, relatively “cheap” propane now has more than doubled to a rate of $3.91 a gallon.

  At about the same time that I got the propane bill, I filled up the truck with diesel fuel. It was $4.87 a gallon with a credit card, up in price almost $2 a gallon from over a year ago. I thought myself lucky since the week prior in Palo Alto it was about $5.29 a gallon.

  I spoke not long ago in Bakersfield to an oil man. He described impending California new rules on the horizon concerning almost every aspect of horizontal drilling and fracking—as part of his own larger fears that the entire industry is shrinking even as demands and profits soar, and consumers need more natural gas and gasoline than ever.

  Has anyone ever heard of liberal Americans deliberately not pumping oil and gas, but still needing so much more output that they beg the illiberal Saudis and Russians to bail us out? At other times in our history, we have suffered plenty of fossil fuel scarcities due to war, embargoes, and declining reserves. But never has America deliberately created shortages amid a sea of our own gas and oil.

  What has been the reaction from those who slashed natural gas and oil production by cancelling new federal leases and pipelines, and oil fields in Alaska, or warned frackers that new regulations and taxes were just the prerequisites to a rapid phase out of their existence altogether—on the pathway to a wind and solar nirvana?

  When asked if the United States would at least increase (e.g., restore previous levels of) oil production, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm laughed, “That is hilarious.”

  To whom is that comical? The guy with an older model pickup doing daily landscape work for his wealthy clients? The waitress who drives 20 miles to work? The broke student who commutes to campus?

  I drove today along a rural avenue next to my farm. Both sides of the street were littered—far more than usually so—with trash. They were not just the usual garbage bags and tires, but washers, dryers, refrigerators, car seats, furniture—and mattresses of all shapes and sizes. It was an intensification of the now old story of rural California as an open dumping ground of refuse.

  I stopped to inspect the flotsam and jetsam. The dumpers are careful to glean out their personal addresses. They rarely leave traceable material. But all the magazines, newspapers, and printed material were in Spanish. Note there are no green regulators out here who patrol rural avenues to stop the pollution and desecration of the natural landscape; in the hierarchy of wokeness, illegal immigration trumps the environment.

  So, I assumed, as is the case when I find people in the actual act of dumping their garbage and refuse on my property (like last week), that they are likely illegally here (no English). And the current clutter may represent recent spikes in crossings from a nonexistent border and redirects of illegal aliens from Texas. (If 2 million illegal entrants will cross the current fiscal year, and if they are being bused or dispersed by the Biden Administration throughout the United States, then small communities of recent immigrants will likely feel the surge).

  The reaction? The Biden Administration is planning to settle “claims” of “wrong” treatment lodged by those who feel that after crossing illegally into the United States, and continuing to reside illegally in America, that they are entitled to $450,000 per family. Otherwise, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas preened of the nonexistent border that it “is no less secure than before.” 

  “No less secure” means 2 million will cross this year?

  When acting White House deputy press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked why the Biden Administration would lavish nearly a half a million dollars on illegal aliens who broke federal law, but not upon legal immigrants who obey America’s laws, she seemed bewildered at any criticism of rewarding only the unlawful: “Why would we be giving people who are coming here the right way money?”

  Ms. Jean-Pierre gave a rare unguarded summation of the essence of woke progressivism: If we are going to give free stuff to Americans, those who do things the “right way” deserve nothing; those who do things the wrong way certainly do. Asymmetrical application of the law is the hallmark of wokeism.

  I have been looking at new cars at the large regional car dealers. Whereas a year ago there were 200 or so new ones on lots to inspect, now there are not more than 10 or so—mostly subcompacts with prices upon inquiry well over the sticker MSRP figure. Almost overnight the lots have changed from premium new car marts into vast used car dealerships, but with a twist: today’s used cars sell at last year’s new car prices.

  Wood is now a bit cheaper than three months ago, but still about triple the price of a year ago. I talked to a Mexican American contractor I know not long ago at Home Depot who was sorting and sifting through a small pile of what was left of overpriced 2’x6’s. “Just the junk left. It’s all junk,” he said.

  When pressed about these disruptions in the supply chain, empty shelves, scarce inventories, delayed or cancelled shipments, and soaring prices, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki snarked, “The tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.”

  Yes: cars, lumber, food—all the irrelevant treadmill trinkets that people don’t need.

  After disappearing in the midst of the crisis due to his paternity leave, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg returned to weigh in with:

  I think there have always been two kinds of Christmas shoppers. There is the ones who have all their list completed by Halloween, and then there’s people like me who show up at the mall on Christmas Eve . . . .   [I]f you’re in that latter bucket, obviously there’s going to be more challenges.   

  Yes, that’s it, Pete. The bucket of self-employed handymen who make their living repairing roofs will just have to plan ahead better and quit waiting to fix eaves and gutters on Christmas Eve.

  Farmers are not procrastinating but they still aren’t always being paid.  Some hear their almond containers are stuck at Asian ports abroad, rotting for lack of longshoreman—and months after shipping the grower is getting nothing for his crop. Other payments freeze because California crops can’t get onto ships to cross the Pacific from Los Angeles or Long Beach. Growers are not whining about late-arriving Pelotons.

  I’ve been looking at house prices too, again partly out of curiosity, partly because a family member is looking for a home. Homes in a development in October 2020 that were outrageously priced at $850,000 for a 2,400 square foot home near the central California coast are now listed between $1.3-4 million!

  Interest may be about 2-3 percent, and so monthly mortgage costs don’t fully or immediately reflect the burdensome sale prices. Nonetheless, who could afford the $15,000-20,000 minimum property tax, the soaring insurance, the exorbitant cost to landscape the dirt lot in the backyard—and with a price increase on what we used to call a “middle-class home” of some $400,000 plus in just a year? Translated, the house went up over $1,000 a day, from unaffordable to a sick joke.

  Medical bills are skyrocketing. A daughter’s health insurance deductible is $5,0000—per person in a five-person family. This year almost every family member’s bill will exceed that deductible. Of such spiraling prices, White House chief of staff Ron Klain reweeted former Obama advisor and Harvard professor Jason Furman’s shrug about the soaring inflation, “Most of the economic problems we’re facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems.”

  Ron and Jason are right: Rent, a ruptured appendix, and mammograms are just the “high class problems” stuff of America.

  Retribalizing America

  The country is rapidly retribalizing—the most toxic and sickest of all of Joe Biden disastrous gifts to America over the last 10 months. The Biden fixation with race reverberates throughout the intelligence agencies, the bureaucracy, the Pentagon, and the White House, as left-wing furies are unleashed shrieking and searching for mythical “white rage” and “white supremacy.” The Left’s new message is that of Bull Connor and Lester Maddox to the core: you are what you look like. Your race defines you and everyone who looks like you—and as well all those who don’t look like you. Individuals don’t exist; the tribe tolerates no exceptions, no traitors to their racial allegiances.

  When I go into local large national discount retail stores, I notice that in the early morning hours one group of Americans shops. And by 10 a.m. they are replaced by quite another. Another strange new development: someone of your own race, a total stranger, will abruptly greet you with enthusiasm, as if some new tie, some previously unrecognized bond, now exists between you at a time when apparently the “color of your skin” fixation is supposedly the new normal.

  Critical race theory’s legacy will entail the complete destruction of the message of Martin Luther King, Jr. When asked about the consequences of mandating the teaching of critical race theory racism to “combat” racism in Virginia, and the statewide pushback against Democratic candidates who endorsed such retrograde tribalism, Deputy Press Secretary Jean-Pierre scoffed, “Great countries are honest, right? They have to be honest with themselves about the history, which is good and the bad. And our kids should be proud to be Americans after learning that history.”

  Yes, of course, that explains the Democratic implosion in Virginia: Those poor dishonest Virginians who were previously deluding themselves that their country was only half good!

