• We Have Met The Enemy
  We Have Met The Enemy

  Authored by James Howard Kunstler via DailyReckoning.com,

  “When we see the few truth-tellers who are the stars of their organizations jettisoned – Tucker Carlson from Fox News, Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, James O’Keefe from Project Veritas… we must face the fact that there is an organized conspiracy to suppress truth.” 

  – Paul Craig Roberts

  The weird part the news media isn’t telling you about World War Three is that America’s main enemy in this struggle is… the US Government itself!

  America is looking like that crazy person on the street, punching himself in the head. How else do you explain this epic act of national self-destruction?

  The “Joe Biden” regime is “standing up for our democracy” by trying to silence all and any public speech about what it does in the world and how it treats its own citizens. Meanwhile, the entire scaffold of American life crumbles and you are supposed to not notice it’s happening. The funny part is that the Democratic Party thinks this is an election strategy. The funniest part of the funny part is that we bother holding elections at all.

  You understand, “Joe Biden” is only pretending to run for president again, in the same way that he’s only pretended to be president the past two years. Are we to believe, for instance, that the old zombie has become a fervent Maoist? Or that he follows any known structured political philosophy at all, other than cashing checks from favor-seekers from all  over the world?

  “Joe Biden” is pretending to run — no matter how preposterous it seems — because his handlers know that only a titanic pretense of political strength can stave off the reveal of his family’s awesome criminality and the fall of everyone hitched to that broke-down wagon.

  So much for the funny stuff. Things are getting to the point where we stop laughing. It’s only a question now of how the calamity rolls out. There are so many more parts to our national fiasco and they are all out-of-hand in the most disastrous way.

  

  The Ukraine Fiasco

  The Ukraine project is a big part. It was prodigiously stupid to provoke a war at Russia’s door-step and the side we backed, the corrupt Zelensky regime, has already lost. You just don’t know it because the American news business is a joke on the American public. It reports nothing honestly.

  Ukraine is the last in a string of hapless military adventures that has exhausted America’s credibility in the world, especially as regards our military superiority. (Think: Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missile.) There will be many unexpected consequences of the Ukraine screw-up. One will be the crack-up of NATO, which has only been a false front for American military power.

  Germany couldn’t fight its way out of a duffle bag with what it’s got, and it is supposedly Europe’s leading economic power. The sad truth is that it will stop being any kind of power without the cheap Russian natural gas it was running on, and later this year Germany will be in a panic to try and restore its horribly damaged trade relations with Russia to get that natgas.

  Since NATO’s essential mission is to oppose Russia on everything, that will be the end of NATO. Europe will return to what it has always been: a region of squabbling national interests. Let’s hope Europe does not become again the slaughterhouse it was in the last century.

  You Go Broke in Two Ways

  The failure of the Ukraine project could easily stimulate a collapse in Europe’s banking system, which would instantly spread to America’s banking system as obligations dissolve and payments stop.

  The net effect of all that will be the vanishing of a whole lot of capital, including the money in bank accounts, the money invested in stocks and bonds, the money lodged in pension plans, and the money controlled by insurance companies.

  As I’ve mentioned before — it’s worth repeating — you can go broke two ways: you can have no money, or you can have money that’s worthless. We’ve been steadily following the latter path through the “Joe Biden” years, but we’re close to simply not having money at all. Being broke will get Americans’ attention. And the first place they’ll look is the party in power.

  Multiple scandals have finally caught up to “Joe Biden” and are escaping the formidable suppression apparatus erected by the Deep State’s legal department. Attorney General Merrick Garland himself is now directly implicated in obstruction of justice by an IRS whistleblower.

  Election Interference?

  The allegation is that Mr. Garland interfered in the case against Hunter Biden in the Delaware US attorney’s office and lied about it to Congress. On top of that comes a new allegation, with hard documentary evidence (testimony by former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell), that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan arranged, as “Biden” campaign officials in 2020, for fifty-one intel officers, including five retired CIA directors, to sign a phony letter denouncing the Hunter laptop as a Russian disinfo project, knowing it to be untrue. A case can be made for that amounting to election interference.

  All that is fairly fresh news. For many months, it’s been known that Rep. James Comer (R-KY), Chair of the House Oversight Committee, has possession of bank records that show more than a hundred instances of the decanting of millions of dollars from foreign lands into various Biden family accounts.

  Doesn’t look good. Looks impeachable. Will DOJ try to stonewall everything? Yeah, probably.

  A Civil War Strategy

  On top of all that, observers are reporting that more than ten thousand illegal immigrants a day will be crossing into the USA from Mexico in the weeks ahead. Alejandro Mayorkas’s Dept. of Homeland Security and Mr. Blinken’s State Department have made arrangements with international NGOs working through the UN, to systematically conduct these immigrants across the border, furnishing them with pre-cooked phony asylum documents.

  This week, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) introduced legislation to allow unrestricted immigration to any person claiming to be LBGTQ. Co-sponsors of the bill include Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. How is any of this a re-election strategy?

  It’s not. If these matters are not adjudicated, it will be a civil war strategy.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 05/02/2023 – 00:00

• Earthquake Swarms Rattle Southern California
  Earthquake Swarms Rattle Southern California

  An earthquake swarm rattled the Salton Sea region of Southern California and the US-Mexico border over the weekend, with seismic activity reaching up to 4.5 magnitude, as reported by The Sacramento Bee. 

  

  US Geological Survey data shows the first quake struck around 12:08 p.m. local time Saturday in Heber near the US-Mexico border, about 60 miles south of the Salton Sea, measuring 4.1 magnitude. There were dozens of tremors reported after the initial shock. 

  

  Then on Sunday morning, a 4.5 magnitude quake struck 4 miles west-southwest of Niland and just east of the Salton Sea, USGS data showed. Dozens of tremors were reported as well. 

  

  According to a USGS intensity map, the quakes were felt in Palm Desert, Indio, El Centro, and Mexicali. 

  

  Last month, a series of earthquakes shook Pacifica in Northern California. Earlier this year, Los Angeles experienced a quake, and Humboldt County was hit in December. 

  As for the state’s southern region, it remains to be seen whether these swarms signal the potential for larger quakes. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 23:40

• Would The Feds Ban Twitter Under The RESTRICT Act?
  Would The Feds Ban Twitter Under The RESTRICT Act?

  Authored by Ben Weingarten via RealClear Wire,

  Decoupling from Communist China in every strategically significant realm, from the capital markets to defense and pharmaceutical production, and information and communications technology is imperative if we are to counter its hegemonic ambitions and persist as a free and independent nation in something more than name.

  

  Banning TikTok – a ubiquitous social media platform that masquerades as a proliferator of harmless dance videos while doubling as a likely tool of Chinese Communist Party surveillance and data harvesting, and certain tool of its information warfare, under de facto if not de jure CCP control via Beijing-based parent ByteDance – would logically be part of any such decoupling, and manifestly in the U.S. national interest.

  But arguably the most prominent congressional effort putatively aimed at achieving a ban of TikTok, the bipartisan RESTRICT Act, raises concerns that the cure may be worse than the disease – to the extent it even ameliorates it.

  If past is prologue, key language in the bill hiding in plain sight would seem to legitimize the very heretofore lawless targeting of domestic dissent under which Americans have suffered in recent years – undermining the values and principles the bills’ supporters purport to cherish.

  Under the bill, one could easily see the likes of a Twitter, or any other platform or service out of favor with authorities nuked, or at minimum under existential threat.

  The RESTRICT Act broadly authorizes the Secretary of Commerce to “review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries.”

  Among other provisions, it calls on the Secretary to “take action to identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate” any of a number of “undue or unacceptable” national security risks arising from a slew of transactions past or present, including “any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology product or service” to which entities tied to China or several other countries, or subject to their jurisdiction, have an interest.

  The leading co-sponsors of the RESTRICT Act, Virginia Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat, and South Dakota Senator John Thune, a Republican, frame it as “a holistic, rules-based” effort “narrowly tailored to foreign-adversary companies” that is “more likely to withstand judicial scrutiny” than other proposed bills for combatting TikTok – bills that arose in part because the courts stymied President Donald Trump’s efforts to ban the application using existing executive authorities.

  Some critics, including China hawks, contend that despite the broad authority the bill grants the Commerce Secretary, it may not ultimately lead to a TikTok ban. The bill does not explicitly call for the banning of the application. Nor does it mention it, or any other application, by name – rather listing broad categories of software and hardware that could be probed under the bill, linked to several foreign foes, including among them China.

  Others liken the legislation to the Patriot Act, just for the digital age. This is not meant to be a compliment. They argue that the RESTRICT Act threatens civil liberties – namely free speech – in the name of security by granting the government sweeping powers to crush communication platforms under the guise of ill-defined risks with extensive criminal penalties. The vaguer the language, more pervasive the powers, and fewer the checks and balances, such critics surmise, the riper the opportunity for government to overreach.

  While the bill’s backers may argue otherwise, the fears of those left and right who believe the legislation opens the door to censorious mission creep are well-founded. The danger becomes self-evident when one juxtaposes the roots and results of the mass public-private censorship regime imposed upon Americans in recent years, and the bill’s language.

  Under said censorship regime, America’s national security apparatus and public health authorities, often government-linked and/or funded academic and research “counter-disinformation” organizations, and Big Tech have colluded to suppress dissenting views from prevailing Ruling Class orthodoxy on a plethora of contentious issues under the guise of public safety and health.

  “Digital wrongthink generates real world harm,” the regime argues.

  The speech-stiflers have exploited, if not helped fuel a moral panic over mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM) – this notwithstanding that such censorious authorities have often proven the most powerful and pervasive propagators of false or misleading information – which they claim threatens American democracy, to justify their actions.

  The moral panic has its roots in claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election that proved at minimum highly overblown – with national security authorities framing the threat as primarily a foreign one, which put them on ostensibly stronger footing when it came to their surveilling, policing and/or out-sourcing of policing of speech on social media platforms.

  The Capitol riot fanned the flames of the moral panic. Authorities claimed that the greatest threat to the homeland now emanated from, effectively, MAGA terrorists, and that it was dangerous MDM on elections that incited them. Such Wrongthink could incite domestic violent extremists to lash out, including at critical infrastructure, compelling a whole-of-society response.

  Authorities, in truth, had already been targeting domestic Wrongthink, particularly on elections, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential contest – operating on the logic that questions about the election process and results represented, or could represent a threat to critical infrastructure including election infrastructure.

  The shift in focus from foreign adversaries to domestic Wrongthinkers, and on an ever-growing array of issues, including under an elastic definition of infrastructure, can be seen in the evolution of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a key cog in the censorship regime.

  By the time the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing, it only made sense that the censorship regime would expand to include policing speech antithetical to whatever authorities believed it imperative for Americans to believe, on matters from the pandemic’s origin, to masking, and vaccine efficacy.

  The Biden administration would codify the combatting of domestic MDM, and countering “the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories” in a bid to enhance “faith in government” and “American democracy” as a strategic imperative by way of its June 2021 National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

  Bear this background in mind – to say nothing of how government has used the most tortured of legal readings to justify its targeting of Wrongthinkers from ex-presidents, to engaged parents, to the pious, running roughshod over the First Amendment in the process – as we look at the language of the RESTRICT Act.

  The bill empowers authorities to neutralize risks including those stemming from applications that could: have “catastrophic effects on the security or resilience of the critical infrastructure” of the U.S.; “interfer[e] in…the result or reported result of a Federal election;” or pose a risk of “coercive or criminal activities by a foreign adversary that are designed to undermine democratic processes and institutions or steer policy and regulatory decisions in favor of the strategic objectives of a foreign adversary to the detriment of the national security of the United States.”

  Now consider a hypothetical post-RESTRICT Act world.

  Imagine there is a U.S.-based social media platform on which Americans are raising questions about and criticizing the RESTRICT Act. At the same time, foreign adversaries, including the PRC, by way of its mouthpieces, are raising the same objections. Might authorities conclude that the proliferation of such ideas could lead to the bill’s repeal, leaving America open to “catastrophic effects on…critical infrastructure” – as evinced by the adversaries’ similar propaganda, one who seek a return to the infrastructure-threatening status quo?

  Now, imagine that on that same platform, Americans are posting memes instructing people to vote for U.S. presidential candidates by texting fictitious phone numbers, and that hundreds or even several thousand people might be messaging accordingly. Might authorities conclude the platform is being used to “interfer[e] in…the result…of a Federal election?”

  Lastly, imagine Americans are also using this hypothetical platform to raise questions about and criticize America’s continued involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Russian mouthpieces are leveling similar arguments. Russians have been accused of engaging in criminal influence efforts using social media platforms before, including those impacting our politics. Might authorities conclude the platform poses a risk of enabling “criminal activities by a foreign adversary…designed to…steer policy in favor of the strategic objectives of a foreign adversary” by getting Americans to exert political pressure on their leaders to curtail American support for the war?

  “But,” one might ask, “why would such a platform fall under the RESTRICT Act if it’s U.S.-based?”

  Well, recall that the bill covers any of a slew of transactions in which a foreign adversary or affiliated entity is involved, or to which it is subject to the jurisdiction, “including through an interest in a contract for the provision of the technology or service” in question.

  Might the company be targeted on grounds, however tenuous, of having taken a small investment from a person or entity who can be linked to an adversary government, or from a larger fund with ties to an adversary government, or for having used a subcontractor otherwise affiliated in some form or fashion with, or operating under the jurisdiction of an adversary government?

  The hypothetical scenario we have conjured up is actually quite real. On Twitter you will find a whole raft of content critical of the RESTRICT Act. On Twitter Douglass Mackey posted the kind of meme described – one for which he was convicted of a federal crime and faces up to 10 years in prison. On Twitter, you will find many critics of U.S. involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War – a platform that Russians used to allegedly “commit federal crimes while seeking to interfere in the United States political system” during the 2016 election.

  What of Twitter’s ties to foreign adversaries? Well, among the co-investors in Elon Musk’s take private of Twitter is cryptocurrency exchange Binance, a company initially based in China, which put up $500 million in equity. Who knows, perhaps there are other links that could be found between Twitter and China, for example via a contractor or subcontractor with which it works or has worked. And this is to say nothing of Musks’s more significant exposure to China by way of Tesla.