  The electoral anger in New Jersey and Virginia, but also throughout the country, reflects not just the chaos of the Biden first year, but the way in which the nearly 10 months of disasters have so rapidly damaged millions of American lives. The Biden team’s smug responses to the messes they made remind us that socialists care little for the millions of broken eggs necessary to cook a vast toxic omelet.

  Does the Biden socialist cadre who engineered these self-induced calamities have any clue about the damage they have done to America? Or do they believe the chaos is tolerable collateral destruction to achieve an otherwise unattainable socialist paradise?

  Or do they assume that their own wealth, power, and influence will provide them exemption from the baleful, concrete consequences of their own abstract ideologies?

  Will trickle-down Bidenism always harm someone else, someone poorer, someone less important, someone culturally repugnant to them—like Joe Biden’s dregs and chumps, Barack Obama’s clingers, and Hillary Clinton’s deplorables and irredeemables?

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 22:40

• Used-Car Prices Hit New Record Highs Amid Snarled Supply Chains 
  Used-Car Prices Hit New Record Highs Amid Snarled Supply Chains 

  Anyone shopping for a used car has been sticker shocked by soaring prices since the virus pandemic began. There’s a global shortage of semiconductor components which has shuttered auto plants and crimped new car output. Lower inventories at dealerships forced many people onto secondary markets (used car market), searching for the next best option, pushing prices to record highs. 

  The Manheim U.S. Used Vehicle Value Index jumped 9.2% month-over-month in October. This brought the index to 223.7 (a new record high). From a year ago, the index is up a whopping 38.1% from a year ago.

  

  “Some of the monthly increase is a result of the seasonal adjustment, as October typically sees above-average vehicle depreciation and therefore used price declines,” Manheim wrote in the report. 

  However, it added, “this October was the first October in the history of the Manheim Index data, which dates to 1997, to see a non-seasonally adjusted price increase in October. The non-adjusted price increase in October was 5.4%.” 

  The used car market continues to march higher after the index stalled over the summer. Ford’s CFO John Lawler warned earlier this month that supply constraints could continue into 2022 and said, “we’ll be dealing with [supply chain issues] for a while.” This means used car prices might rise even further through year-end. 

  Manheim data reveals the lag between high-frequency data and traditional data at the BLS. We noted after September’s CPI print that “used cars will turn higher in coming months as Manheim wholesale prices rebounded.”

  Ahead of Wednesday’s CPI print, we suspect the used car component of the index will rise due in part to Manheim’s latest data. As we’ve noted before, soaring prices have weighed on consumer sentiment. 

  There are no immediate indications that would suggest used car prices have reached a peak. However, a top US warehouse operator has just called the peak in the supply chain crisis. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 22:20

• Australian Nurse Charged After Pretending To Administer Vaccine
  Australian Nurse Charged After Pretending To Administer Vaccine

  By Daniel Khmelev of The Epoch Times,

  A nurse in Western Australia (WA) has been charged with the fraudulent recording of vaccine information after she allegedly pretended to administer a dose of a COVID-19 jab before throwing away the still-full syringe.

  

  WA Police arrested and charged the 51-year-old female registered nurse at her residence on Sunday, Nov. 7. The woman employed at a private medical centre in St James had obtained approval to vaccinate the teenage child of a person known to her.

  It is alleged that the nurse made a false record that the teenager had received the vaccine while also recording that another employee had performed the procedure. Standard practice for the procedure involves a second medical practitioner to observe the process, who on this occasion was a doctor.

  The investigation commenced after the medical centre reported the incident to the police.

  The nurse has been charged with one count of “Gains Benefit by Fraud.” She was refused bail and is due to appear before the court on Nov. 8.

  Australia has seen a number of fraudulent vaccine-related incidents. According to The Age, the nation has seen fake digital vaccination certificates, along with bribes of up to $1,500, which have been offered to medical practitioners in Victoria to falsely record that the vaccine had been delivered.

  This news of the arrest comes as WA Premier Mark McGowan announced a “Super Vax Weekend” on Nov. 6 and Nov. 7 to encourage West Australians to roll up their sleeves to get the jab.

  “I’ve always said the way out of this pandemic is high vaccination rates, and this remains the case as today I outline WA’s Safe Transition Plan out of the COVID-19 pandemic,” McGowan said in a media release.

  McGowan had previously stated that WA would maintain its closed border policy until 90 percent of the state’s 12-and-over population were fully vaccinated.

  WA is also the nation’s least-vaccinated state—despite public information campaigns from the government—with around 67 percent of West Australians aged 16 being fully vaccinated, and over 80 percent receiving the first dose.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 22:00

• White House Pushes Schools To Vaccinate 28 Million 5-11 Year-Old Students. Should They?
  White House Pushes Schools To Vaccinate 28 Million 5-11 Year-Old Students. Should They?

  As we noted the other day, parents with young children (between the ages of 5 to 11), who have just been approved to receive the COVID vaccine, are increasingly worried about side effects for children.

  Unfortunately, the pressure on those parents is about to be turned up to ’11’…

  First lady Jill Biden and Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy are set to visit the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia, on Monday to launch a nationwide campaign to promote pediatric vaccinations, per AP.

  The school, which is well known as a top public high school in the Greater DC Area, was the first to administer the polio vaccine in 1954. Meanwhile, President Biden is planning to visit more pediatric vaccine sites across the country.

  Meanwhile, at the same time, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona are sending a letter to school districts across the country calling on them to organize vaccine clinics for their newly eligible students. The officials are reminding school districts that they can tap billions of dollars in federal coronavirus relief money to support pediatric vaccination efforts.

  The Biden administration is providing local school districts with tools to help them partner with pharmacies, or simply administer the shots themselves. And it’s asking schools to share information on the benefits of vaccines and details about the vaccination process with parents, in an effort to combat disinformation surrounding the shots.

  The White House is encouraging schools to host community conversations and share resources like vaccine fact sheets. It’s also working with the American Academy of Pediatrics to partner local physicians who can work with schools aiming to share science-based information about the shots.

  

  If there is any possible relief from the pressure-to-jab, Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Dr. Nicole Saphier, an assistant professor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College, address the question of whether you should vaccinate your 5-year-old in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

  There answer is perhaps reassuring: Be reassured that whatever you do, the risk is extremely low.

  Here are the numbers…

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 42% of U.S. children 5 to 11 had Covid by June 2021, before the Delta wave – a prevalence that is likely greater than 50% today. Of 28 million children in that age range, 94 have died of Covid since the pandemic began (including deaths before newer treatments), and 562 have been hospitalized with Covid infections.

  Serious complications are so uncommon in this age range that of 2,186 children in the Pfizer vaccine study, no child in either the vaccine or placebo group developed severe illness from Covid.

  Additionally, Saphier and Makary note that, just as with adults, pediatric COVID deaths and hospitalizations tend to come among those with comorbidities.

  

  Crucially though, Saphier and Makary note that if a child already had Covid, there’s no scientific basis for vaccination.

  Deep within the 80-page Pfizer report is this crucial line:

  “No cases of COVID-19 were observed in either the vaccine group or the placebo group in participants with evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

  That’s consistent with the largest population-based study on the topic, which found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic Covid.

  Natural immunity is likely even more robust in children, given their stronger immune systems.

  An indiscriminate Covid vaccine mandate may result in unintended harm among children with natural immunity.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 21:40

• Stop Looking At Danchenko, Start Looking At Andrew Weissmann & Robert Mueller
  Stop Looking At Danchenko, Start Looking At Andrew Weissmann & Robert Mueller

  Authored by ‘Sundance’ via TheConservativeTreehouse.com,

  TechnoFog has a good outline on the background of Igor Danchenko and the DOJ/FBI team effort to avoid undermining the Steele Dossier. {SEE HERE}  The accurate analysis ends with the following question, also posed by Sergei Millian: “Why was the DOJ/FBI covering for Danchenko“?

  

  To my friends in the truth media, the answer is inside the information previously released {See Here} which we have covered for a long time; and which the righteous media (Mollie Hemmingway, Lee Smith, Kimberley Strassel, etc) are hopefully only a few weeks away from outlining.

  The DOJ/FBI coverup, which included being purposefully blind to the 2017 Danchenko revelations, was not done to protect Danchenko. It was done to protect Andrew Weissmann and Robert Mueller.

  Yes, the FBI and DOJ knew the primary subsource for Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, disavowed the material in the dossier and undermined it in January of 2017 and again in June 15, 2017, as everyone is noting.  Yes, despite that knowledge Mueller/Weissmann applied for a FISA renewal on June 29th.  However, there’s a date a year later, all the way into July of 2018, when the DOJ and FBI claimed that Danchenko was speaking truth in their affirmation to the FISA court.

  THAT is in 2018.

  Why would the same DOJ/FBI officials who knew the dossier was junk in early 2017 lie to the FISA court in 2018?

  ANSWER: Because they were not protecting Danchenko, they were protecting Robert Mueller.

  Robert Muller was appointed by institutional preservationist Rod Rosenstein in order to cover up the era of government abuse and political weaponization by corrupt and highly political FBI and DOJ officials.   Robert Mueller was as much the Special Counsel as Joe Biden is the current presidency; which is to say they are figureheads, avatars, public faces to activity that is really underway by those behind them.

  When Mueller appeared before congress, the public got their first-hand look at how disconnected he was from any actual involvement in the investigation that carried his name.  He knew virtually nothing about the two year investigation, because he was a title in name only.  The real players charged to throw a bag over the corrupt activity preceding their appointment was the team led by Andrew Weissmann.

  

  When Andrew Weissmann and crew entered the DOJ to effectively run the Trump-Russia investigation, their purpose was to: (1) continue what was ongoing; and (2) coverup all that came before.   AG Jeff Sessions recused himself, and DAG Rod Rosenstein became the co-dependent enabler for the Weissmann crew’s needs.

  During a June 2020 Senate hearing, Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein openly admitted to being nothing more than the rubber stamp for every request.  Rosenstein approved every request, signed every authorization and agreed to every scope expansion Andrew Weissmann put in front of him.  There was nothing Rosenstein ever denied the Weissmann crew.

  Team Weissmann, under the authorities of a blank-check special counsel, effectively ran Main Justice top to bottom for two years.  When you accept the framework Rosenstein later admitted was in place, then you understand that anything blocked from DOJ/FBI release (see Nunes pleas) was blocked by Weissmann Inc; and everything that ever came out of the DOJ/FBI was released by Weissmann Inc.   Reread that as many times as needed until it sinks in.

  Back to the question about why the DOJ/FBI were protecting Danchenko by not exposing the lies that John Durham is now making public in his indictments.

  To wit, I would reference you THAT specific moment in July of 2018 when Team Weissmann wrote a letter to the FISA Court that was increasingly distrusting of what they were seeing and hearing within the justice system:

  Look at how the FISA was used by the Mueller investigation to continue its weaponization throughout 2017 and even into 2018. In July of 2018, long after the source material was debunked, the special counsel office was still telling the FISA court the predication for the FISA application and subsequent renewals was valid.

  Drive this point home.  This is a key to understanding the scope of how weaponized the Mueller team was.

  In July of 2018 the special counsel resistance group was lying to the FISA court in order to protect the cornerstone document that permitted them to weaponize the intelligence apparatus.

  This letter was written July 12, 2018. It is NOT accidental that only a week later, July 21st, the special counsel released the FISA application under the guise of FOIA fulfillment.

  

  Aside from the date, the important part of the first page is the motive for sending it. The Mueller team running the DOJ is telling the court in July 2018: based on what they know the FISA application still contains “sufficient predication for the Court to have found probable cause” to approve the application. The resistance unit running the DOJ is defending the Carter Page FISA application as still valid.

  On page #8 [Source Document Here] when discussing Christopher Steele’s sub-source, Igor Danchenko, the special counsel group notes the FBI found Danchenko to be truthful and cooperative.

  

  This is an incredibly misleading statement to the FISA court, because what the letter doesn’t say is that 18-months earlier Danchenko, also known in the IG report as the “primary sub-source”, disavowed the content and informed the FBI that the material attributed to him in the dossier was essentially junk.

  By July 2018, the DOJ clearly knew the dossier was full of fabrications, yet they withheld that information from the court and said the predicate was still valid. Why?

  It doesn’t take a deep-weeds-walker to identify the DOJ motive.  In July 2018 Robert Mueller’s investigation was at its apex.

  This letter justifying the application and claiming that current information would still be a valid predicate therein, speaks to the 2018 DOJ needing to retain the validity of the FISA warrant.  The the DOJ needed to protect evidence Mueller/Weissmann had already extracted from the fraudulently obtained FISA authority.  Protect the ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’, that’s the motive.

  In July 2018, if the DOJ-NSD had admitted the FISA application and all renewals were fatally flawed, Robert Mueller/Andrew Weismann may have needed to withdraw any evidence gathered as a result of its exploitation. The DOJ in 2018 was protecting Mueller’s poisoned fruit.

  If the DOJ had been honest with the court, there’s a strong possibility some, perhaps much, of Mueller evidence gathering would have been invalidated… and cases were pending. The solution: mislead the court, ie. lie, and claim the predication was still valid.

  

  That’s the bigger issue.  Forget Danchenko and go there.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 21:20

• House Version Of Biden's SALT Economic Agenda Set To Predominantly Benefit Wealthy, High Tax States
  House Version Of Biden’s SALT Economic Agenda Set To Predominantly Benefit Wealthy, High Tax States

  This should rile up “the squad” plenty…

  The House version of Joe Biden’s economic agenda may wind up benefitting New Jersey and other high-tax states, a new report from Bloomberg revealed today.

  The middle class in these states would benefit from the expansion of the state and local tax deduction, Representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, commented on Sunday night while speaking on CNN.

  The House’s version of Biden’s agenda increases the cap on the SALT write-off to $80,000, up from a $10,000 limit that was put in place in 2017, Bloomberg reported.

  

  Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey spoke out against the idea, arguing that the tax break should only be for those making under $400,000 per year. Senator Bernie Sanders echoed these sentiments, making the case that the deduction increase shouldn’t benefit the wealthiest Americans. 

  For those with lower taxes and lower costs of living, Gottheimer says the deduction cap would have less of an effect. “For Bernie Sanders, if you’re in Vermont, it’s a different situation, right?” he commented.

  The think tank Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said that high earners stood to benefit the most from the House version of the bill. Middle income households would get, on average about $20 per year in cuts, while wealthy households would get over $23,000 per year in cuts, the Committee said. 

  House leaders are prepared to pass Biden’s bill this month. The bill would then undergo additional changes in the Senate. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 21:00

• Trump Hints At Biden Rematch: "You Think I Kid, But I'm…Not"
  Trump Hints At Biden Rematch: “You Think I Kid, But I’m…Not”

  Authored by Phillip Wegmann via RealClearPolitics.com,

  The former president made a gaffe, realized his mistake, and then made a joke sure to make the Republican establishment nervous.

  It was Friday night, and Donald Trump was telling a crowd at Mar-a-Largo about his last campaign, about how “we were going to go in with a fourth term.” Of course, he was talking about his unsuccessful bid for a second stint in the White House. So, pivoting with a quick quip, Trump said, “It could be; you know we should be entitled to a fourth term too, after what we had to put up with!”

  The audience — including some former Cabinet members and sympathetic members of Congress — laughed and cheered. They laughed and cheered again when Trump said he couldn’t use “Keep America Great” as a slogan because, as he explained it, “with all of the things that are happening in this country, I’ll say it, America, right now, is not great; America is under siege.”

  
  The slogan needed an update: “It’s ‘Make America Great Again, Again.’”

  More laughing and more cheering from the crowd.

  But Trump was serious.