  The Biden administration, which has seemingly had Musk in its sights since he became interested in purchasing Twitter, and certainly post-acquisition and the release of the Twitter Files, reportedly will not be investigating Musk’s Twitter purchase under existing authorities via the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Might that change under a RESTRICT Act that the White House has championed – this despite its disavowal of the idea that it wishes to decouple from China, and Democrats’ embrace of TikTok as a platform?

  If this scenario sounds far-fetched, you are not being nearly imaginative nor cynical enough in this era of sophistry and illiberalism.

  America should ban TikTok, but the means must not do more damage than the ends do good.

  The prudent and judicious move would be for Congress to take a second look at any of several more tightly-written and straightforward bills aimed squarely at combatting TikTok – that is, if it is really serious about combatting the CCP, rather than granting authorities power-hungry presidents might use to emulate the CCP in silencing domestic opponents.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 23:20

• Vice Preparing To File For Bankruptcy
  Vice Preparing To File For Bankruptcy

  First BuzzFeed, now Vice: one by one all the woke “media giants” of the new normal are going broke.

  Just two weeks after we reported that BuzzFeed News – which was instrumental in spreading fake news to get us suspended on twitter – was shuttering it not filing for bankruptcy just yet, today the NYT reports that the woke left’s disruptor darling and former “multi-billion media empire” Vice, which once upon a time charmed giants like Disney and Fox into investing hundreds of millions before its stunning crash-landing, is preparing to file for bankruptcy.

  According to the NYT, the filing could come in the coming weeks, according to three people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to discuss the potential bankruptcy on the record.

  

  The company has been looking for a buyer, and still might find one, to avoid declaring bankruptcy. More than five companies have expressed interest in acquiring Vice, according to a person briefed on the discussions. The chances of that, however, are growing increasingly slim, said one of the people with knowledge of the potential bankruptcy.

  A Vice bankruptcy filing would be a fitting ending to the tumultuous story of Vice, a new-media Phoenix that rose out of the ashes with its iconoclastic, counterculture facade, then quickly sought to supplant the media establishment before persuading it to invest hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2017, after a funding round from the private-equity firm TPG, Vice was worth $5.7 billion. Around this time, the company realized that for the money to keep flowing, it would need to curb its rebellious ways and quickly turned woke, losing most of its fans in the process.

  As a result, the company is now worth a fraction of the money it managed to squeeze out of existing media giants, and is now facing bankruptcy.

  When Vice files, the company’s largest debtholder, hegde fund Fortress, will likely end up controlling the company. Vice could continue operating normally and run an auction to sell the company over a 45-day period, with Fortress in pole position as the most likely acquirer.

  Unlike Vice’s other investors, which have included Disney and Fox, Fortress holds senior debt, which means it gets paid out first in the event of a sale. Disney and Fox, which have already written down their investments to zero, are getting wiped out.

  “Vice Media Group has been engaged in a comprehensive evaluation of strategic alternatives and planning,” Vice said in a statement on Monday. “The company, its board and stakeholders continue to be focused on finding the best path for the company.”

  Vice began as a punk magazine in Montreal more than two decades ago. Over the years, it blossomed into a global media company with a movie studio, an ad agency, a glossy show on HBO and bureaus in far-flung world capitals. Disney, after investing hundreds of millions in Vice, explored buying the company in 2015 for more than $3 billion.

  The deal never materialized, but the interest from Disney forced a comprehensive culture revolution within Vice, which lost its rebellious appeal and instead scrambled to appeal to woke snowflakes – the group that represents the core decision-making process at Disney – and not surprisingly, it lost virtually all of its readers and viewers in the process.

  After it failed to convince a strategic partner to acquire it, Vice eventually succumbed to a bearish market for digital media companies. The company has been trying for years to turn a profit but has consistently failed to do so, losing money and repeatedly laying off employees.

  Last week, we reported that Vice was closing its Vice World News, a global reporting initiative that covered world conflict and human-rights abuses. The closure of the world news operation was a blow to employees who saw the division’s aggressive coverage as in keeping with Vice’s roots in gonzo journalism, established when co-founder Shane Smith would report from risky destinations like North Korea.

  As it has sought a buyer in recent months, Vice has dealt with turnover in its leadership ranks. Nancy Dubuc, the company’s former chief executive, left this year after nearly five years at the company. Jesse Angelo, the company’s global president of news and entertainment, also left the company.

  Smith founded Vice with Suroosh Alvi and Gavin McInnes in 1994 as a magazine. He sold out his core vision of Vice in the coming years just so he could buy (and then sell) the legendary Beverly Hills Cop mansion for $50 million. In 2008, McInnes left Vice in 2008 and went on to found the Proud Boys. He has yet to sell out.

  News of Vice’s coming bankruptcy reached as far away as El Salvador, whose president Nayib Bukele had a laconic comment.

  It seems like Soros’ money also rans out 😂 https://t.co/SAcjuLKsZl

  — Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) May 2, 2023

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 23:00

• 2024 Presidential Candidate Wants To 'Shut Down The FBI,' Replace It
  2024 Presidential Candidate Wants To ‘Shut Down The FBI,’ Replace It

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

  Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said he would attempt to shut down the FBI and replace it with another entity if he’s elected president.

  

  During an interview with “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Ramaswamy, a businessman, suggested that he does not want to “defund the FBI” after host Chuck Todd suggested it.

  “I didn’t say defund the FBI. I said shut down the FBI and replace it with something new,” said Ramaswamy on Sunday. “I think it’s a new apparatus built from scratch that actually respects the law instead of making it up.”

  “So you’re going to replace the old FBI with a new FBI?” Todd asked in response. “With a new institution built from scratch to carry out federal law enforcement,” Ramaswamy said, “because the existing FBI, the people who work there, have worked there for so long they’ll be getting in their own way.”

  “I personally believe someone who’s running to actually run the executive branch of the government, when you have a bureaucracy whose culture becomes so ossified, every once in a while, you need to turn it over,” he told “Meet the Press.” He added: “We need federal law enforcement, but that institution has, in a bipartisan way, become so, I think ossified in its own norms, in its own corruption, that we need to rebuild it from scratch and have something new take its place.”

  When Todd suggested that Ramaswamy wants to “replace the old FBI with a new FBI,” Ramaswamy stated: “The problem is there’s people who have worked there for decades.”

  

  “What I say is, if I’m the U.S. president and I can’t work for the federal government for more than eight years—which I think is a good thing—then none of those bureaucrats reporting in to me should either,” he added. “There’s people who have worked there for decades,” he said.

  Republicans in recent years have become increasingly critical of the FBI, accusing the agency of targeting the political opponents of Democrats while not investigating actual criminals. Former President Donald Trump has perhaps been the chief critic of both the FBI and the Department of Justice and said both agencies have engaged in a longstanding witch hunt to politically wound him.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 22:40

• Biden "Punishes Responsibility" As New Mortgage Equity Program Begins
  Biden “Punishes Responsibility” As New Mortgage Equity Program Begins

  Starting today, the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s mortgage pricing adjustments will increase fees for borrowers with high credit scores while reducing costs for those with subpar credit scores. This upside-down policy is blatantly socialism, and one can’t help but wonder if anyone in the Biden administration learned anything from the subprime mortgage meltdown that occurred more than a decade ago. 

  As part of the Biden administration’s plan to make housing affordable for everyone (we’ve seen this story before), upfront fees for loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be adjusted based on the borrower’s credit score. Borrowers with high credit scores will pay more in fees, while those with lower credit scores will pay less. 

  The Wall Street Journal cited data from Evercore ISI that shows borrowers with credit scores between 720-759 who make around 15-20% down payments will see loan-level pricing adjustment (LLPA) costs rise by .750%. Inversely, under the new adjustments, risky borrowers with a credit score below 639 and who put down only 5% of the value of their home will only have to pay 1.750%, compared with 3.750% under old rules. 

  

  Backlash over LLPA changes prompted the FHFA to publish a statement last week, calling such concerns “a fundamental misunderstanding.” The Biden administration ensures the new changes are meant to help those with poor credit scores obtain homes amid the worst housing affordability in a generation. 

  According to the FHFA, the new adjustments will redistribute funds to reduce the interest rate costs paid by risky borrowers. This sounds like socializing home buying to us. 

  Even more alarming is data from the American Enterprise Institute found that default rates of Fannie/Freddie owner-occupied 30-year fixed-rate purchase loans acquired in 2006-2007 were between 39.3% and 56.2% for borrowers with credit scores between 620 and 639 and less than 4% down payments. Those with credit scores between 720 and 769 and 20% down payments had default rates between 4.2% and 8.8%. 

  The Biden administration is subsidizing irresponsibility, rewarding failure, and discriminating against people with high credit scores.

  Meanwhile, 27 states revolted against Biden’s mortgage redistribution rule to subsidize risky borrowers… 

  BREAKING: 34 state financial officers from 27 states have signed-on to a letter to the Biden Administration demanding that they end their new mortgage equity program, which forces buyers with good credit to pay higher rates to subsidize loans for riskier borrowers. pic.twitter.com/P8RHbj0zzf

  — Will Hild (@WillHild) May 1, 2023

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  Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) blasted Biden. 

  .@SenatorTimScott slams new federal mortgage rules punishing Americans with good credit scores and urges voters to ‘reverse the curse’ of the Biden administration.https://t.co/15mnVVO7F8 pic.twitter.com/8gXOuQANcq

  — Fox News (@FoxNews) May 1, 2023

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  “Punishing responsibility—that’s the Biden way,” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). 

  Biden’s mortgage scheme will cost homeowners an extra ~$30k for having a high credit score.

  Punishing responsibility—that’s the Biden way.

  — Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) May 1, 2023

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  “While the changes may not be as bad as some headlines suggest, it still seems illogical to essentially penalize fiscally responsible borrowers in an effort to assist less qualified borrowers,” Federal Savings Bank loan officer Lewis Sogge told us. 

  There’s no logic here, just progressive bureaucrats enacting policies that may ultimately lead to another future crisis. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 22:20

• America's Empire Is Bankrupt
  America’s Empire Is Bankrupt

  Authored by John Michael Greer via UnHerd.com, (emphasis ours)

  The dollar is finally being dethroned…

  

  Let’s start with the basics. Roughly 5% of the human race currently live in the United States of America. That very small fraction of humanity, until quite recently, enjoyed about a third of the world’s energy resources and manufactured products and about a quarter of its raw materials. This didn’t happen because nobody else wanted these things, or because the US manufactured and sold something so enticing that the rest of the world eagerly handed over its wealth in exchange. It happened because, as the dominant nation, the US imposed unbalanced patterns of exchange on the rest of the world, and these funnelled a disproportionate share of the planet’s wealth to itself.

  There’s nothing new about this sort of arrangement. In its day, the British Empire controlled an even larger share of the planet’s wealth, and the Spanish Empire played a comparable role further back. Before then, there were other empires, though limits to transport technologies meant that their reach wasn’t as large. Nor, by the way, was any of this an invention of people with light-coloured skin. Mighty empires flourished in Asia and Africa when the peoples of Europe lived in thatched-roofed mud huts. Empires rise whenever a nation becomes powerful enough to dominate other nations and drain them of wealth. They’ve thrived as far back as records go and they’ll doubtless thrive for as long as human civilisations exist.

  America’s empire came into being in the wake of the collapse of the British Empire, during the fratricidal European wars of the early 20th century. Throughout those bitter years, the role of global hegemon was up for grabs, and by 1930 or so it was pretty clear that Germany, the Soviet Union or the US would end up taking the prize. In the usual way, two contenders joined forces to squeeze out the third, and then the victors went at each other, carving out competing spheres of influence until one collapsed. When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the US emerged as the last empire standing.

  Francis Fukuyama insisted in a 1989 essay that having won the top slot, the US was destined to stay there forever. He was, of course, wrong, but then he was a Hegelian and couldn’t help it. (If a follower of Hegel tells you the sky is blue, go look.) The ascendancy of one empire guarantees that other aspirants for the same status will begin sharpening their knives. They’ll get to use them, too, because empires invariably wreck themselves: over time, the economic and social consequences of empire destroy the conditions that make empire possible. That can happen quickly or slowly, depending on the mechanism that each empire uses to extract wealth from its subject nations.

  The mechanism the US used for this latter purpose was ingenious but even more short-term than most. In simple terms, the US imposed a series of arrangements on most other nations that guaranteed the lion’s share of international trade would use US dollars as the medium of exchange, and saw to it that an ever-expanding share of world economic activity required international trade. (That’s what all that gabble about “globalisation” meant in practice.) This allowed the US government to manufacture dollars out of thin air by way of gargantuan budget deficits, so that US interests could use those dollars to buy up vast amounts of the world’s wealth. Since the excess dollars got scooped up by overseas central banks and business firms, which needed them for their own foreign trade, inflation stayed under control while the wealthy classes in the US profited mightily.

  The problem with this scheme is the same difficulty faced by all Ponzi schemes, which is that, sooner or later, you run out of suckers to draw in. This happened not long after the turn of the millennium, and along with other factors — notably the peaking of global conventional petroleum production — it led to the financial crisis of 2008-2010. Since 2010 the US has been lurching from one crisis to another. This is not accidental. The wealth pump that kept the US at the top of the global pyramid has been sputtering as a growing number of nations have found ways to keep a larger share of their own wealth by expanding their domestic markets and raising the kind of trade barriers the US used before 1945 to build its own economy.

  The one question left is how soon the pump will start to fail altogether.

  When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US and its allies responded not with military force but with punitive economic sanctions, which were expected to cripple the Russian economy and force Russia to its knees. Apparently, nobody in Washington considered the possibility that other nations with an interest in undercutting the US empire might have something to say about that. Of course, that’s what happened. China, which has the largest economy on Earth in purchasing-power terms, extended a middle finger in the direction of Washington and upped its imports of Russian oil, gas, grain and other products. So did India, currently the third-largest economy on Earth in the same terms; as did more than 100 other countries.

  Then there’s Iran, which most Americans are impressively stupid about. Iran is the 17th largest nation in the world, more than twice the size of Texas and even more richly stocked with oil and natural gas. It’s also a booming industrial power. It has a thriving automobile industry, for example, and builds and launches its own orbital satellites. It’s been dealing with severe US sanctions since not long after the Shah fell in 1978, so it’s a safe bet that the Iranian government and industrial sector know every imaginable trick for getting around those sanctions.