  “You think I kid,” he warned, “but I’m actually not. I’m actually not.”

  The private remarks, shared with RealClearPolitics, are the clearest sign yet that Trump is considering a return to politics. Some close to him believe he’s already decided. Last  month, his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told a radio host to lend him “all your money” so he could “bet that [Trump] is running again.”

  Trump’s latest remarks came at the end of a policy summit hosted by the America First Policy Institute, the brainchild of his former senior domestic policy adviser, Brooke Rollins. It was a chance to replay all the old hits, introduce new ones at the expense of Joe Biden, and continue the will-he/won’t-he routine that’s aggravated the GOP establishment and titillated the MAGA base since he left office.

  The Virginia gubernatorial election was proof that the Trump method works, at least according to the former president. A year after he issued an executive order banning federal training programs that even mention critical race theory, he said it “had become the number one issue in the Virginia governor’s race.”

  On the eve of that election, Trump hosted a tele-rally for Glenn Youngkin, who went on to defeat former Gov. Terry McAuliffe by 2.3 percentage points. If he hadn’t called in to the rally and his base didn’t turn out to vote, Trump argued, “you would never ever have even come close to winning that election. Not even close.” Three days later, then, at Mar-a-Largo, Trump was ready to explain what “Glenn’s victory” meant. In his estimation, it was “a complete vindication of the arguments, and that was truly a vindication of our movement and the things we have been talking about for years.”

  More such vindication is coming, he predicted, though Trump warned that “once these incompetent radicals are voted out of office … we have our work cut out for us because they are vicious and they are smart and they do stick together.”

  But the GOP that will emerge if Trump is right about next November will be “a much different party,” he said, citing the gains his 2020 campaign made with blue-collar voters. “They even call it the party of Trump. And I said, ‘It’s not the party of Trump. This is the party of all of you in this room, and this is going to long outlast Trump.’”

  One area where this assessment seems apparent: The proliferation of culture war political arguments. Though Youngkin was hesitant to embrace Trump in Virginia, the Republican candidate was more than eager to lean into the debate over parental rights in education. Pointing to the Virginia victory, and to the salience of the CRT debate, Trump argued, “We did not start the so-called culture war. But we will win it, and we will win it very strongly.”

  But while Trump was ready to declare early victories, he also returned to old grievances, reading aloud from a list of Republicans who he believed had wronged him. He griped briefly about Sens. Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Bill Cassidy. His harshest remarks, however, were reserved for the Senate minority leader. Trump called Mitch McConnell “an old, broken-down crow.”

  “They don’t fight like they should,” he said of that wing of the party.

  “They’re afraid of doing anything without apologizing to the radical left.”

  The crowd seemed to enjoy this commentary, but they sounded ecstatic when the 45th president turned his attention to the current occupant of the Oval Office.

  According to Trump, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was “the most embarrassing moment in the history.” Rising inflation is ruining the economy, and things are so bad that Jimmy Carter looks “like a brilliant president by comparison.” The surge of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border wasn’t the result of incompetence, he asserted; the uptick was evidence that the Biden White House “wants these people to pour into our country.”

  All of it sounded like one his old stump speeches, but Trump rolled out new material for his guests. “You just saw what happened to Joe Biden on his travails in Europe. That wasn’t good,” Trump said of unsubstantiated right-wing rumors that the current president was indisposed during his recent visit to the Vatican. “He went to see the pope. He was, uh … a little late. What the hell happened to him? Does anybody know what happened?”

  As Trump was riffing, someone in the crowd started bellowing, “Let’s go, Brandon!”

  Another crossover of politics and culture, the chant has become a GOP rallying cry. And Trump was delighted.

  “Brandon has become a big star. Nobody ever heard of this guy before. Now he’s one of the biggest stars,” Trump told his supporters. The chant that had started at a NASCAR race, when an Alabama crowd interrupted a live interview of Brandon Brown in the winner’s circle with shouts of “F— Joe Biden” — and the confused interviewer jokingly told the driver that fans were chanting his name — suddenly echoed in the ornate  Mar-a-Largo ballroom. Trump was pleased. He enjoyed the original: “I still like the first phrase better somehow. It’s more accurate.”

  This new meme has become part of the Trump camp’s marketing machinery. Along with the red MAGA hats and branded plastic straws, there are now the “Let’s Go, Brandon!” T-shirts for sale. Without officially running, the former president has amassed a war chest of more than of $102 million. Along with his grassroots army, that pile of cash makes Trump impossible for the GOP establishment to ignore.

  Given that he wins most 2024 nomination straw polls, why wouldn’t he run again? That was the question RCP’s Tom Bevan asked the former president last month. His answer:

  “Well, one reason could be your health. You get a call from your doctor and that’s the end of that. … You never know, there are many things can happen; politics is a crazy world. It is a big commitment of you, your children, your wife and your family.”

  If Trump has any hesitation now, he didn’t express it Friday night. He talked about Trump World, particularly the America First Policy Institute that hosted the night, as part of a larger “movement,” one that transcended him. Those followers, he told the black-tie crowd, “will prevail.”

  “They’re destroying our country,” he said of progressives in summing up his hour-long speech. “We’re gonna make our country greater than ever before.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 20:40

• Farmers Wait Weeks For John Deere Parts As Strikes Paralyze Midwest Factories 
  Farmers Wait Weeks For John Deere Parts As Strikes Paralyze Midwest Factories 

  Multiple John Deere dealerships report part delays for tractors and heavy equipment amid an ongoing strike of more than 10,000 members of the United Auto Workers union at 12 of Deere’s Midwest factories and facilities, according to Bloomberg. 

  Dealerships note that customers face weeks-long delays for tractor and equipment parts that would typically take several days to fulfill. These parts and components are crucial for farmers to keep combine harvesters and other farm equipment humming during harvest season to stay ahead of the wintry season.

  

  Deere’s situation worsened this week when 90% of union workers rejected its offer that would have ended the walkout, which began in mid-October. Workers are encouraged to seek higher pay because of Deere’s strong earnings. 

  “It seems general membership feels emboldened by this current political moment of labor power. They’re pushing things further than the union leadership apparently wants to go,” Victor Chen, a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies labor, told CBS News. “It’s a gamble, but the economic wind is against their backs, given widespread supply chain problems and the current worker shortage.”

  Jon Fisher, a wholesaler of tractors and other machinery in Columbia, South Carolina, said supply chain issues already complicated the picture for procuring parts. Now strikes are a “doubly whammy” where parts are more expensive and harder to find. He said what used to take days now takes three or more weeks. 

  According to CNN Business, the strike has forced the tractor company to explore whether it can source parts from its 59 foreign factories to satisfy domestic demand while striking continues with no end in sight. 

  Deere has considered using replacement workers or strikebreakers, a ploy by companies to counteract strikes, but there are few workers in the labor market. 

  Importing parts from its overseas factories could be the company’s short-term solution to mitigate the disruptions that have forced some farmers to resort to the second-hand market for parts. 

  The part disruption is problematic for farmers racing to finish corn and soybean harvesting ahead of the winter season. Part delays could begin to prevent fall fieldwork in preparation for spring plantings.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 20:20

• CNN Airs "Town Hall" With Sesame Street Puppets Encouraging Kids To Get Vaccinated
  CNN Airs “Town Hall” With Sesame Street Puppets Encouraging Kids To Get Vaccinated

  CNN has stooped to a new low in the hysteria to try and get children vaccinated: it is using puppets from the popular kids show Sesame Street to promote the Covid-19 jabs.

  CNN aired a program called ‘The ABCs of COVID Vaccines: A CNN/Sesame Street Townhall for Families’ this weekend where the puppets showed up to recommend to kids that they get vaccinated. The ‘town hall’ came just hours after the FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine for children aged 5 to 11. 