  Right after the start of the Ukraine war, Russia and Iran suddenly started inking trade deals to Iran’s great benefit. Clearly, one part of the quid pro quo was that the Iranians passed on their hard-earned knowledge about how to dodge sanctions to an attentive audience of Russian officials. With a little help from China, India and most of the rest of humanity, the total failure of the sanctions followed in short order. Today, the sanctions are hurting the US and Europe, not Russia, but the US leadership has wedged itself into a position from which it can’t back down. This may go a long way towards explaining why the Russian campaign in Ukraine has been so leisurely. The Russians have no reason to hurry. They know that time is not on the side of the US.

  For many decades now, the threat of being cut out of international trade by US sanctions was the big stick Washington used to threaten unruly nations that weren’t small enough for a US invasion or fragile enough for a CIA-backed regime-change operation. Over the last year, that big stick turned out to be made of balsa wood and snapped off in Joe Biden’s hand. As a result, all over the world, nations that thought they had no choice but to use dollars in their foreign trade are switching over to their own currencies, or to the currencies of rising powers. The US dollar’s day as the global medium of exchange is thus ending.

  It’s been interesting to watch economic pundits reacting to this. As you might expect, quite a few of them simply deny that it’s happening — after all, economic statistics from previous years don’t show it yet, Some others have pointed out that no other currency is ready to take on the dollar’s role; this is true, but irrelevant. When the British pound lost a similar role in the early years of the Great Depression, no other currency was ready to take on its role either. It wasn’t until 1970 or so that the US dollar finished settling into place as the currency of global trade. In the interval, international trade lurched along awkwardly using whatever currencies or commodity swaps the trading partners could settle on: that is to say, the same situation that’s taking shape around us in the free-for-all of global trade that will define the post-dollar era.

  One of the interesting consequences of the shift now under way is a reversion to the mean of global wealth distribution. Until the era of European global empire, the economic heart of the world was in east and south Asia. India and China were the richest countries on the planet, and a glittering necklace of other wealthy states from Iran to Japan filled in the picture. To this day, most of the human population is found in the same part of the world. The great age of European conquest temporarily diverted much of that wealth to Europe, impoverishing Asia in the process. That condition began to break down with the collapse of European colonial empires in the decade following the Second World War, but some of the same arrangements were propped up by the US thereafter. Now those are coming apart, and Asia is rising. By next year, four of the five largest economies on the planet in terms of purchasing power parity will be Asian. The fifth is the US, and it may not be in that list for much longer.

  In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off, and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact of their dissolution will be severe.

  In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.

  We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate public and private life, and the vast majority of the population impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.

  The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services. That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter, foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be undone.

  The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government, corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes. Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air. It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same degree.

  The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.

  Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers. Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next. We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.

  The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us.

  Those are the only two options our collective imagination can process these days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.

  What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the income streams that supported them disappear.

  This is not going to be a fast process. The US dollar is losing its place as the universal medium of foreign trade, but it will still be used by some countries for years to come. The unravelling of the arrangements that direct unearned wealth to the US will go a little faster, but that will still take time. The collapse of the cubicle class and the gutting of the suburbs will unfold over decades. That’s the way changes of this kind play out.

  As for what people can do in response this late in the game, I refer to a post I made on The Archdruid Report in 2012 titled “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush”. In that post I pointed out that the unravelling of the American economy, and the broader project of industrial civilisation, was picking up speed around us, and those who wanted to get ready for it needed to start preparing soon by cutting their expenses, getting out of debt, and picking up the skills needed to produce goods and services for people rather than the corporate machine. I’m glad to say that some people did these things, but a great many others rolled their eyes, or made earnest resolutions to do something as soon as things were more convenient, which they never were.

  Over the years that followed I repeated that warning and then moved on to other themes, since there really wasn’t much point to harping on about the approaching mess when the time to act had slipped away. Those who made preparations in time will weather the approaching mess as well as anyone can. Those who didn’t? The rush is here. I’m sorry to say that whatever you try, it’s likely that there’ll be plenty of other frantic people trying to do the same thing. You might still get lucky, but it’s going to be a hard row to hoe.

  Mind you, I expect some people to take a different tack. In the months before a prediction of mine comes true, I reliably field a flurry of comments insisting that I’m too rigid and dogmatic in my views about the future, that I need to be more open-minded about alternative possibilities, that wonderful futures are still in reach, and so on. I got that in 2008 just before the real estate bubble started to go bust, as I’d predicted, and I also got it in 2010 just before the price of oil peaked and started to slide, as I’d also predicted, taking the peak oil movement with it. I’ve started to field the same sort of criticism once again.

  We are dancing on the brink of a long slippery slope into an unwelcome new reality. I’d encourage readers in America and its close allies to brace themselves for a couple of decades of wrenching economic, social, and political turmoil. Those elsewhere will have an easier time of it, but it’s still going to be a wild ride before the rubble stops bouncing, and new social, economic, and political arrangements get patched together out of the wreckage.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 22:00

• IBM To Stop Hiring For Roles That Can Be Replaced By AI; Nearly 8,000 Workers To Be Replaced By Automation
  IBM To Stop Hiring For Roles That Can Be Replaced By AI; Nearly 8,000 Workers To Be Replaced By Automation

  One month ago, to much dismay and widespread denial, Goldman predicted that AI could lead to some 300 million layoffs among highly paid, non-menial workers in the US and Europe. As Goldman chief economist Jan Hatzius put it, “using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work. Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation” as up to “two thirds of occupations could be partially automated by AI.”

  

  Yet while Goldman’s forecast was met with a emotions ranging from incredulity to outright mockery, it may not have been too far off the mark.

  Consider that just last week, Dropbox said it would lay off 16% of the company, some 500 employees as the company sought to build out its AI division.  In a memo to employees, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said that “in an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we’ll need even more.”

  The changes we’re announcing today, while painful, are necessary for our future,” Houston notes. “I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era, just as we were at the forefront of the shift to mobile and the cloud. We’ll need all hands on deck as machine intelligence gives us the tools to reimagine our existing businesses and invent new ones.”

  But while Dropbox’s layoffs were lateral, and meant to open up space for more AI linked hires, in the case of IBM, it is AI itself that is making workers redundant.

  As Bloomberg reports, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company expects to pause hiring for roles it thinks could be replaced with artificial intelligence in the coming years. As a result, hiring in back-office functions — such as human resources — will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said in an interview. These non-customer-facing roles amount to roughly 26,000 workers, Krishna said. “I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.” That would mean roughly 7,800 jobs lost.

  Part of any reduction would include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, an IBM spokesperson said.

  Krishna’s plan marks one of the largest workforce strategies announced in response to the rapidly advancing technology; it certainly won’t be the last as virtually all companies follow in IBM’s footsteps and layoffs tens if not hundreds of millions of workers in the coming years.

  Mundane tasks such as providing employment verification letters or moving employees between departments will likely be fully automated, Krishna said. And while some HR functions, such as evaluating workforce composition and productivity, probably won’t be replaced over the next decade, it is only a matter of time before these roles are also replaced by AI.

  IBM currently employs about 260,000 workers and continues to hire for software development and customer-facing roles. Finding talent is easier today than a year ago, Krishna said. The company announced job cuts earlier this year, which may amount to about 5,000 workers once completed. Still, Krishna said IBM has added to its workforce overall, bringing on about 7,000 people in the first quarter.

  The Armonk, New York-based IBM beat profit estimates in its most recent quarter due to expense management, including the earlier-announced job cuts. In the past IBM had managed to manipulate its stock higher thanks to billions in stock buybacks (at much higher prices). But once its debt load grew too big, the buyback game ended, Warren Buffett sold his shares, and the stock price has languished for over half a decade. And since the company’s revenue is stagnant at best, its only hope is to drastically cut overhead.

  Enter AI: new “productivity and efficiency” steps – read replacing workers with algos – are expected to drive $2 billion a year in savings by the end of 2024, Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh said on the day of earnings.

  Helping the company’s imminent transition to an AI-staffed corporation will be the coming recession. Until late 2022, Krishna said he believed the US could avoid a recession. Now, he sees the potential for a “shallow and short” recession toward the end of this year, although it remains unclear just how once can determine that a recession will be “shallow and short”.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 21:40

• Colorado: 27 Democrats Vote Against Making Flashing Kids A Felony
  Colorado: 27 Democrats Vote Against Making Flashing Kids A Felony

  Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

  More than two dozen Democrats in the state of Colorado have voted against legislation that would make it a felony for anyone to indecently expose themselves to children, reasoning that it could lead to the banning of drag shows.

  

  Currently, in Colorado it is only considered a class 1 misdemeanor if a person indecently exposes themselves in the view of a child, if it is the first offence.

  Speaking about the legislation to make it a class 6 felony, one of the Democratic Representatives, Leslie Herod said, “These types of laws have been used to ban drag shows, to target individuals who use the restroom of the sex that they identify with—a public restroom—to charge them with felony charges.”

  “I am very concerned about the attacks against the transgender community that are happening across the country,” she added.

  🚨🚨 27 DEMOCRATS VOTE AGAINST MAKING INDECENT EXPOSURE TO MINORS A CLASS 6 FELONY!

  A Democrat attacked the bill for “targeting” the transgender community in her dissent. #copolitics #coleg

  📜BILL: https://t.co/Lgle6vX25U

  🎧Listen for yourself: pic.twitter.com/Tq9wiryLMu

  — Colorado House Republicans (@COHouseGOP) April 29, 2023

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

  HAPPENING TODAY‼️

  HOUSE DEMOCRATS filibustered for nearly three hours today AGAINST felonizing #IndecentExposure to minors.

  Rep. Mary Young (D) argued AGAINST jailing perpetrators — incase they might be mentally impaired. HB23-1135 #CoPolitics pic.twitter.com/Uki3xQhlq9

  — Roger D. Hudson (@RogerHudsonCO) April 28, 2023

  pic.twitter.com/03AditcSyL

  — Colorado House Republicans (@COHouseGOP) April 29, 2023

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

  First of all, what attacks?

  Secondly, this has nothing to do with transgenders, it’s a bill to make flashing at kids a felony.

  Despite the Democratic opposition, the bill reportedly did pass on Saturday, but with amendments to not apply the law if the exposure is in a public place with other adults present.

  It’s still ok for drag queens to get their junk out in front of kids then.

  Drag Queen Flashes Children During Story Hour

  So this is an admission that drag shows may involve indecent exposure to minors. How else could it be seen as targeting them?

  — Jolene Campbell (@JoleneCampbel65) April 29, 2023

  If a man flashes my daughter while she’s walking home from school, it should not be a felony because we need to protect trans people?

  Once again, trans ideology trumps girls’ safety.

  — Eyes Wide (@ShannaDarkness) April 29, 2023

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

  So it’s ok to show your junk to a minor? Sick democrats, nothing justifies this, nothing.

  — Pmtrader (@Pmmoontrader) April 29, 2023

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

  GROOMERS!

  — Nat Nat (@media20148) April 30, 2023

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

  Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/

  ALERT! In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch.

  We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here.

  Support our sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown.

  Also, we urgently need your financial support here.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 21:20

• Prepare For "Major Accidents" In The Market; Morose Milken-ites Warn "We're Going To See Losses"
  Prepare For “Major Accidents” In The Market; Morose Milken-ites Warn “We’re Going To See Losses”

  Bad loans, worse banks, but “it’s not nearly as bad as it was in 2008” if you believe Charlie Munger.

  

  Having admitted over the weekend in an interview with The FT that American banks are “full of” what he said were “bad loans”, thanks to the plunge in commercial property prices, the 99-year-old warned ominously that “trouble happens to banking just like trouble happens everywhere else. In the good times you get into bad habits… When bad times come they lose too much.”

  Quite notably, while the Biden administration is deftly attempting to paint SVB, SI, and now FRC as “outliers” and “unique”, the latter is far from ‘unique’ and that is a problem as Munger later noted that “it’s not that damned easy to run a bank intelligently, there are a lot of temptations to do the wrong thing.”

  Karine Jean-Pierre says they are “very confident” no more banks will fail — despite the second-, third-, and fourth-largest bank failures in history happening during the Biden presidency. pic.twitter.com/KnAXVuMaOK

  — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 1, 2023

  More specifically, their loan books are now plagued with CRE loans (a topic we warned about extensively – before the mainstream media picked up the torch).

  “A lot of real estate isn’t so good any more,” Munger said.

  “We have a lot of troubled office buildings, a lot of troubled shopping centres, a lot of troubled other properties. There’s a lot of agony out there.”

  

  And while the grumpy old man has slammed bitcoin (we don’t blame him for not understanding that), he is certainly far more versed in the details of commercial property loans and banking, which is why we take him seriously and at today’s Milken Conference, Munger’s message was echoed loud and clear by investment leaders from Apollo’s Marc Rowan to Cain’s Jonathan Goldstein and Citi CEO Jane Fraser.

  “It’s a bad day to be an office owner in San Francisco and Chicago,” Marc Rowan, co-founder and chief executive officer of Apollo, said Monday.

  “We are going to see losses,” he said, adding that the stresses will be concentrated and not systemic.

  “Every piece of real estate, everywhere in the world, that was purchased pre-the run up in interest rates, as a result of the change in interest rates, is now worth less,” Rowan continued.

  “It does not mean it won’t come back. It does not mean it won’t ultimately be a good investment, but in the short term, we have significant dislocation.”

  David Steinbach, global chief investment officer at real estate investment firm Hines, said Monday during one panel that commodity office buildings – older office buildings that lack amenities – would face particular pain, with Amherst CEO Sean Dobson pointing to office towers in central business districts as a particular rough spot for the industry.

  “I do think we’ve got a period of pain and I don’t think we’ve yet reached the bottom of that,” Cain’s Goldstein said.

  “But there will be opportunity that comes out when people do begin to sense that the bottom’s been reached.”

  As Bloomberg reports, Fraser said she’s most worried about real estate with debt that’s been packaged into lower-rated commercial mortgage-backed securities.

  “It’s the return-to-office phenomenon that’s driving it,” Fraser said Monday during a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California.

  “We’re not talking about the local doctors’ office, we’re not talking about all of the office space either.”

  Finally, TCW Group President and CEO Katie Koch warned that cracks are starting to show in the private credit market and that investors should prepare for “major accidents” in the red-hot sector over the next 12 to 18 months. 