  Do you or your little ones have questions about the COVID-19 vaccines? Join your favorite furry friends for a special town hall hosted by @DrSanjayGupta and @EricaRHill, airing this Saturday, 11/6 at 8:30am ET on @CNN. pic.twitter.com/VmDojM8q65

  — Sesame Street (@sesamestreet) November 3, 2021

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

  The show tells kids they can have “playdates” with the vaccine when they weren’t able to beforehand.

  Puppets like one named Rosita said things about the vaccine like: “It will help keep me, my friends, my neighbors, my abuela all healthy.”

  Dr. Sanjay Gupta says the more people that get vaccinated, “the better we’re going to be able to stop the spread of Covid and keep everyone healthy.”

  Even Big Bird Tweeted over the weekend that he got the Covid vaccine – a Tweet which President Biden promptly responded to.

  Good on ya, @BigBird. Getting vaccinated is the best way to keep your whole neighborhood safe.

  — President Biden (@POTUS) November 8, 2021

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

  According to Toronto99.com, it marks the 6th time CNN has used the Sesame Street puppets to run a ‘town hall’ about Covid.

  One ex-BBC corporate communication trainer summed up what most people online were thinking, calling the script that the show was following “very concerning”. 

  Ex BBC ITV and corporate comms trainer here. This is very concerning pic.twitter.com/raPiE8OLNi

  — Anna Brees (@BreesAnna) November 6, 2021

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

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 20:00

• David Stockman On The 'GreenMageddon' (And What It Means For You)
  David Stockman On The ‘GreenMageddon’ (And What It Means For You)

  Authored by David Stockman via InternationalMan.com,

  With COP26 now underway, it’s not too soon to start clanging the alarm bells – not about climate catastrophe, of course – but about the stupidest act of the assembled nations since Versailles, when the vindictive WWI victors laid the groundwork for the catastrophes of depression, WWII, the Holocaust, Soviet tyranny, the Cold War and Washington’s destructive global hegemony, all of which followed hard upon the next.

  

  Politicians and their allies in the mainstream media, think tanks, lobbies and Big Business (with its cowardly sleep-walking leaders) are fixing to do nothing less than destroy the prosperity of the world and send global life careening into a modern economic Dark Ages. And worse still, it’s being done in the service of a bogus climate crisis narrative that is thoroughly anti-science and wholly inconsistent with the actual climate and CO2 history of the planet.

  Cutting to the chase, during the past 600 million years, the earth has rarely been as cool as at present, and almost never has it had as low CO2 concentrations as the 420 ppm level that today’s climate howlers decry.

  In fact, according to the careful reconstructions of actual earth scientists who have studied ocean sediments, ice cores and the like, there have been only two periods encompassing about 75 million years (13% of that immensely long 600 million year stretch of time) where temperatures and CO2 concentrations were as low as it present. These were the Late Carboniferous/Early Permian time from 315 to 270 million years ago and the Quaternary Period, which hosted modern man 2.6 million years ago.

  You might say, therefore, that the possibility of a warmer, CO2-richer environment is a case of planetary “been there, done that”. And it is most certainly not a reason to wantonly dismantle and destroy the intricate, low-cost energy system that is the root source of today’s unprecedented prosperity and human escape from poverty and want.

  But that’s hardly the half of it. What actually lies smack in the center of our warmer past is a 220-million-year interval from 250 million years ago through the re-icing of Antarctica about 33 million years ago that was mainly ice-free.

  As shown by the blue line in the chart below, during most of that period (highlighted in the brown panels), temperatures were up to 12C higher than at present, and Mother Earth paid no mind to the fact that she lacked polar ice caps or suitable habitats for yet un-evolved polar bears.

  Global Temperature And Atmospheric CO2 Over Geologic Time

  

  As it happened, during what has been designated as the Mesozoic Age, the planet was busy with another great task, namely, salting away the vast deposits of coal, oil and gas that power the modern economy and allow billions of people to have a living standard enjoyed only by kings just a few centuries ago.

  There is no mystery as to how this serendipitous gift to present-day man happened. In a world largely bereft of ice and snow, the oceans were at vastly higher levels and flooded much of the landmass, which, in turn, was verdant with plant and animal life owing to warmer temperatures and abundant rainfall.

  Stated differently, Mother Nature was harvesting massive amounts of solar energy in the form of carbon-based plant and animal life, which, over the eons of growth and decay, resulted in the build-up of vast sedimentary basins. As the tectonic plates shifted (i.e., the single continent of Pangaea broke up into its modern continental plates) and the climates oscillated, these sedimentary deposits were buried under shallow oceans and, with the passage of time, heat and pressure, were converted into the hydrocarbon deposits that dot the first 50,000 feet (at least) of the earth’s crust.

  In the case of coal, the most favorable conditions for its formation occurred 360 million to 290 million years ago during the Carboniferous (“coal-bearing”) Period. However, lesser amounts continued to form in some parts of the Earth during subsequent times, in particular, the Permian (290 million to 250 million years ago) and throughout the Mesozoic Era (250 million to 66 million years ago).

  Likewise, the formation of petroleum deposits began in warm shallow oceans, where dead organic matter fell to the ocean floors. These zooplankton (animals) and phytoplankton (plants) mixed with inorganic material that entered the oceans by rivers. It was these sediments on the ocean floors that then formed oil sands while buried during eons of heat and pressure. That is to say, the energy embodied in petroleum initially came from the sunlight, which had become trapped in chemical form in dead plankton.

  Moreover, the science behind this isn’t a matter of academic armchair speculation for the simple reason that it has been powerfully validated in the commercial marketplace. That is, trillions of dollars have been deployed in the last century in the search for hydrocarbons, based on immensely complicated petroleum engineering research, theory and geologic models. Oil drillers weren’t throwing darts at a wildcatter’s wall but were coincidentally proving these “facts” of climate history are correct, given that they led to the discovery and extraction of several trillions of BOEs (barrels of oil equivalent).

  Consequently, it is solidly estimated by industry experts that today’s petroleum deposits were roughly formed as follows:

  • About 70% during the Mesozoic age (brown panels, 252 to 66 million years ago) which was marked by a tropical climate, with large amounts of plankton in the oceans;

  • 20% was formed in the dryer, colder Cenozoic age (last 65 million years);

  • 10% were formed in the earlier warmer Paleozoic age (541 to 252 million years ago).

  Indeed, at the end of the day, petroleum engineering is rooted in climate science because it was climate itself that produced those economically valuable deposits.

  And a pretty awesome science it is. After all, billions of dollars have been pushed down the wellbores in up to two miles of ocean waters and 40,000 feet below the surface in what amounts to an amazingly calibrated and targeted search for oil-bearing needles in a geologic haystack.

  For instance, the Cretaceous Period from 145 million to 66 million years ago, which was especially prolific for oil formation, was a period with a relatively warm climate, resulting in high open sea levels and numerous shallow inland seas. These oceans and seas were populated with now-extinct marine reptiles, ammonites and rudists, while dinosaurs continued to dominate on land. And it is knowing this science that permits multi-billion barrel hydrocarbon needles to be found in the earth’s vasty deep.

  Needless to say, the climate warmed sharply during the Cretaceous, rising by about 8 degrees C, and eventually reached a level 10 degrees C warmer than today’s on the eve of the asteroid-driven Great Extinction Event of 66 million years ago. As shown in the graph below, at that point, there were no ice caps at either pole, and Pangaea was still coming apart at the seams–so there was no circulating ocean conveyor system in the infant Atlantic.

  Yet during the Cretaceous, CO2 levels actually went down while temperatures were rising sharply. That’s the very opposite of the Climate Alarmists’ core claim that it is rising CO2 concentrations which are currently forcing global temperatures higher.

  Moreover, we are not talking about a marginal reduction in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Levels actually dropped sharply from about 2,000 ppm to 900 ppm during that 80 million year stretch. This was all good for hydrocarbon formation and today’s endowment of nature’s stored work, but it was also something more.

  To wit, it was yet another proof that planetary climate dynamics are far more complicated and ridden with crosscurrents than the simple-minded doom loops now being used to model future climate states from the current far lower temperature and CO2 levels.