  “We have had five years where ‘diligent light’ became a term,” Koch said.

  “That is not going to be fun over the next five years if you arrived at it from that perspective.”

  Koch said investors should be “very underweight” regional banks.

  “The globally systemically important banks are a good place to be invested,” Koch said.

  “Regional banks is an area we are concerned about because of deposit flight, and also they have the highest exposure to commercial real estate, which is an area we are concerned about.”

  Marc Cowan had perhaps the most important comment though for ‘average joe’ and his 401(k), warning that “equity has adjusted somewhat, but not nearly as much as credit.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 21:00

• Joe Biden Is Losing Young Climate Voters
  Joe Biden Is Losing Young Climate Voters

  Authored by Rick Whitbeck via RealClear Wire,

  Now that President Biden has made his 2024 run official, he has plenty of work to do if he hopes to shore up his lagging support among key constituencies. According to a recent NBC News survey, a full 70 percent of Americans do not want the President to run again. One demographic to watch is younger voters, who backed Biden by a wide 61-36 margin in 2020. 

  

  Younger Americans are exceptionally aggressive and vocal on climate policies. Nearly two-thirds (62%), support phasing out fossil fuels entirely, said Alec Tyson, an associate director of research at Pew Research Center.  According to a recent Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics poll, an amazing half of those polled prefer the government do more to curb climate change, even if U.S. economic growth is damaged in the process.

  As friendly as Biden has been to the eco-left, and outright hostile to our domestic, traditional energy industries, he is still facing backlash from these eco-centric voters over three recent decisions dealing with energy development. As always, my state of Alaska is at the epicenter. 

  First, the President – through the Department of Interior – approved Alaska’s Willow oil and gas development project last month. His decision elicited a collective groan of disgust and disapproval from the environmental movement.  They’d dedicated years opposing the project, and spent the weeks ahead of the final decision bombarding social media, protesting outside of the White House and using their extensive, inside access to stop Willow from progressing.  

  Afterward, they vented.

  “Biden approved [Willow] knowing full well that it’ll cause massive and irreversible destruction, which is just appalling, particularly coming from an administration who has pledged to address the climate crisis, has pledged to address environmental injustice, has pledged to address the extinction crisis,” said Kristen Monsell, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, who, along with other activist organizations, promptly took legal action to oppose the decision.

  Next, Biden greenlit the export plan for Alaska Gasline Development Corp’s goal to build an 800-mile pipeline to bring trillions of cubic feet of gas from the North Slope to homes, businesses and eventually a tidewater port for export to Asia and other Pacific Rim countries.  Having previously been held up under the guise of environmental and Indigenous justice reviews, the approval on April 14 gave a significant boost to the $43 billion project.  

  Environmentalists went apoplectic. “Joe Biden’s climate presidency is flying off the rails,” said Lukas Ross of Friends of the Earth. Ross pointed out this was the second U.S. approval of a “fossil-fuel mega-project” in as many months.  

  Finally, the tipping point for climate activists may have come on April 21, when Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm penned a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), asking to “expeditiously” approve regulatory authorizations for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia. Granholm noted the gas pipeline can “play an important role as part of the clean energy transition”.

  Once again, green activists hit the roof, including former National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) attorney and current Congressman Jared Huffman (D-CA), who stated bluntly, “She (Granholm) sounds like a cheerleader for the fossil fuel industry; it’s really quite pathetic.”

  The same groups who previously cheered when the Green New Deal was introduced, celebrated when the Keystone Pipeline was shuttered and nearly danced in the streets when copper mines in Alaska and Minnesota were ruled off-limits to development are now blasting Biden for losing his way on what they see as an ‘existential threat’ to their survival, and turning his back on mankind.

  The group Gen-Z for Change recently put out a statement that clearly spells out the position of many young voters. “There is no deeper form of betrayal than watching a president who has claimed to value the voices of youth…blatantly disregard one of our generations’ largest and clearest movements.”  Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) was even more blunt: ”Young people are plugged in and more informed than they have ever been about climate change,” he said. ”Now they’re feeling stabbed in the back.” If Mr. Biden doesn’t reverse course, ”young people stay home in 2024, that’s the consequences.” 

  Make no mistake: Biden is a dedicated disciple to the green cult. If given another four years, he will take steps toward fulfilling his promise to “end fossil fuel.” The next 17 months will determine whether Joe Biden will turn 86 in 2028 as a two-term President or defeated, one-term leader.  Ironically, voters much younger will make or break his fate, and they see the world through a very green lens. Right now, they’re seeing red, and that spells trouble for Team Biden.

  Rick Whitbeck is the Alaska State Director for Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs and opportunities. Contact him at Rick@PowerTheFuture.com and follow him on Twitter @PTFAlaska.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 20:40

• Greenwald: Ukraine's Conscript Army Being Used By West As "Cannon Fodder"
  Greenwald: Ukraine’s Conscript Army Being Used By West As “Cannon Fodder”

  Journalist Glenn Greenwald issued some blunt and apt statements on the nature of the Ukraine war and Washington’s constant stoking of conflict, as opposed to US officials exploring serious avenues for peace. Below is his epic Twitter thread Monday in response to once again being accused of supposedly “aping” pro-Kremlin talking points [emphasis ours]…

  No, the biggest victims of the war in Ukraine are the tens of thousands of Ukrainian men forced against their will as conscripts to serve as cannon fodder so that empty and weak Western losers like you can feel a sense of purpose and strength as you cheer from a safe distance.

  No, the biggest victims of the war in Ukraine are the tens of thousands of Ukrainian men forced against their will as conscripts to serve as cannon fodder so that empty and weak Western losers like you can feel a sense of purpose and strength as you cheer from a safe distance. https://t.co/sAi6bDWFtL

  — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 1, 2023

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

  Whenever it comes to wars people get to cheer without fighting in them — call it the Bill Kristol Syndrome — you can never underestimate the ample psychological benefits they get from feeling strong and tough but never getting near the fight.

  Adam Smith [in The Wealth of Nations] warned of it in 1776:

  

  For those who love to cheer the war in Ukraine but seem to have no idea what it’s actually about, here’s just the latest instance in which Zelensky had to increase punishments for desertion because of how unwilling much of the conscript army is to fight:

  

  Zelensky knew there were way too few Ukrainian men willing to fight the Russian Army. That’s why he begged Westerners who “support Ukraine” to come help fight Russia.

  But so few did, so they closed the border and used unwilling conscripts…

  

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 20:20

• Kansas Becomes 1st State To Pass Law Defining Gender As A Person’s Sex At Birth
  Kansas Becomes 1st State To Pass Law Defining Gender As A Person’s Sex At Birth

  Authored by Alice Giordano via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Kansas has become the first state to adopt a definition of gender with the passage of legislation that keeps men, no matter what gender they identify as, out of women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and other intimate spaces.

  

  It also separates inmates and restricts participation in sports according to one’s sex at birth.

  The move came late in the afternoon of April 27, when the state Legislature voted to override Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of S.B. 180, which became known as the “Women’s Bill of Rights.”

  Under it, a female is defined as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova.” A male is defined as “an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.”

  It also defines gender words calling for “woman” and “girl” to be used to refer to human females and “man” and “boy” to refer to human males. It defines “mother” as a parent of the female sex and “father” as a parent of the male sex.

  The override comes a little more than a week after Kelly vetoed the bill on April 20, after it was passed by a two-to-one margin between Republicans and Democrats in both the House and Senate.

  Kelly said she vetoed the legislation because she was concerned it would open the state up to costly discrimination lawsuits, cause a loss of federal funding, and hurt the Sunflower State’s economy.

  The bill garnered support from a range of groups, including one staunchly pro-choice women’s rights group.

  “Victory!” wrote the Women’s Liberation Front (WOLF) on Twitter, upon news of the veto override.

  The national women’s rights organization, which helped craft the legislation, wrote on its website, “This bill takes procedural steps to write into law common sense definitions that ensure the meaning of words like ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ aren’t corrupted by unelected bureaucrats intent on pushing gender ideology.”

  The group stated that members sent more than 600 messages to Kansas lawmakers in support of the bill.

  Opposition Forces

  The legislation also had plenty of opposition, with critics calling it anti-trans and reminiscent of racial segregation in the 1960s.

  “It’s the same sayings,” state Rep. John Alcala (D-Topeka) said at a public hearing on the bill. “I don’t want you in my bathroom. I don’t want you drinking out of my water fountain. I don’t want you over at my house. I don’t want my kid hanging out with you.”

  Beth Oller, a physician who testified against the bill, said the title was inappropriate and violated women’s rights. “This is [in] no way a women’s bill of rights. The bill does the opposite of protecting women; it causes harm.”

  Oller said that medical doctors “for decades have agreed that there is no sufficient way to define what makes a woman.”

  “Gender is not binary but is a spectrum of biological, mental, and emotional traits that exist along a continuum,” she said. “Intersex people exist.”

  The bill does include a provision that recognizes intersexual individuals. “Individuals born with a medically verifiable diagnosis of disorder/differences in sex development are to be provided available federal and state legal protections,” the legislation states.

  Opposition to SB 180 also came from the Kansas School Superintendents’ Association, the United School Administrators of Kansas, and Kansas Legal Services.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 20:00

• 6 Dead, Dozens Injured After Blinding Illinois Dust Storm Caused 90-Vehicle Pileup
  6 Dead, Dozens Injured After Blinding Illinois Dust Storm Caused 90-Vehicle Pileup

  Six people have died and more than 30 injured in a 90-vehicle pileup on Interstate 55 in Illinois that was blamed on a blinding dust storm. 

  “The cause of the crash is due to excessive winds blowing dirt from farm fields across the highway leading to zero visibility,” Illinois State Police Maj. Ryan Starrick told NBC News. 

  Interstate 55 in southern Sangamon and northern Montgomery counties remains closed in both directions because of numerous crashes caused by a dust storm, which has greatly reduced visibility. (photo via @wics_abc20) pic.twitter.com/rYbWKndJa6

  — IDOT_Illinois (@IDOT_Illinois) May 1, 2023

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

  S​tarrick said the stretch of the interstate would be closed until tomorrow because of the high number of crashed vehicles and casualties. 

  Massive pileup on I-55 south of Springfield, Illinois has closed the interstate for nearly 30 miles. Blowing dust off freshly plowed fields led to very low visibility#ilwx
  🎥: Nathan Cormier pic.twitter.com/im7QLE8BTp

  — Nick Hausen (@NickHausenWx) May 1, 2023

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

  N​athan Cormier was driving on the interstate and described what he saw to The Weather Channel:

  “I saw the smoke cloud from a distance and I’ve driven through them before, you know, you put your hazards on, go slow … And I moved to the left lane to get away out from behind a semi. And that’s when I came across everything else stopped in the road.”

  Cormier described the scene as a “dust bowl.”

  “This is like 1930’s dust bowl.”

  A dust storm caused a major crash on I-55 south of Springfield, Illinois earlier Monday. Truck driver Nathan Cormier joined FOX Weather to recount his experience during the pile-up. #ILwx @IanOliverWX pic.twitter.com/nWDW353IH6

  — FOX Weather (@foxweather) May 1, 2023

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

  Starrick said dust storms similar to this one sometimes occur across Illinois during the planting season. 

  A total of ten helicopters were requested, with four on the scene. First responders requested 37 ambulances. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 19:40

• US Says It Will Defend Philippine Boats Against Chinese Threats
  US Says It Will Defend Philippine Boats Against Chinese Threats

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  The State Department has reaffirmed that an attack on a Philippine vessel in the South China Sea will invoke the US-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty following a near miss between Chinese and Philippine coast guard vessels in the disputed waters.

  The stand-off took place on April 23 when Manila says a larger Chinese ship blocked a Philippine patrol vessel after warning it to leave the area near Second Thomas Shoal, a Philippine-controlled reef in the Spratly Islands also claimed by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

  

  The incident received a lot of publicity as the Philippine coast guard had journalists onboard during the patrol, including reporters from The Associated Press. According to AP, the Chinese ship came within 120 to 150 feet of the Philippine vessel, which had to reverse its engines to avoid a collision.

  For their part, Beijing blamed the Philippine vessel for the incident and said Manila staged the near collision for the press. “

  “It needs to be stressed that the Philippine vessels intruded into the waters with press staff on board. This makes it clear that it was a premeditated provocation designed to initiate friction, blame it on China and hype up the incident,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said.

  The State Department issued a statement that said the US “stands with The Philippines in the face of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Coast Guard’s continued infringement upon freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.”

  The statement went on to vow that the US was willing to go to war with China if a Philippine vessel came under attack.

  

  “The United States stands with our Philippine allies in upholding the rules-based international maritime order and reaffirms that an armed attack in the Pacific, which includes the South China Sea, on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft, including those of the Coast Guard, would invoke US mutual defense commitments under Article IV of the 1951 US Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty,” the statement said.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 19:20

• Woke Bar Loses Customers Defending Bud Light Transgender Ad Campaign
  Woke Bar Loses Customers Defending Bud Light Transgender Ad Campaign

  A dive bar in southern Indiana is begging for more customers after defending Bud Light and booting anyone being ‘intolerant’ following Anheuser-Busch’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvnaey.

  The beer maker has received enormous backlash since the “365 Days of Girlhood” ad campaign featuring custom-made cans featuring Mulvaney’s face. In response, millions of Americans have boycotted Bud Light and other Anheuser-Busch brands.

  The Fairfax Bar & Grill in Bloomington, Indiana, however, is now hurting for customers after it hypocritically declared that it supports free speech – except for anyone who criticizes Anheuser-Busch or Bud Light.

  

  “We are tired of all of the hate. We are very open to debate and discussion and it’s truly a shame that we can’t have open conversations about this important political and cultural topic. Bars, in our opinion, exist as public spaces where ideas should be exchanged,” the establishment wrote on Facebook. “Unfortunately due to all of the bigotry and hatred that has surfaced around the Bud Light controversy any patron wanting to voice their concerns about the issue will be immediately asked to pay their bill and leave our establishment.”

  The post was featured next to an image of a statement claiming the Bar & Grill welcomes “ALL people,” except those who are “intolerant.”

  “We are all aware of the controversy surrounding Bud Light. We support ALL people in this establishment no matter who you are of how you identify. We will continue to sell Anheiser [sic] Busch products because we don’t care who they make special cans for,” reads the statement. “If you are intolerant of other humans of any kind, we ask that you keep your opinions to yourself. Should you feel the need to discuss this matter in public you will be asked to leave. We will not tolerate intolerance here.”

  Bar owner McKinley Minniefield told WISHTV: “We were just dealing with a lot of hate speech, and people being uncomfortable. My bartenders were aggravated and we had customers that were leaving.”

  “We’re a local dive bar in southern Indiana, there’s a lot of ideas that tossed around here, but I’ve never dealt with anything recently that was so overtly hateful.”

  

  As Fox News notes, however, on Wednesday the bar’s Facebook page posted a follow-up statement to the backlash.

  “While the response here has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive, it’s time to reiterate why we took a stand against hate speech. In the last two weeks since sharing a post stating that we will not tolerate intolerance, our social media has been flooded with blatantly transphobic, homophobic and racist comments,” adding “We are all inclusive and welcome all kindhearted customers. After making that post, the comments on every post since include hate speech saying that transgender people are mentally ill, biological women are being erased, and showing a plethora of disgusting memes.”

  “Hate speech has no place at The Fairfax,” the statement continues, before admitting that they’re hurting for customers.

  “Thank you to all of you for supporting our establishment. With the departure of some of our regulars, we have needed new clientele, and you have answered. I’m not gonna lie, we still need more of you right now,” reads the page. “Please continue to consider supporting us. It’s gonna be a great year of friendship, food, drinks and live music!”

  As Jonathan Turley notes,

  According to his policy, “playing nice” means not voicing an opposing view on this controversy. Yet, being tossed out of the bar is not considered censoring an opinion.

  Notably, the ban is not on those who are shouting or engaging in disruptive conduct. It is anyone who “voices their concerns” about the transgender campaign.

  Clearly, the bar has a free speech right to set such standards. Heck, we just discussed a bar that faced a boycott from the left over showing a Harry Potter game. It solved the problem with a cringing apology and promising to ban any Harry Potter images. This is not a denial of the right of the bar owner to impose his own views on patrons, but a criticism in how that right is being exercised.

  Notably, many of the same people defended the right of players to kneel during the national anthem as an exercise of free speech. Yet, some support this bar tossing out those who express opposing views on the Bud Light controversy. What is maddening is for Minniefield and the bar to do so in the name of free speech.

  All businesses and sites face tough choices in what to remove in terms of speech. Many blogs and newspapers like The Hill have now eliminated comment sections because it is too much work to monitor and make these decisions. On this blog, we use a WordPress system to remove profanity. We also remove a narrow range of threatening, doxing, or offensive content. However, we tend to allow a far greater range of speech than most sites, including speech that we find personally offensive and wrong.

  The line drawing can be challenging. For example, most would agree that someone using racist or anti-Semitic attacks in reference to another patron should be asked to leave. However, it would be more problematic to toss out someone who is making a comment that is deemed inherently racist or intolerant. Such judgment can be highly subjective and biased.

  In this case, the use of transgender advertising campaigns raises a host of issues for customers. I understand how many view this as an objection to the status of Mulvaney and a denial of her identity. However, there remains a major debate in society over the involvement of corporations to push such social agendas. We have to be able to discuss these issues. Indeed, I can imagine no more appropriate forum for discussing the Bud Light controversy than a bar. If a patron becomes loud and disruptive on either side of that debate, the bar has every reason to issue a warning and, if necessary, ask the patron to leave.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 19:00

• Hedge Fund CIO: "The US Will Benefit From Existential Competition With China… Provided We Don't Destroy Each Other"
  Hedge Fund CIO: “The US Will Benefit From Existential Competition With China… Provided We Don’t Destroy Each Other”

  By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

  Survival Of: “Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space,” said the President of the United States. “We mean to be a part of it – we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding,” continued John F. Kennedy in 1962, the USSR’s Sputnik orbiting overhead, a 184-pound metallic ball, 22 inches in diameter.

  The Fittest: “Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe,” said the President of the United States. “Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar,” continued Ronald Reagan, standing before the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, eighteen years after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. “As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Two years later, the Berlin Wall fell, ending the greatest national competition in human history.

  Monopolies: “Today the House of Representatives has taken an historic step toward continued prosperity in America, reform in China and peace in the world,” said the President of the United States. “If the Senate votes as the House has just done, to extend permanent normal trade relations with China, it will open new doors of trade for America and new hope for change in China,” continued Bill Clinton in 2000, overly confident in the triumph of democracy, capitalism. “Bringing China into the WTO and normalizing trade will strengthen those who fight for the environment, for labor standards, for human rights, for the rule of law. America, of course, will continue to defend our interests, but at this stage in China’s development we will have more positive influence with an outstretched hand than with a clenched fist.”

  Competitors: Nineteen years later, China landed a rover on the dark side of the moon. In 2020 it pioneered quantum-entanglement satellite communication. In 2021, Beijing released its 14th Five-Year-Plan with ambitions to achieve supremacy across exploration/research/technologies essential to national security and development. 1. Artificial Intelligence. 2. Quantum computing. 3. Semiconductors. 4. Brain Science. 5. Genomics and biotechnology. 6. Clinical medicine and health. 7. Deep space, deep earth, deep ocean, and polar research. It also included China’s vision for 2035, when the country seeks/expects to “be among the most innovative nations globally.”

  Communists: “At the heart of capitalism is creative destruction.” Joseph Schumpeter brought forward economic principles with piercing logic. Competition is key to progress – firms “strive to survive,” he argued. Excessive policy responses to successive financial crises have derailed that pathway by socializing financial losses, allowing incumbents to deepen competitive moats. The policy narrative is that financial losses risk economic depression, justifying the prioritization of bailouts. Yet, even at low unemployment rates, workers earn a share of the national income seen in the 1950s. Unlike previous inflations, corporate profit margins survived the most recent one due to lack of real competition. Political urgency should be squarely focused on restoring it.

  Metaphors: Life expectancy in America has dropped for a nearly unprecedented second year in a row – down to 76 years. While countries all over the world saw life expectancy rebound during the second year of the pandemic after the arrival of vaccines, the US did not. American children are less likely to live to age 5 than children in other high-income countries. Even Americans who are not obese or do not smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their peers in other countries. And in 2020, a Pentagon study revealed that 77 percent of young Americans do not qualify for military service without a waiver due to being overweight, drug use, or mental or physical problems. 44 of those 77 failed to qualify for more than one reason.

  * * *

  Anecdote: “You Americans generally do not understand the Chinese,” said the CIO from Asia, visiting us in Connecticut. “And we Chinese generally do not understand Americans,” she continued, a unique thinker, independent, aggressive, blunt. “And this is where I hunt for opportunities, in these kinds of misunderstandings,” she said, our teams brainstorming, looking for ways to work together more closely. “Do you think our countries will have a direct military conflict?” I asked, knowing that no one knows, but interested in how she would respond. “It is not in China’s interest, and it would be economically devastating, so only if there is a miscalculation, an accidental conflict,” she said. “China has too little food to feed 1.4bln people and the US is the world’s largest exporter, so this gives me hope we will avoid a great war,” I said. “China also needs energy, metals, nearly everything,” she added.

  “So here is my base case,” I said, “The US is in desperate need of a worthy competitor, so we need China as badly as China needs us. The EU was designed simply to prevent another devastating war, and if it can accomplish that it will be a minor miracle. We should expect no more from them. Russia is a failed state. India is decades away from mattering. That leaves only China.”

  I graduated college in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, twenty years after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. With no real competitor to keep the flame alive, great cities like San Francisco are in chronic decline, our politicians are abdicating leadership to the regulators and central bankers, who in turn have short-circuited creative destruction. 77% of our youth are now unfit for military service, and the nation is needlessly divided.

  “I want to see what can be accomplished by two great powers in fierce competition, using today’s technology. Imagine the incredible things we will discover, invent, produce. And perhaps, to be in true competition – the kind that awakens us from this slumber – we need to truly believe this is an existential struggle, even if it need not be. It’s probably necessary, healthy. Provided we don’t destroy each other.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 18:40

• Kirby Claims Whopping 100,000+ Russian Casualties In Bakhmut Alone
  Kirby Claims Whopping 100,000+ Russian Casualties In Bakhmut Alone

  In a Monday press briefing National Security Council spokesman John Kirby issued a surprisingly high estimate of Russian casualties which he said took place since December fighting in the contested Donetsk city of Bakhmut. 

  He said Russian forces have suffered over 100,000 total casualties – including about 20,000 soldiers killed in combat and another 80,000 wounded.

  

  He explained that these figures were based on “information and intelligence that we were able to corroborate over a period of of some time.”

  While presenting these figures he said that the Russian advance in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces had “failed” – despite most international estimates currently indicating Russia holds 80-90% of Bakhmut at this point. 

  “Most of these efforts have stalled and failed,” Kirby said. “Russia has been unable to seize any real strategically significant territory. “

  “The only area where Russia has made some incremental gains — and I want to focus on the word ‘incremental’ — is Bakhmut,” Kirby acknowledged. “That really holds, as we’ve said before, very little strategic value for Russia. The capture of Bakhmut would absolutely not alter the course of the war in Russia’s favor, and Ukraine’s defenses in the areas surrounding Bakhmut still remain strong.”

  He also said that some half of the 20,000 Russians killed there had been fighting on behalf of Wagner.

  “Folks he [Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin] went knocking around on the doors in prison cells throughout Russia to throw human flesh at this fight,” Kirby said of a months-long recruitment drive by Wagner, controversially focused on Russian prisons.

  But when pressed, the NSC spokesman refused to give casualty numbers for the Ukrainian side. “I’m not ever going to put anything out in the public domain that’s going to make their job harder,” Kirby said. “They are the victims here. Russia is the aggressor.”

  While very clearly Bakhmut has for months been a tragic “meat-grinder” for both sides, the US could be offering this staggering and large Russian casualty count of 100,000 in order to establish a ‘pyrrhic victory’ narrative. Kirby admitted the Russians are winning in Bakhmut, but wants to paint a picture of it losing the overall conflict given the massive cost and sacrifice for Bakhmut. 

  But to keep this figure in perspective, which to most people is going to seem an extremely high estimate (and thus dubious), the total official American casualties in Vietnam were nearly 60,000 killed in action, and over 150,000 wounded – and that was after a decade of war.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 18:20

• Luongo: Tucker, BlackRock, & The SIFI Two-Step
  Luongo: Tucker, BlackRock, & The SIFI Two-Step

  Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

  The big news last week was Tucker Carlson’s unceremonious firing by Fox News. The reasons for Tucker’s firing are still unclear. And even Tucker’s emergence from his man cave on Tuesday for two minutes did nothing to quell the speculation.

  What it did do was underscore just how much real power he amassed during his time in the prime time slot anchoring Fox’s entire evening.

  Good evening pic.twitter.com/SPrsYKWKCE

  — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 27, 2023

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

  I’m not the first to point out to you just how many views this thing has gotten, dwarfing his Nielsen Ratings.

  This was a serious needle scratch.  Something changed behind the scenes.  Within an hour Don Lemon was dumped by CNN.  Susan Rice left the Biden Administration that morning. Nate Silver was let go from ABC News.

  Both Carlson and Lemon had stories planted about them harboring ‘toxic workplace environments’ to set the scene.  

  Nuts and Sluts is a time-tested method of invalidating a public figure.

  It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to play. Even if only for a day or two *cough* Abby Grossman *cough*

  There is every theory imaginable about what happened here and all of them have a nugget of truth to them.  Dexter White and I recorded a podcast covering what we think is the beginning of the Death of the Time Slot.

  And while the court politics of this are interesting, they almost feel like discussing 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination at this point. Does it matter who was behind or why Carlson was ousted from Fox? Could we not see this coming the further he went off the reservation?

  In fact, I was amazed he was still on the air after all this time. I don’t think this is a Tucker-as-Icarus proxy story no matter which way you cut it. It was always about something far bigger than Tucker Carlson.

  The confluence of major media and political figures leaving their posts, including now the head of the BBC Richard Sharp, over literal ancient conflict of interest issues that looks more like something taken off the shelf for the proverbial rainy day rather than some new, disturbing thing.

  It never just rains when its time to change the board state. And that’s exactly what this feels like, an attempt to completely change the direction of information flow as we get ready for the next big psy-op…

  … The remaking of the First Fungal President into the Next Garden Variety Wartime President.

  Because this is the best chance the DNC has at this point of retaking the presidency with any degree of credibility given their approval ratings. Even if you believe our elections aren’t corrupt (sic) you at least have to admit to yourself that this is a plausibly deniable way to convince yourself of that ‘fact.’

  Of course, as I said above, do any of the other whys about these events even matter? Of course not, they are, like Wartime presidents don’t lose, statistics which are simply chum for people to feed their confirmation biases and prevent any coming together of the center of the electorate to say no more.

  This was Tucker’s real crime if any of us are being honest with ourselves.

  And, in fact, it is the least interesting part of the whole story. Because the given proximate cause spoon fed to the ‘smart people’ in alternative media is the entire Blackrock angle.

  

  Of course, this isn’t true but, again, it doesn’t matter. That said, there is a Blackrock angle to this story but it isn’t what people were led to believe for a couple of days.

  Blackrock increased their ownership in FOX just before these events. This is symptomatic of Blackrock’s use of proxy to get what they want.

  Larry Fink, BLK CEO, is notorious for his antics in forcing heads of state and CEO’s to do his bidding while hiding behind the smokescreen of ‘I’m just a guy investing your hard-earned capital on your behalf for the good of humanity.’

  

  Now, this is some prime Grade AA Bullshit.

  Blackrock is Davos’ main arm-twisting subsidiary in the C-Suites of the S&P 500 as well as the Euro STOXXX 50 (link will need translation from German).  He may as well change his first name to Don but there are some ethnic issues with this outside of Queens. 

  As I’ve discussed in previous Private Blog posts for my patrons and interviews Blackrock bet the farm on Obama/Biden getting rid of Jerome Powell. They went all in on their CARES Act power to access the Fed’s Discount window to procure zero-cost seed capital to buy US stocks and, by extension, real estate and everything else.

  

  The company’s growth was turbocharged during COVID by this but it was already growing by more than $1 trillion annually before that.

  Its AUM — Assets Under Management — fell in 2022 because the value of the underlying assets fell as Powell put the interest rate screws to a lot of Blackrock’s ‘investments.’  The headlines have been full of governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis going on an anti-Blackrock/anti-ESG/anti-Woke tirade which has helped see some outflow from Blackrock’s funds. 