  As it happens, during the periods since the Great Extinction Event 66 million years ago, both vectors have steadily fallen; CO2 levels continued to drop to the 300–400 ppm of modern times, and temperatures dropped another 10 degrees Celsius.

  

  It is surely one of the great ironies of our times that today’s fanatical crusades against fossil fuels are being carried out with not even a nod to the geologic history that contradicts the entire “warming” and CO2 concentration hysteria and made present energy consumption levels and efficiencies possible.

  That is to say, the big, warm and wet one (the Mesozoic) got us here. True global warming is not the current and future folly of mankind; it is the historical enabler of present-day economic blessings. Yet, here we are on the eve of COP26, manically focused on reducing emissions to the levels required to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels.

  Then again, exactly which pre-industrial level might that be?

  We will address the more recent evolution, including the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age in Part 2, but suffice it to say that the chart below reflects broadly accepted geologic science. Still, we are hard-pressed—even with the aid of a magnifying glass—to see any time in the last 66 million years in which the global temperatures weren’t a lot higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius above current levels—even during much of the far-right margin labeled the “Pleistocene Ice Age” of the past 2.6 million years.

  If your brain is not addled by the climate change narrative, the very term rings a resoundingly loud bell. That’s because there have been on the order of 20 distinct “ice ages” and interglacial warming periods during the Pleistocene, the latest of which ended about 18,000 years ago and from which we have been digging out ever since.

  Of course, the climb away from retreating glaciers in Michigan, New England, northern Europe, etc. to warmer, more hospitable climes has not been continuously smooth, but rather a syncopated sequence of advances and retreats. Thus, it is believed that the world got steadily warmer until about 13,000 years ago, which progress was then interrupted by the Younger Dryas, when the climate became much drier and colder and caused the polar ice caps to re-expand and ocean levels to drop by upwards of 100 feet as more of the earth’s fixed quantity of water was reabsorbed back into the ice packs.

  After about 2,000 years of retreat, however, and with no help from the humans who had repaired to cave living during the Younger Dryas, the climate system swiftly regained its warming mojo. About 8,000 years ago, during the subsequent run-up to what the science calls the Holocene Optimum, global temperatures rose by upwards of 3 degrees Celsius on average and up to 10 degrees Celsius in the higher latitudes.

  And it happened quite rapidly. One peer-reviewed study showed that in parts of Greenland, temperatures rose 10°C (18°F) in a single decade. Overall, scientists believe that half of the rebound from the “ice age” conditions of the Younger Dryas may have occurred in barely 15 years. Ice sheets melted, sea levels rose, forests expanded, trees replaced grass and grass replaced desert—all with startling alacrity.

  In contrast to today’s climate models, Mother Nature clearly did not go off the rails in some kind of linear doomsday loop of ever-increasing temperatures and without any hectoring from Greta, either. Actually, Greenland got all frozen up and thawed several more times thereafter.

  Needless to say, the Holocene Optimum 8,000 years ago is not the “preindustrial” baseline from which the Climate Howlers are pointing their phony hockey sticks. In fact, other studies show that, even in the Arctic, it was no picnic time for the polar bears. Among 140 sites across the western Arctic, there is clear evidence for conditions that were warmer than now at 120 sites. At 16 sites for which quantitative estimates have been obtained, local temperatures were on average 1.6 °C higher during the optimum than they are today.

  Say what? Isn’t that the same +1.6 degrees C above current levels that the COP26 folks are threatening to turn off the lights of prosperity to prevent?

  In any event, what did happen was far more beneficent. To wit, the warmer and wetter Holocene Optimum and its aftermath gave rise to the great river civilizations 5,000 years ago, including the Yellow River in China, the Indus River in the Indian subcontinent, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile River civilizations among the most notable.

  Stated differently, that +1.6 degrees C was reflective of the climate-based catalyzing forces that actually made today’s world possible. From the abundances of the river civilizations, there followed the long march of agriculture and the economic surpluses and abundance that enabled cities, literacy, trade and specialization, advancement of tools and technology and modern industry—the latter being the ultimate human escape from a life based on the back muscles of man and his domesticated animals alone.

  At length, the quest for higher and higher industrial productivity spurred the search for ever-cheaper energy, even as intellectual, scientific and technological advances which flowed from these civilizations led to the rise of a fossil fuel-powered economy based on energy companies harvesting the condensed and stored solar BTUs captured by Mother Nature during the planet’s long warmer and wetter past.

  In a word, what powers prosperity is ever more efficient “work,” such as moving a ton of freight by a mile or converting a kilogram of bauxite into alumina or cooking a month’s worth of food. Alas, during the 230 million mainly ice-free years of the Mesozoic, the planet itself accomplished one of the greatest feats of “work” ever known: Namely, the conversion of massive amounts of diffuse solar energy into the high-density BTU packages embodied in coal, oil and gas-based fuels.

  As it happens, when one of the previous “preindustrial” warming eras (the Roman Warming) was coming to an end in the late 4th century AD, St. Jerome admonished the faithful “never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  

  Yet that’s exactly what the assembled nation’s will be doing at COP26.

  *  *  *

  We’ve seen governments institute the strictest controls on people and businesses in history. It’s been a swift elimination of individual freedoms. But this is just the beginning… Most people don’t realize the terrible things that could come next, including negative interest rates, the abolition of cash, and much more. If you want to know how to survive what the central bankers and the Deep State have planned, then you need to see this newly released report from legendary investor Doug Casey and his team. Click here to download it now.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 19:40

• Elliott's "Wolfpack" Plans To Divide Toshiba Into 3 Standalone Companies By 2023
  Elliott’s “Wolfpack” Plans To Divide Toshiba Into 3 Standalone Companies By 2023

  Japan has been quietly receding as it accepts its place as the world’s third-largest economy roughly a decade after China finally threw off the chains of its “century of humiliation” to reclaim China’s place as Asia’s most powerful economic and military force. But despite two decades of tepid growth and inflation, something even “Abenomics” couldn’t fix, a handful of big-name American investors are buying up some of Japan’s most visible companies seeking “deep value” in the land of the rising sun.

  

  In Aug. 2020, Warren Buffett and Berkshire announced that while Berkshire was quietly dumping its holdings in American banks, Buffett was raising stakes above the 5% reporting threshold in Itochu, Marubeni, Mitsubishi Corp., Mitsui and Sumitomo.

  A little more than a month ago, Paul Singer’s Elliott Management joined a “wolfpack” of investors targeting Toshiba with some whispering about the Japanese tech giant being broken up by its new private equity overlords, Elliott and its fellow “wolfpack” members.

  According to Nikkei, Toshiba is set to divide itself into three companies to focus on three primary areas: infrastructure, devices, and semiconductor memory, with the division expected to be completed by 2035.

  More from Nikkei:

  All three are expected to be listed at some point. The move is part of Toshiba’s strategy to strengthen shareholder value by creating independent companies that have different profit structures and growth strategies. Japanese electronics companies, with their wide range of businesses from power stations to home appliances, used to be a growth engine for the country. Toshiba had been a star among those companies and a move like this by such a prominent entity is unprecedented. However, Toshiba has been disadvantaged by a so-called conglomerate discount, as investors tend to value a diversified group of businesses and assets at less than the sum of its parts because of a wider range of risks and a perceived reduction in capital efficiency.

  Toshiba says it hopes to unveil it plan during its upcoming shareholder meeting.

  Toshiba wants to incorporate the new plan into its mid-term management strategy to be unveiled on Friday.

  Toshiba has its fingers in many pies – from the operation of nuclear and thermal power plants to transportation systems, from the manufacture of elevators to the production of air conditioners, hard disc drives and semiconductors.

  These businesses earned 200 billion to 800 billion yen annually and brought in total revenue of 3.5 trillion yen ($30.8 billion) in the fiscal year that ended in March.

  Under the new plan, Toshiba’s power stations business will be operated by an infrastructure company while hard disc drive business will be run by a device company, for example.

  A company owned by Kioxia Holdings, in which Toshiba has a 40% stake, is expected to operate its semiconductor memory business.

  However, it is also possible that its semiconductor business could be integrated into the company that oversees devices.
  Toshiba shareholders are expected to be allocated shares in the new separate entities.

  The big question now: how many more major Japanese corporations will be gobbled up as American dealmakers look further abroad for deals. Buffett and Munger both claimed that there’s still plenty of value to be found. So, will Elliott Management lock in some kind of competition against Berkshire Hathaway to help drive up Japanese valuations?

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 19:20

• MSNBC Goes Full Clowntard: Gaslights That Inflation Is A "Good Thing", Deletes Tweet After Angry Backlash
  MSNBC Goes Full Clowntard: Gaslights That Inflation Is A “Good Thing”, Deletes Tweet After Angry Backlash

  While millions of Americans are suffering from runaway, galloping inflation everywhere (to avoid the dreaded “H” word that made Jack Dorsey every lib’s enemy #1) from the gas pump to the grocery store aisle – which of course affects low-income individuals the most, MSNBC has gone up to bat for the Biden administration, deploying their best pretzel-logician to explain why all this inflation is literally – wait for it – good.

  First, the now-deleted tweet…

  

  Nevermind that in September, a Kroger executive warned in that grocery prices were about to get nasty, and the company will be “passing along higher cost to the customer where it makes sense to do so.” Or that Nestle CFO Francois-Xavier Roger said blistering inflation would likely continue into next year – telling the crowd at a Barclays consumer staples conference: “If we talk of 2022, it is likely that input cost inflation will be higher next year than this year.”

  Or that Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic admitted last month that inflation is not transitory (and even has a swear jar collecting dollar bills for every time some gaslighter utters the word “transitory”).

  Or that agricultural input costs from fertilizer to feed have gone through the roof – thanks to soaring natural gas prices of all things.

  Or labor shortages throughout the supply chain – including US ports and the trucking industry – including those who refuse to take the Covid-19 vaccine.

  Or just read this from Bank of America:

  “Meanwhile on Main Street: cost of living rising…wages rising; food (coffee @ 7-year high, wheat @ 13-year high), energy (BofA forecast $120/bbl Brent next 6 months), shelter (US rents up 9% YoY), wages annualizing 6% past 6 months; US core CPI currently 4.0% YoY, likely to be 5-6% spring’22.”

  Nope. You see, the inflation we’re seeing today is a good thing, according to MSNBC’s James Surowiecki, whose financial background is a Ph.D. in American history and being a writer at The Motley Fool and The New Yorker.

  

  Their rationale: people spent less and saved more during the pandemic (more disposable income), and the stock market (which most American’s still don’t participate in) went apeshit.

  Even though millions of Americans lost their jobs, enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus payments left many of them better off, not worse. And the stock market, after initially falling, boomed.

  Which of course is just propaganda, because as Morgan Stanley explained so simply even MSNBC columnists could understand, the “bottom 80%” of the population retained just a third of the $2 trillion in so-called excess savings. And without jobs, most have already burned through whatever money they had saved up. In other words, the bulk of government handouts ended up – you guessed it – in the hands of the ultra rich who never needed it!

  

  Facts be damned, MSNBC’s propaganda continued: “American consumers are, relatively speaking, flush, and it’s that strong demand for goods and services that is sending prices higher.”

  BUT (and totally couldn’t be the primary reason, could it?), “it’s taking manufacturers and food producers time to increase supply after cutting back production during the pandemic,” and as a result, “When you have high demand, and relatively low supply, prices go up.”

  “The inflation we’re seeing is not, then, some mysterious affliction that’s descended on the economy. It’s the predictable product of the economy’s rapid recovery, and its costs have been offset, to a large degree, by robust wage growth and government policies.”

  Except, when adjusted for inflation, real weekly earnings are negative.

  

  We’ve come full circle on inflation pic.twitter.com/0qwqP1XDxA

  — Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 8, 2021

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

  Meanwhile, even the notorious optimistic Wall Street is starting to tell the truth, with Goldman warning that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

  Not surprisingly, after getting ratio’ed in a furious backlash, MSNBC did the only thing it could and deleted its tweet, as its latest attempt at mass gaslighting propaganda went terribly wrong.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 19:00

• 'Roads Are Racist' – Buttigieg Debates CNN On Deconstructing America's Bigotted Highway System
  ‘Roads Are Racist’ – Buttigieg Debates CNN On Deconstructing America’s Bigotted Highway System

  Not for the first time, Pete Buttigieg is vowing to do something about America’s “racist” interstate highway system. As absurdly silly as it might be for the Biden-tapped US Transportation Secretary to be prioritizing tackling supposedly racist roads, it was perhaps the question itself from a reporter that reached new asinine depths – made all the more laughable given the “seriousness” of the lengthy exchange related to last week’s bipartisan infrastructure bill which passed through Congress.

  This was a real question by CNN (who else?) White House correspondent April Ryan during a Monday press briefing… amid Biden admin plans to “deconstruct the racism” built into America’s infrastructure, she asked: can you give us the construct of how you will deconstruct the racism that was built into roadways?” 

  Reporter @AprilDRyan to @PeteButtigieg: “Can you give us the construct of how you will deconstruct the racism that was built into the roadways? … Can you talk to us about how that could be deconstructed?” pic.twitter.com/FXXEq5tuQL

  — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 8, 2021

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

  Buttigieg responded: “I’m still surprised that had some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a White and a Black neighborhood or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach, or that would have been, in New York was designed too low for it to pass by…” 

  He argued that this makes it “obvious” that “racism” was built into the road system: “…that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices,” he said. “We have everything to gain by acknowledging” these “racist” choices, he explained. The reference was to an April interview wherein Buttigieg claimed: 

  “…there is racism physically built into some of our highways.”

  At this point CNN’s Ryan pressed him on potential efforts to actually “reconstruct communities that this happened to…” She said these roads were “meant to be racist.” She seemed to define this as basically any and all beltways and roadways erected prior to the Civil Rights Act. 

  Meanwhile, an actual Bloomberg headline: US Will Use Infrastructure Bill to Address Racist Highway Design…

  Pete Buttigieg says the U.S. will use about $1 billion from Biden’s infrastructure bill to remedy racial inequities in U.S. highway design https://t.co/nTHt7e9OoW

  — Bloomberg (@business) November 8, 2021

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

  “Please make our roads thinner and less racist”

  This is where our media is today. https://t.co/7T8Hya03Dj

  — Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) November 8, 2021

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

  That’s when Buttigieg actually seemed to agree that some overpasses and roadway infrastructure “might have to come down” – as in some of the “racist” roadwork will get demolished…

  “Sometimes it really is the case that an overpass went in a certain way that is so harmful that it’s gotta come down or maybe be put underground,” the Transportation Secretary said.

  As with prior statements from Buttigieg which present America’s vast network of highways as ‘systematically racist’ – immediate and widespread mockery followed the Monday afternoon exchange.

  The roads are racist.

  We must get rid of roads. https://t.co/nde3mJHn37

  — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 8, 2021

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

  For example, Texas Senator Ted Cruz wrote in response to the exchange, which it should be noted went on for nearly three minutes: “The roads are racist. We must get rid of roads.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 18:40

• Bitcoin Hits New Record High, Surpasses Tesla's Market Cap; Ether Tops $4800
  Bitcoin Hits New Record High, Surpasses Tesla’s Market Cap; Ether Tops $4800

  In early Asian trading, Bitcoin just broke out from its October highs, surging up towards $68,000…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Bitcoin is now bigger than Tesla…

  

  Source

  Not to be outdone, Ethereum also jumped, rallying above $4800 for the first time ever, having traded in a very uniform up-trend channel for 6 weeks…

  

  Today’s market saw gold also rallying and the dollar get dumped. Did Quarles’ resignation, giving Powell potentially four open spots to fill with the most dovish doves in dove-land help support the bid for alternative currencies today?