  But that doesn’t do a whole lot in the face of $10 trillion in AUM.  A few billion is literally a rounding error.

  No, the bigger effect came from taking the Fed Funds Rate from 0% to 5% in a year.  

  In the late stages of the ZIRP years we saw really strong moves in the equity markets, especially coming out of COVID as the CARES Act money made its way into the economy.   Normie FinTwit is always going on about the Fed subsidizing the ‘wealth effect’ as their main argument for why Powell is just ‘one more meeting away from pivoting’ off his ‘higher rates for longer’ schtick.

  The ‘wealth effect’ expands not only Blackrock’s AUM but also it’s political pull in the board room.  There is both coincidence and causality in my opinion, between things like Woke-a-Cola and genuflecting to every sicko with a gender fetish and the rise in Blackrock’s AUM.

  So it’s no wonder that the standard FinTwit commentary on the Fed is that QE and ZIRP goose equity prices (which it does) but also that that is what the Fed wants to do all the time!

  This is the part I disagree with and have been steadfast in my assessment as to why for nearly two years.

  Powell was trapped by both COVID and the CARES Act to go along with extending this madness for another two years.  And in the process handed Don Fink-liosi the keys to the whole rotten candy store to ensure what we’re seeing today — maximal brand destruction that defies market logic — gets ramped up to 11.

  Buying a huge stake in Fox is just one more brick in the New Media Stonewall for the upcoming war.

  All they had to do to seal the deal was convince everyone the global economy was still suffering because of COVID and we needed even MOAR SPENDING!! at the zero bound to reflate the economy.

  Powell was supposed to be deposed and Lael Brainard installed to ensure continuity of policy with them having moved Janet Yellen back into a position of power as Treasury Secretary under “Biden.”

  That has failed.  Brainard is out at the Fed. She’s prepping to replace Yellen in Biden’s 2nd term.

  Biden/Harris’s soft launch of their re-election campaign, was timed with Carlson’s ouster from Fox and warning shots fired at every major media outlet to toe the line like never before.

  So, now, let’s really talk what’s going on with Blackrock in light of this failure to replace Powell.

  For a few years now Janet Yellen and Elizabeth Warren have brought up the idea of expanding the definition of SIFI – Systemically Important Financial Institutions — to non-bank entities, like Blackrock.

  Blackrock has argued for years that it cannot be a SIFI because:

  “The British commissioner who took over from Barnier, Jonathan Hill, wanted the commission to work hand-in-hand with the financiers and every time a debate or a hearing was organised, BlackRock’s people were there,” recalls Daniela Gabor.

  “Then I realised that it was no longer the banks that had the power but the asset managers. We are often told that a manager is there to invest our money for our old age. But it’s much more than that,” she says. “In my opinion, BlackRock reflects the renunciation of the welfare state. Its rise in power goes hand-in-hand with ongoing structural changes; changes in finance, but also in the nature of the social contract that unites the citizen and the state.”

  Daniela Gabor explains that the European Central Bank, which commissions BlackRock to audit banks, has no power over the company. “BlackRock’s argument is simple: we do not do leverage, we do not act like banks, so we do not need to be regulated as a systemic institution.” {emphasis mine}

  In fact, BlackRock slips under all radars. “They can be regulated for reasons known as micro-prudential, to protect their customers, but not as a financial institution tasked with ensuring overall financial stability,” she says.

  HTTPS://WWW.INVESTIGATE-EUROPE.EU/EN/2019/BLACKROCK-THE-FINANCIAL-LEVIATHAN-THAT-BEARS-DOWN-ON-EUROPES-DECISIONS/

  This ‘conversation’ has been going on since at least 2019.  It resurfaced again this week as Yellen brought this up.  Now why would she do that if, as I’ve strenuously argued, she’s Davos through and through.

  After all wouldn’t she continue arguing for the opposite per Blackrock and Don Fink-liosi’s instructions?

  It goes back to what I’ve been saying about Blackrock for over a year now.  All of that AUM rests on a very slim pile of shareholder equity, $38.2 billion to be precise.

  As longtime Patrons know, when I do a balance sheet analysis of a company I strip out things like “Goodwill” and “Intangible Assets” from the asset side of the balance sheet.  These are simply piles of ‘value’ leftover from previous M&A activity, brand equity, etc., that may or may not have any real value.

  Stripping out the $33.6 billion BLK has in these two ‘asset’ classes that leaves Fink with less than $5 billion in shareholder equity.  

  I’m not saying there is no value there, but it’s reasonable to think that the actual value of Blackrock’s balance sheet is somewhere between these two numbers. I’m even willing to entertain 100% valuation for argument’s sake.

  It is also staring at more than $55 billion in “Other liabilities” which, is very likely derivative exposure that the company can play very fast and loose with since it was over $90 billion in 2021, and $120 billion in both 2019 and 2020.

  These are some pretty big black boxen.

  So I’m asking the question no one really wants asked, “Does Blackrock actually have any equity today?” Or is this all a big psy-op based on them voting our proxy for us?

  And when we look at the stock price I have to wonder if Wall St. isn’t also asking that question with growing confidence?

  

  I note on the chart the 2022 bottom in October.  What else bottomed in October 2022?  The Euro at $0.956 while the USDX made an important high. But look at that chart.  A two-bar reversal in Oct/Nov, followed by a triple-top around $775 which turns into a one-bar reversal in February, when Powell finally turned the corner on convincing the market the Fed Put is dead.

  Now we’re looking at this as a possible ‘dead cat bounce’ which needs a lot of help here to create a rally.  

  So, if Blackrock is in real trouble here because of falling asset prices, ESG backlash, rising rates, and falling cash flow then that would necessitate a change in the rules to allow it to be bailed out.

  Remember, last year when the UK pension crisis developed which took out Prime Minister Liz Truss and forced the Bank of England to intervene, the one holding the bag on the failing assets there was none other than Blackrock. 

  They were the ones in trouble who sold these leveraged CLOs — Collateralized Loan Obligations — to the UK state pensions which ran out of money to pay pensioners.

  Now, is Blackrock, which was built on the same premise as Silicon Valley Bank, using non-balance sheet activity to resist being regulated as a SIFI, is staring at a crisis if yields keep rising?

  Who is protected by the big inversion of the US yield curve we keep staring at? Who is

  So, in swoops Yellen to demand Blackrock should be a SIFI once the FUD surrounding it reaches a fever pitch.  Who is everyone afraid of now? Blackrock.  

  Why?  Because they “own the world.” 

  Why aren’t they regulated like the big banks?  Because they sit at the High Table.

  Who gets screwed if they go tits up?  The little guy.

  Who’s fault will it be if Blackrock went tits up?  The Fed.

  You can hear Elizabeth Warren setting the political stage for this now. We have to protect US workers from the evil Wall St. fat cats.  So, we’ll bring them under the auspice of increased government regulation by labeling them as a SIFI.

  Who sits on the Financial Services Oversight Council who will make this decision?

  And then we have Jim Rickards’ Ice-9 scenario.  (Link to tweet with video).

  In short, Blackrock as a SIFI becomes a protectorate of the Treasury department and it circumvents a bankruptcy.

  Since Blackrock is just a pile of AUM on top of a relatively small balance sheet it can be carved up pretty easily. Its book of business can be bought by the rest of Wall St. licking their lips at the thought of all those asset management and consulting fees that generate the lion’s share of the company’s cash flow.

  So now, does Blackrock want to be regulated as a SIFI after having built itself into the monster it is by evading that designation?  

  You can see the game here, Janet Yellen can force Jerome Powell to bail them out when their balance sheet implodes for real, holding the holes in the pension funds hostage as blackmail.

  Why would they do that?  Why would Fink do this?  

  Well, if you want to nationalize the US pension system and end the old US dollar system then you do that during a major crisis.  

  How did they tie Powell’s hands during COVID?  

  The CARES Act.  

  How will they tie Powell’s hands during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis?

  Making Blackrock a SIFI before it happens.

  What would you expect to happen between now and then?  

  Snuffing out any major selloff in US Treasuries by managing credit spreads between US and European debt.  This relieves the pressure on Blackrock’s balance sheet and that of others.  

  Now let’s talk about the blowout in US Credit Default Swap Rates as well as the massive plunge in the 1-month T-Bill rate last week creating an historic 1 month/2 month spread of over 160 basis points.  Yellen has been ramping up the rhetoric about the US defaulting once the Treasury General Account is empty.  

  “Biden” and Davos are serious about trying to stop any kind of spending cuts, because they want to balloon the US deficit to the moon to save the EU.  Blackrock is more heavily exposed to Europe than the US pension systems, but still heavily exposed to both.

  What did Lagarde at the ECB put in place last July?  The TPI – Transmission Protection Instrument — designed to protect credit spreads within the EU, nominally, but also internationally.

  What’s been happening during this major rally in the euro to $1.10 and Powell convinced the markets he’s serious about not pivoting? A collapse of US/European credit spreads indicating preferential capital movement into the US and out of Europe.

  

  In short, I think Blackrock’s deteriorating balance sheet as well as Yellen’s intention to stiff US bondholders to save pensioners is setting us up for the biggest Lucy with the Football moment in history. It is the biggest threat to Powell’s “higher for longer” rate policy and the future of the US.

  And it comes down to playing hard ball over the debt ceiling without significant spending cuts. If that happens then Yellen is winning and Powell is checkmated. If McCarthy and the GOP hold the line then the US banking interests will tear Blackrock apart and take their business in bankruptcy.

  Making Blackrock a SIFI short-circuits this completely and puts the onus directly on the taxpayer, per Rickards’ analysis.

  I can easily see Blackrock sacrificed on the alter of the Great Reset once it’s control over corporate interests has been turned over to the Treasury and the ECB.

  In fact, it is the best play for them to nationalize all the assets they have.  $9 trillion in AUM is a lot of win for the commies.

  And Fink, as I said, already has his seat at The High Table.

  Which is why Tucker Carlson’s firing is important but really the side show in all of this.

  *  *  *

  Join my Patreon if you don’t like tables

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 18:00

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• US Air Force Moves Strategic Air Tankers From Germeny To Poland
  US Air Force Moves Strategic Air Tankers From Germeny To Poland

  Via Remix News,

  Nineteen American in-flight refueling aircraft will be stationed at the Powidz Air Base in western Poland. According to the U.S. magazine Stars and Stripes, this is the latest sign that U.S. Armed Forces are shifting combat resources to strengthen NATO’s eastern flank.

  

  The U.S. Air Force command in Europe confirmed that on March 10 of this year “American air tankers began working in their new main location in Poland.”

  This was done as part of operation “Copper Arrow,” which demonstrated the efforts of the U.S. military command in Europe to “strengthen security on NATO’s eastern flank through forward deployed and stationed forces.”

  “The cooperation of American air tankers with our NATO allies clearly shows how much we value our partnerships and how important it is to increase our interoperability,” said Colonel Timothy Foery, advisor to the U.S. Air Force Reserve Commander.

  Foery noted that interoperability is evident when looking “at any photo of a KC-135 refueling a Polish F-16 or a KC-46 refueling a Finnish F/A-18.”

  American air tankers KC-135 Stratotanker, KC-10 Extender and the newest in the U.S. Air Force fleet, KC-46 Pegasus, could all be sent to the Powidz Air Base.

  The aircraft currently stationed at the Spangdahlem base in Germany, will be transferred to the Powidz air base as Unit 1. As emphasized by the U.S. Air Force leadership, this relocation also demonstrates “the ability of U.S. command to quickly deploy large, credible combat forces and equipment throughout Europe.”

  The tankers stationed in Powidz can be used for refueling combat aircraft, including the world’s most advanced fighter jet, the F-35A Lightning II, which extends the range of NATO air missions. Stars and Stripes notes that eight F-35 aircraft of the Dutch Air Force have been stationed in the Malbork air base in Poland for several months.

  #Watch a @USAFReserve KC-46 Pegasus refuel a Finnish F/A-18s for the first time in Finland airspace, as part of a @HQUSAFEAFAF partnership exercise called Copper Arrow. #TogetherWeDeliver @FinnishAirForce pic.twitter.com/awMoN0axD1

  — USTRANSCOM (@US_TRANSCOM) April 20, 2023

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

  Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the presence of U.S. forces in Europe has increased, with the number of U.S. military personnel on the continent growing from 80,000 to 100,000.

  U.S. Ambassador to Warsaw Mark Brzezinski recently stated that over 10,000 American soldiers are in Poland.

  “The U.S. military’s shift to the east is another example of the United States’ efforts to create a permanent presence in the former Warsaw Pact country, an important member of NATO, which has over 300 miles of border with Ukraine,” said reporter Jennifer Svan in Stars and Stripes.

  A month ago, the United States officially established its first permanent base in Poland. The U.S. Army garrison in Poznań, located about 100 kilometers from Powidz, will support the V Corps of the Army, which oversees NATO missions in the east.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 05/01/2023 – 02:00

• The Left Has No Intention Of Going Quietly Into The Night
  The Left Has No Intention Of Going Quietly Into The Night

  Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time,

  Younguns is a folksy term used mainly by people with a few years under their belt to refer to those far younger. Sometimes this term focuses on those under thirty. These people often don’t realize those injuries they see as badges of honor will far too soon turn to aches and pain. Today I find myself at low-ebb, it may be a combination of too much work and a recent birthday taking its toll.

  

  Adding to this is the reality that we live in a world that has made a mockery of hard work and savings, this is a major disservice to those carrying the load. Many people fail to take into account that the socialist agenda of the far left is in many ways anti-social. As we look around it is easy to see that much of the workforce has gone full “John Galt” and decided not to participate in the job market. Much of this is driven by the notion that hard work does not pay big dividends and we might as well dump our problems off onto those stupid enough to accept them.  

  Society and politicians are rapidly dismantling the rights of ownership. This transfer of rights constitutes a transfer of wealth whether we wish to call it by that name or not. This is the main reason so many of the most capable contributors to our economy are now moving toward the sidelines. Capable and smart people do not have to work hard to make ends meet and are proving this by going out and enjoying life rather than working to support those that won’t. When people decide to remove themselves from a game they see as rigged in favor of those far less deserving it is an indication of greater problems ahead.