  *  *  *

  As we detailed earlier, cryptocurrency’s combined market cap has tagged $3 trillion for the first time (roughly the size of the entire UK economy), as top altcoins push into all-time highs.

  

  Source

  Bitcoin is back above $66,000…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  “Bitcoin feels like it’s gonna have a 7 in front of it soon,” Cameron Winklevoss said on Twitter early Monday.

  “Bitcoin flirting with (an) all-time high. Time to go parabolic,” twin Tyler said on Twitter Monday morning.

  Despite Bitcoin’s impressive price gains during the past two years, CoinTelegraph reports, BTC’s market dominance has fallen by 42.8% since tagging a top of 70.8% on Sep. 6, 2019.

  While Bitcoin still beats out its closest rival by more than double in terms of market share with 40.5% or $1.22 trillion compared to Ether’s 18.6% or $560 billion, the combined capitalization of all other cryptocurrencies is 40.9% or $1.24 trillion — evidencing the increasing plurality of the digital asset sector.

  And Ethereum has topped $4700, a new record high…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  “The price of ether is increasing with help from the continuing burning reducing supply and anticipation for eths move to proof of stake in the new year moving ether to a far less energy-intensive system expected to reduce ethereum’s energy usage by 99%,” Freddie Evans, Sales Trader at UK based digital asset broker GlobalBlock said.

  But while the media plays up the speculative narrative, UBS details that on-chain activity has been anything but frenzied. BTC transactions are dominated by hoarders: around 77% of coins is held by those who have only ever sold less than 25% of what they accumulated.

  With old supply not moving and relatively little short-term interest, ‘liveliness’ is well off its peak. Implied vol is less depressed than it was when prices were last making new highs, indicating less euphoria…

  

  …and options open interest has dropped off post October expiry accordingly. Moreover, skew is relatively undemanding at around par, in stark contrast to ETH, which has a pronounced topside bias, particularly in longer dates.

  

  Relatively little was rolled into November, leaving December as the only contract with significant volume (100k, 120k and 200k strikes are dominant, page 6).

  

  Which, as quant analysts Plan B has noted, crypto assets will see a hyperbolic surge early next year, where it will outperform all other assets.

  #bitcoin long term momentum is rising fast pic.twitter.com/5Mp7nE6iVs

  — PlanB (@100trillionUSD) November 7, 2021

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

  “I guess we will be above $100,000, above $135,000 at the end of the year, and then we’ll continue to grow maybe towards to stock-to-flow X (S2FX) model target [at] $288,000 or even above. So I would not be surprised even to see in Q1 in Q2 next year prices of $300,000, $400,000 or $500,000,” says PlanB.

  

  It’s not just bitcoin though, as Bernhard Rzymelka, global markets managing director at Goldman Sachs, anticipates Ether to have hit $8,000 by December 2021 if the token keeps tracking inflation expectations.

  

  Will “Moonvember” start to live up to its name?

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 18:26

• Goldman: Inflation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better
  Goldman: Inflation Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better

  It has not been a good year for Goldman’s economists in their dismal attempts to predict what transitory persistent inflation will do as the year progressed. As the following summary sheet notes, what started off in April as a forecast for 2.77% year-end inflation has singe ballooned into the realization that Headline CPI will be 6.31%. And judging by the 45bps monthly increase in inflation estimates this number will only get higher.

  

  Amusingly, one month ago when it became pretty clear in which direction Goldman’s premeditated “error” is headed and at what pace we wrote “at the rate, Goldman is constantly wrong to the tune of 0.45% every single month, and so by December core PCE should be about 5.5% and the US will have collapsed into the stagflationary abyss.” We still hold to this prediction. 

  And sure enough, while overnight Goldman’s economics team tried to salvage some of its credibility, publishing a note from economists Spencer Hill and David Mericle titled “2022 Inflation Outlook: Getting Worse Before It Gets Better” in which they write that inflation “will eventually revert closer to the Fed’s 2% goal”, they too were forced to admit that “prolonged supply-demand imbalances, strong wage growth, and accelerating rents will leave core PCE inflation and especially core CPI quite high for much of 2022.”

  No wonder mainstream propaganda is now going full-bore with such garbage as “Why the inflation we’re seeing now is a good thing“. We can only hope that most people can see right through this steaming pile of dogshit.

  Why the inflation we’re seeing now is a good thing https://t.co/WwkvaAinEo

  — MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 8, 2021

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

  Anyway, going back to Goldman, the bank now expects core PCE inflation, after hitting a 30 year high driven mainly by purchases of durable goods..

  

  … to rise further from 3.6% at present to 4.4% at end-2021, but to then decline to 2.3% at end-2022 and 2.1% at end-2023 (and when this benign forecast is wrong too, Goldman will just keep hiking its near-term forecasts, while cutting its longer-term inflation outlook, just because). The bank also discussed its expectations for each of the three key drivers of inflation in the current backdrop below:

  • Supply-demand imbalance. The vampy squid expects demand to moderate slightly next year as services spending rebounds and peak fiscal and stay-at-home boosts fade. On the supply side, the bank expects fading headwinds from input shortages (such as semis), labor shortages, and shipping delays to support rebuilding of inventory which should in turn restore competition and bring down elevated prices (for more see “When Will The Supply-Chain Collapse Finally Stabilize: Here Is Goldman’s Take“). Then, as inventory is rebuilt, the goods sector should in theory transition from an unusual environment of scarcity back to an environment of abundance in which competition will bring down elevated prices. Goldman expects this process to start by the second half of next year and to extend into 2023.

  

  • Wage growth. The bank also expect wage growth to slow to just over 4% as labor supply returns, which is stronger than last cycle but after netting out productivity growth, consistent with the Fed’s inflation goal.

  

  • Shelter inflation. This one is troubling: Goldman’s shelter inflation model projects that the further labor market recovery combined with spillover effects from the ongoing boom in house prices will push shelter above 4½% to the highest rate in three decades by end-2022. Farther out in 2023, we expect shelter to moderate to about 4%, still somewhat higher than last cycle (see “Goldman Warns Of “Substantial” Surge In Home Prices, Expects Bigger Housing Bubble Than 2007“).

  

  

  The bottom line according to Goldman: “prolonged supply-demand imbalances, strong wage growth, and accelerating rents will leave core PCE and especially core CPI quite high for much of next year.” But then, “as supply-constrained categories shift from a transitory inflationary boost to a transitory deflationary drag, we expect core PCE inflation to fall from4.4% at end-2021 to 2.3% at end-2022 and 2.1% at end-2023.”

  

  The bank also warns that “the full set of inflation data will look quite hot on a year-on-year basis around the middle of next year when tapering ends. Core PCE inflation is likely to remain above 3%, core CPI inflation above 4%, and trimmed measures should rise as the shelter category accelerates. This hotter inflation dashboard through the end of the taper process is the main reason that we expect a seamless transition from tapering to rate hikes

  As an interesting aside for the CPI vs PCE purists, Goldman notes that “CPI inflation is likely to exceed PCE by more than usual next year, especially in the first half, for three main reasons. First, durable goods have a higher weight in the CPI. Second, shelter inflation also has a much larger weight in the CPI. Third, while the end of pandemic-related support payments is likely to lower government-paid prices included in the PCE health care index, the insurance component that is unique to the CPI health care index is likely to spike over the next year.”

  

   

  In conclusion, all we can say is that this is the same bank that predicted six months ago that the “transitory” inflation scare would blow over by year-end 2021. Not only did that not happen but Goldman was forced to admit what we said back in April – that this inflation is not transitory but quite persistent and will remain so for a long time, so if anyone is skeptical that any of this will take place as predicted, we certainly understand.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 11/08/2021 – 18:20