  Still, make no mistake, the left claiming it is “progressive” has no intention of melting quietly into the night. I fear those both in the middle and on the right that think things will turn around are overly optimistic. Those on the right often point to California as a failed state. They use as an example drug-infested San Fransisco. At the end of 2021, it was estimated that of the city’s roughly 8,124 people that were at the time “unhoused,” a full 73 percent were “unsheltered.”  This means they sleep out of doors, in tents, and under highway overpasses.

  Catch-22 Is A Real Thing

  What is being cast upon us is breeding a culture that lacks accountability. The legal system is failing. From the smallest to the largest issues we face, it seems few are being resolved in a way most people find uplifting. More often than we would like we are running smack dab into the proverbial catch-22 situations that try our souls. A catch-22 is a paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules or limitations. The term was coined by Joseph Heller, who used it in his 1961 novel Catch-22.

  

  While much of the country views high taxes, rampant drug use, and crime as the reason many major retailers are closing stores in the state, its Governor is being touted as a candidate for the Presidency in 2024. The bad news is that if you think it can’t get any worse, you are wrong. Sadly, society has turned onto a fast path to ruin downward. A slew of lightweight JV thinkers have taken us down the rabbit hole when it comes to creating a better future.

  We Need A Hero, But None Is In Sight

  It could be argued that those on the far left have been joined by, or are being egged on and encouraged by those wishing to weaken the United States from the inside. Russia and China are generally painted as the villains in such a scenario. The real problem we face is that true leadership tends not to exist in a vacuum. The fact is that we need a hero and they are in short supply. It has been said, the “pioneers took all the arrows,” meaning it is much safer to travel west today. It also means people of real value will most likely be destroyed if they attempt to move to the front.

  

  A feeling of hopelessness recently descended upon me when I became a victim of vandalism. How do you protect what can not be protected? The catch-22 here is that you have a very difficult time insuring an empty building but how do you rent it when it is constantly being ripped apart by vandals? While not the economic disaster that will end me, such events are “mentally” troubling. It is also why so many people shy away from owning hard assets, this applies to gold, real estate, and more. Readers of AdvancingTime know not owning “real things” is an investment strategy I consider problematic. 

  The efforts of those in power to paint vandalism of private property as mischief is the reason so many Americans when given the chance, op to live in gated communities. In truth, we cannot “gate off” everything. This reflects society’s inability to make people behave. The failure of people to take responsibility for their actions signals greater problems ahead.

  It does not help that we are facing a toxic mix when it comes to protecting our freedom. Big companies are predatory and big governments are stupid. The thing they have in common is they both want more control and power. In truth, we are the underdog in this ongoing struggle for control of our lives and progressives are promoting policies that empower those that want to control us. Throw in the likelihood of an economic reset or hard landing and you might say, if you think it can’t get any worse, you are wrong. Lowering your expectations may be in order.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 23:30

• These Are The Most Dangerous Countries To Work In
  These Are The Most Dangerous Countries To Work In

  In many regions of the world, workplace safety has drastically increased over the last couple of decades, ensuring healthy working environments for many employees. As the collapse of Rana Plaza, a nine-story building in Bangladesh housing several garment workshops connected in large part to the fast fashion industry, ten years ago shows, there is still lots of room for improvement though. Research quoted by the International Labor Organization (ILO) suggests that in 2017 alone, 2.8 million people died and a further 374 million people suffered non-fatal injuries in their line of work.

  As Statista’s Florian Zandt details below, according to data from ILO, Costa Rica currently has the highest number of work-related injuries with 9,421 non-fatal as well as 9.7 fatal occupational injuries per 100,000 workers in 2016. For decades, the nation’s economy relied heavily on agriculture and tourism. Since the turn of the millennium, manufacturing and industry have surpassed the agricultural sector, with companies like Intel or Procter & Gamble heavily investing in the country. According to media reports, Intel’s microprocessor facility was responsible for five percent of the total GDP and 20 percent of all Costa Rican exports in 2006.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Anecdotal evidence from other countries suggests that the aforementioned focus on industry and manufacturing might also be responsible for the high number of fatal occupational injuries. While Costa Rica doesn’t provide segregated data on fatal injuries by economic activity, Mexico and Turkey, which rank ninth and tenth in terms of non-fatal as well as second and third in terms of fatal occupational injuries, do. In Mexico, for example, out of 806 work-related deaths, 118 people died in the manufacturing, 76 in the construction and 86 in the transportation and storage sectors. Turkey registered 386 deaths in construction, 297 deaths in manufacturing and 258 deaths in transportation and storage out of a total of 1,394.

  Nations known for their textile industries like Pakistan and Portugal also make the top list of the countries with the most occupational injuries per 100,00 workers. While independent auditors regularly check and sign off on labor practices and working conditions in the fashion industries of the aforementioned countries, the reality is often far grimmer than official assessments suggest. A report by NGO Human Rights Watch on Pakistan’s garment workers from 2019, for example, points out companies failing to pay their employees the minimum wage, a lack of written contracts, firings of pregnant women and pay deductions for sick days.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 23:00

• Welcome To Trading With The New Daily VIX
  Welcome To Trading With The New Daily VIX

  By SpotGamma

  New this Tuesday, the trading world now has a VIX1D (0-1 DTE) index. With HIRO, we give you a multi-day view under the SPX hood by showing how its zero DTE options are moving in real time. We also have this view available for hundreds of major stocks and ETFs. What this new index represents is a balance of zero-DTE and one-DTE options on SPX.

  Nonstop 0DTE call buying all day (via @spotgamma) https://t.co/auzhlYZc7w pic.twitter.com/wyJASQj7SD

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 27, 2023

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

  Let’s take a look at the first three trading days of the VIX1D.  First, on Tuesday, April 25th, call selling weighed down on the market, as indicated by the green line while the puts were not impactful. Then, on Wednesday, puts were more in control, leading the market up in the morning and then back down in the afternoon.  Lastly, starting with some call buying and then put selling for a doubly bullish lift on the index price, the market trended higher.  You can see the meaningful impact of the 0DTE tool throughout these three days.

  

  Adding the new VIX1D as a datapoint to your trading arsenal can get you up to par. But if you combine that with our proprietary key levels, then this can really set your trading apart from the crowd.

  One of over a dozen tools we provide specifically for analyzing index products is our interactive chart of Absolute Gamma, as shown here from Thursday night, which identifies call gamma in orange and put gamma in blue. This is across all option chains but you can also filter it down to zero DTE.

  These high gamma levels are structural boundaries which have a statistically-significant influence over price action. The price tends to be attracted to these levels, but price movements also generally slow down near them and reverse direction.

  

  Alternatively, here is a view of that same Absolute Gamma tool but restricted to the scope of zero DTE option structure. Although the bigger picture of all chains shows an important structural firewall at 4000 for the broader market, that 4000 level is too far away for zero DTE traders to take meaningful interest. What this more focused view clarifies is that zero DTE options have the heaviest market gamma between 4100 and 4150, which is where the market was taking its bets for Friday.

  Below 4100, there are not enough puts to generate substantial gamma.

  

  This structural backbone provides context which helps to make signals from VIX1D less noisy. We can use key gamma boundaries and levels to set up high-probability trades. In outlier events where the price breaks outside of these ranges, especially if the price is still below the Call Wall  or above the Put Wall, there is less gamma to slow down the price and there can be some very big moves akin to the price escaping from the bottom or top of a volume profile. If breaking above a new level, all the buyers are making money (rather than trying to get it back at resistance), and that trend can easily move beyond expectations.

  As an example of a tactical application, if you see HIRO option flow moving up and leading the price, then you might want to open a covered call (long shares and short a call) to enhance your position and collect some yield if there is not much movement in the underlying price. Or if your outlook is directionally neutral, such as if the price is near our largest Absolute Gamma level and there is positive market gamma, then you could try a credit iron condor: short two options near the middle and long options further out-of-the-money as wingtips. This credit iron condor strategy harvests time premium if realized volatility remains low.

  On the other hand, if you are neutral but you expect volatility to expand, then you could try something like a long straddle, which will have defined risk but uncapped potential profits if there is a large move in either direction. Data suggests that a breach to the downside of our Volatility Trigger would usually be a good time to do that.  

  If you are serious about trading, then we invite you to be on the ground floor of this new VIX1D arena with us and to join us in the discussion on our members-only Discord.

  Start a free trial now to see our daily analysis of these developments and also to have the best tools to get you a head start on this new frontier.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 22:30

• Not Too Old? Actuaries Chime In After Nikki Haley Says Biden 'Likely' To Die Within 5 Years
  Not Too Old? Actuaries Chime In After Nikki Haley Says Biden ‘Likely’ To Die Within 5 Years

  Last week, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said that 80-year-old President Joe Biden is likely to die within the next five years, and that his supporters would have to assume VP Kamala Harris would take his place.

  

  “He announced that he’s running again in 2024, and I think that we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely,” the 51-year-old Haley told Fox News.

  GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley predicts Biden would not make it through a second term:

  “If you vote for Joe Biden, you really are counting on a President Harris. Because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely.” pic.twitter.com/4rMNo5O6gp

  — The Recount (@therecount) April 26, 2023

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

  No so fast, according to the Financial Times, which – citing actuaries, say an 82-year-old Biden wouldn’t be too ancient to start a second term, which he would of course finish at the ripe young age of 86.

  According to UK actuarial firm Club Vita, Biden has a life expectancy of another 11 years, taking him to 91, while former President Donald Trump has 14 more years to look forward to.

  The model’s inputs include affluence, marital status, and employment. These key demographics for both Biden and Trump put them in the same favourable categories for the main factors, including addresses in the top category for life expectancy: the analysts used Trump’s Palm Beach address and Biden’s Delaware home.

  Erik Pickett, a New Jersey-based actuary for Club Vita, said a wide range of factors could prove its model wrong, from whether the candidates “are in significantly different health to the average of someone with the same characteristics” to the fact that presidents have “access to higher quality medical treatments” than the typical American. -Financial Times

  The average American male born on the same day as Biden can expect to live another 8.5 years, according to the Social Security Administration. 

  “I would say that both Biden and Trump are likely to have substantially higher life expectancy than the average, for their age, because they have high socio-economic status, access to the best healthcare in the US, and they do not smoke,” said Georgetown University senior research investigator, Dana Glei.

  “The president will have access to the highest-quality medical care and will remain physically, mentally and socially active whilst in the job — all factors that improve lifespan,” said Pickett, adding that this will be “at least partially countered by a high-stress environment and possibly a greater exposure to external risk factors.”

  And of course, Kamala Harris is ready for whatever might come…

  SEN. CHRIS COONS: “The Vice President’s ready to run & ready to be President should that ever happen…” pic.twitter.com/NeQBd7RFHQ

  — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) April 30, 2023

  Comforting, no?

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 22:00

• Federal Bureaucrats (Outside The Pentagon And US Post Office) Are Paid Some $576 Million Per Day
  Federal Bureaucrats (Outside The Pentagon And US Post Office) Are Paid Some $576 Million Per Day

  Submitted by Adam Andrzejewski, author of OpenTheBooks substack

  Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com recently determined from official Federal Freedom of Information Act filings that we pay Beltway bureaucrats in the federal executive agencies outside of the Defense Department and the U.S. Post Office some $576 million per day.

  

  That’s more than $210 billion per year for the 1.44 million employees of 125 rank-and-file general administrative, civil enforcement and federal law enforcement agencies.

  Economic uncertainty might surround many taxpayers, but for federal workers, we are funding lavish and perk-filled lifestyles.

  In 109 of the 125 federal agencies in Washington, the average employee salary is more than $100,000.

  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average real median wage for the average employee was $54,339 in 2021.

  The average salary at the Census Bureau is $67,656. That’s just a small example of the ‘private-sector’ versus ‘public-sector’ pay disparity.

  

  After working just three years for the federal government, employees have 44 days of paid time off. Can you skip work for nine weeks and still have a job?

  The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average number of paid vacation days for U.S. workers is 11 days, or a day more than two weeks.

  Furthermore, most federal employees worked from home for years due to the recently concluded Covid “emergency.” Congress incentivized this with a $570 million “paid-to-stay home” fund at Treasury. If your child wasn’t back to school, you could collect $21,000 over 15 weeks in paid family leave.

  Congressional testimony shows Office of Personnel Management Director Kiran Ahuja still has no clue how many federal employees returned, or where the people we pay actually do their jobs.

  (Watch the answer starting at 3:00.)

  D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, normally a staunch ally of the Biden Administration, had to call for getting federal employees back to work to revive the city’s economy.

  President Biden suggested he would soon ask workers to report for duty, but many desks remain empty because “flexibility” still prevails.

  Then, President Biden asked for the biggest pay raise in more than 40 years. His 2023 budget includes a 5.2% pay hike for the 1.4 million executive agency employees.

  We all had to pay our taxes when they were due a few weeks ago. For many federal employees, that rule is being flouted.

  In March 2023, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that “The number of delinquent Federal civilian employees has increased by 32 percent from Fiscal Years (FY) 2015 to 2021.” Some 149,000 federal employees owe $1.5 billion in back taxes!

  In the private sector, pay is typically associated with performance. But in the federal government, performance appears not to figure into the compensation equation.

  Take the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). We were all reminded of its importance earlier this year with the implosions of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. The FDIC is there to insure depositors for up to $250,000, helping Americans trust that the banking system is reliable.

  Well, there are 58,000 employees at the FDIC—many of them auditors. Average salary? $160,000. None of them seemed to notice stress on the banking system. The two banks that failed were highly regarded institutions. But in fact, they had veered away from solvency.

  One might ask if we taxpayers – who will pick up the tab for this debacle according to the Administration’s plan — are getting what they we are paying for at the FDIC?

  Such disparities between pay and performance, and they are legion, are making an impact in Congress. Senator Joni Ernst (R.-Iowa) has joined our organization at OpenTheBooks.com in demanding answers to three questions that should be simple: Who is working? Where are they? What on Earth are they doing for us?

  As recent testimony by OPM Director Ahuja shows, the feds just don’t want us to know.

  For example, unlike its predecessors, the Biden Administration has redacted key information on federal workers.

  In the Biden Administration 2022 payroll, 350,861 worker names are redacted. Under the Obama Administration, in FY 2016, that figure was 2,300. Stunning.

  The administration has also redacted 281,656 worker locations.

  Our auditors estimate some $36 billion worth of taxpayer-funded salary, benefits and bonuses are hidden from Americans. Even worse, they are headed to mystery people in mystery locations.

  That means no scrutiny of performance versus pay. It means no oversight by Congress. It means no chance to cut bloat during the budget process.

  We don’t know who these workers are, what they do, where they work, or how much each of them makes.

  Like Senator Ernst, we plan to find out. At $576 million per day, it’s time we knew.

  Additional details found at Newsweek in a co-authored editorial “Where’s Waldo At Club Fed” with U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst and Adam Andrzejewski, CEO, OpenTheBooks.com.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 21:30

• "Fed Wishes It Had Shut Down Reverse Repo Which Is Making The Bank Run Worse… But It Didn't, And Now It's Too Late"
  “Fed Wishes It Had Shut Down Reverse Repo Which Is Making The Bank Run Worse… But It Didn’t, And Now It’s Too Late”

  By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

  “The Policy on Counterparties for Market Operations has been updated to clarify that, in addition to implementing monetary policy, broader policy goals including fostering financial stability and ensuring bank safety and soundness, are considered when reviewing a prospective or existing counterparty,” wrote the NY Fed on their website.

  And of course, on the surface, that’s the most boring quote I’ve ever opened with. Truly. But how about this?

  “SEC registered 2a-7 funds that, in the sole judgement of the New York Fed, are organized for a single beneficial owner, or exhibit sufficient similarities to a fund so organized, generally will be deemed ineligible to access reverse repo operations.”

  More boring. For sure.

  They concluded with this beauty: “These updates are intended to clarify the New York Fed’s existing counterparty management practices and do not impact the participation of current reverse repo counterparties.”

  My favorite word here is “clarify,” which suggests their policy was misunderstood. In fact, it was perfectly understood.

  So understood that the Fed needed to clarify to investors that accelerating the banking crisis is in nobody’s interest, especially not the Fed.

  But to appreciate such subtleties you must waste decades of the most productive years of your life reading these intentionally mind-numbing statements. Like I have. Do it long enough, you succumb to Stockholm Syndrome.

  So, to save you a life of torture, let me translate: The Fed introduced the reverse repo policy (RRP) in 2014 when they lost control of market operations at the zero lower bound. But after losing control of inflation, they hiked interest rates so fast it sparked a bank run.

  

  Now, investors are pulling cash from banks to buy money-market funds that invest in risk-free high-yielding reverse repos.

  

  This exacerbates the bank run, and contracts credit in the economy. Which scares investors into selling risk assets to park more cash in reverse repos.

  And our central bankers wish they’d seen this coming and shut the program years ago. But they didn’t and it’s too late. So instead, they “clarified” their intent, and will probably build another complex program on top of something that should no longer exist. And/or slash interest rates. In the hope of regaining control.

  Even as it slips away.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 20:30

• World's Top Buyer Of LNG Warns Of Another Price Spike
  World’s Top Buyer Of LNG Warns Of Another Price Spike

  The northern hemisphere experienced higher-than-average temperatures this past winter, which helped alleviate energy crunches and sent liquefied natural gas prices tumbling from record-high levels. Now the world’s largest gas buyer expects another price spike this year. 

  In an interview with Bloomberg, Yukio Kani, the chairman and CEO of Jera Co., expressed his concerns about another potential surge in LNG prices, attributing this to the increasing import capacity in Europe and China, along with potential severe weather risks.

  Here’s part of the interview:

  This winter, with import capacity in Europe rising and China potentially increasing demand after it ended pandemic restrictions, prices could spike again if severe weather strikes, he said. There’s no opportunity for buyers to “let their guards down,” Kani said.

  Jera, a venture between Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc. and Chubu Electric Power Co., announced on Friday that it agreed to a 20-year deal to buy LNG from Venture Global LNG Inc.’s proposed terminal in Louisiana. While the company expects Japanese LNG demand to decline over the next decade, it could surprise by staying flat as more data centers and semiconductor factories are built, Kani said.

  “Those two facilities guzzle electricity, making it hard to read the demand outlook,” he said.

  Jera is also working to support Japan’s plans to use ammonia and hydrogen to decarbonize existing thermal power plants. The strategy has gotten pushback from other countries, most recently at the Group of Seven energy and environment ministers meeting. –Bloomberg 

  Kani’s comments come as Asian spot LNG futures are down 83.5% from last September’s high, touching lows not seen summer of 2021. 

  

  On the other side of the world, US NatGas and European NatGas futures are hovering at multi-year lows. 

  

  Kani’s prediction of severe weather could be linked to the likely return of the El Nino climate phenomenon this year, which may contribute to higher global temperatures and a subsequent rise in cooling demand, resulting in an increased need for gas. Additionally, as Europe rejiggers its energy supply chain away from Russia and relies more on US LNG shipments, supplies may face further tightening. Moreover, an uptick in China’s economic recovery could also boost LNG demand. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 20:00

• Death Toll Rises As Ukraine Ramps Up Attacks On Russian Border Towns
  Death Toll Rises As Ukraine Ramps Up Attacks On Russian Border Towns

  Casualties have risen after intense shelling of a Russian village in the Bryansk region near the Ukrainian border, an attack which happened Saturday, with emergency responders initially citing two killed. 

  The casualty count as been revised as rescuers comb through rubble of a residential building. Four civilians have died and another two wounded “as a result of the actions by Ukrainian nationalists,” governor Aleksandr Bogomaz announced Sunday.

  

  Authorities declared a state of emergency in the village of Suzemka, where the strike took place. It lies a mere 10km from Ukraine.

  The governor further said the wave of Ukrainian strikes hit a residential area, according to CNN: 

  Unverified video posted on Bogomaz’s Telegram channel shows people emerging from a damaged building at night.

  A person can be heard on the video saying, “They pulled a woman out. They’re still checking for a kid. Not sure. Horrible.”

  Attacks, including with drones, on Russian territory have increased of late as Ukrainian forces are reportedly preparing for a spring counteroffensive. 

  The biggest weekend attack was deep inside Crimea. Multiple drones hit a fuel depot early Saturday, unleashing a huge multiple-hours long blaze which could be seen for miles.

  

  It appeared a retaliation strike in response to Friday’s major Russian cruise missile and drone attacks against several Ukrainian cities, particularly in the central part of the country.

  Additionally, international reports indicate over the weekend cited Moscow-installed officials in eastern Ukraine who said “Ukrainian shelling had killed nine people, including an eight-year-old girl in the city of Donetsk.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 19:00

• There Were 70 Major Bankruptcies In Just 4 Months This Year
  There Were 70 Major Bankruptcies In Just 4 Months This Year

  By Mish Shedlock of Mishtalk

  For 2009 there were 118 bankruptcies through April. In Covid-impacted 2020, there were 71 bankruptcies. In 2023 there have been 70.

  This is the third worst start to the year since 2000. Here’s the Tweet.

  

  2023 Bankruptcy Spotlight 

  • Bed Bath & Beyond: April 2023: Home goods, baby goods
  • David’s Bridal: Date: April 2023: Bridal apparel
  • Boxed: April 2023: An e-commerce platform selling wholesale consumer goods
  • Independent Pet Partners: February 2023: Pet supplies
  • Tuesday Morning: February 2023: Discount home goods
  • Serta Simmons Bedding: January 2023: Bedding and accessories
  • Party City: January 2023: Party supplies
  • Forma Brands: January 2023: Beauty products 

  The bankruptcy spotlight list is condensed from a detailed report by CBInsights. 

  Spotlight Bed Bath and Beyond

  NBC reports Bed Bath and Beyond Prepares for Store Closings

  “Thank you to all of our loyal customers,” Bed Bath & Beyond said in a message posted to social media on Monday. “We have made the difficult decision to begin winding down our operations. Bed Bath & Beyond and buybuy BABY stores remain open to serve you.”

  According to the retailer’s website, “deep discount” store closing sales are expected to begin in stores and online beginning Wednesday, and “all purchases during our store closing sales will be final.”

  According to the retailer, Bed Bath & Beyond websites, along with 360 brick-and-mortar stores and 120 buybuy BABY locations will “remain open and continue serving customers as the Company begins its efforts to effectuate the closure of its retail locations.”

  In Illinois, only eight Bed Bath & Beyond stores remain open, along with five buybuy BABY stores. Earlier this year, Bed Bath & Beyond announced closures of 19 stores across Illinois, many of them in the Chicago area.

  Deep Discounts, No Coupons

  Bed Bath and Beyond is no longer accepting coupons. Gift cards and loyalty certificates are still valid. All sales are final. 

  Spotlight David’s Bridal 

  CNN reports One in four brides wear David’s Bridal to their wedding. Now, it’s filing for bankruptcy

  “An increasing number of brides are opting for less traditional wedding attire, including thrift wedding dresses,” David’s Bridal said in a bankruptcy filing. “These shifting consumer preferences have significantly exacerbated” the company’s financial crunch.

  “The demand for formal wedding dresses, bridesmaid dresses, and related accessories has decreased substantially in the current environment,” the company said in its filing.

  David’s Bridal will keep its nearly 300 stores and website operating and fulfill all customer orders as it searches for a buyer for the company. It will also honor gift cards, returns and exchanges. But if David’s Bridal is not able to find a buyer, it could have to close all stores and liquidate.

  The company has around 10,000 full and part-time employees, but last week it said it was laying off 9,000 workers.

  David’s Bridal, the successor to a bridal retailing business that began as a single bridal salon in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, in 1950, said approximately 25% of brides in the United States wear one of its gowns at their wedding.

  Nonstore Retail Sales as Percent of Advance Retail Sales

  

  To create the chart I subtracted food, gasoline, motor vehicles, and items one does not normally buy online, then took the nonstore percentage of what remained. 

  Not only have consumer preferences shifted on what people buy, preferences have shifted in the way people buy. 

  The percentage of shopping online has been steadily rising but the Covid pandemic goosed the trend. It’s about four percentage points above the prior trend. 

  Amazon was the big beneficiary. It explains Amazon’s earnings report. Nonetheless, not all is well with Amazon.

  Amazon Layoffs

  On April 26, Geekwire reported Latest round of Amazon layoffs begins today, impacting AWS and human resources

  Amazon began notifying Amazon Web Services and human resources employees impacted by its latest round of layoffs on Wednesday, as the company continues to trim headcount to cut costs.

  The layoffs are part of the 9,000-person corporate workforce reduction announced by the company in March. The cuts mostly affect AWS, human resources (which Amazon calls PXT, for People Experience and Technology), Amazon Advertising, and Twitch.

  Amazon in January announced a 18,000-person layoff, the largest in the Seattle company’s history. The additional 9,000 layoffs bring the total to 27,000 job cuts, about 8% of Amazon’s corporate workforce, which previously numbered around 350,000 people.

  The company has trimmed back and eliminated several products, services, and entire businesses over the past year to help cut expenses, including its Scout neighborhood delivery robots, its Amazon Care primary healthcare business, bricks-and-mortar Amazon bookstores, and others. Amazon said Wednesday that it was shutting down its Halo health devices and service.

  M2 Money Supply Declines 8 Straight Months, ODL Down 12 Straight Months

  On April 12, I commented Fed Minutes Now Predict a Recession This Year Along With Higher Unemployment. Also note M2 Money Supply Declines 8 Straight Months, ODL Down 12 Straight Months.

  

  The economy is slowing fast. A rise in unemployment will follow,

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 18:30

• New California Gold Rush Coming As Record Snowpack Melts
  New California Gold Rush Coming As Record Snowpack Melts

  Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Gold isn’t raining from the sky in California, but it might be flooding into the rivers by summer.

  

  “Nugget Nick” Prebalick expects the record snowpack in northern California to deposit even more gold in Woods Creek in Tuolumne County, where he shares a claim with his father and son near Jamestown. The family has been offering tours to those who want to experience gold mining and learn about the history of the gold rush in the state.

  “I’m already finding more gold,” Prebalick told The Epoch Times. “I’ve been finding gold every tour.”

  The Prebalicks, who own California Gold Panning, usually find about an ounce of gold a day when they take guests to pan for nuggets on their claim. The most he and his father have found was 127 ounces in one day.

  

  As this year’s snow melts from the Sierra Nevada and other mountains, the runoff will wash away silt and deposit more gold in rivers and streams, prompting some to predict a modern-day gold rush this summer.

  California’s first gold rush in 1848 brought fortune seekers from all over the world. More than 300,000 came to the territory, and gold was worth $20.67 per ounce, according to the National Museum of American History.

  Today, each ounce is worth about $2,000.

  “I think this summer. I’m going to be swamped,” he said. “We’ll probably get 10 groups a day.”

  Mark Keene, who owns the mining equipment company Keene Engineering in Chatsworth—about 30 miles northwest of the city of Los Angeles—with his brother, told The Epoch Times he also anticipates a big increase in gold mining activities when the snow starts to melt.

  “In my lifetime, I don’t remember this much snowpack in the mountains,” Keene said, adding that he expects to see a superflood. Keene sells gold pans, sluice boxes, and other tools used by armatures and professionals.

  “When you have a catastrophic flood like that all the riverbanks and the mountainsides wash down in the river and you see a lot of gold,” he said. “It could be one of the best years in decades for mining.”

  Keene and his family have a secret mining spot and they visit on the weekends, he said.

  

  “It’s not always about the gold,” he said. “It’s about the journey and the adventure of it, too.”

  First-timers need to know the rules before heading out to look for treasures, though, said Dickey Melton, manager of The New 49’ers Prospecting Association, a gold mining club based about 20 south of the Oregon border in Happy Camp, California.

  “What we have now is a whole bunch of hand miners,” Melton said, as state law prohibits any type of mining other than panning, sluice boxes, or shovels.

  Even with restrictions, many people come out to the club’s 63 claims on 83 miles on the Klamath River, which flows more than 250 miles through Oregon and northern California.

  “We get people from all over the world who come here,” Melton said. “Right now, all of that snow is melting, and the rivers are running really high. We’re seeing some hand miners coming in with some pretty good gold.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 17:30

• "Falsification Of History": Egypt Goes Ballistic On Netflix Over Cleopatra's Race
  “Falsification Of History”: Egypt Goes Ballistic On Netflix Over Cleopatra’s Race

  According to Egypt’s antiquities ministry, an upcoming four-part drama-documentary produced by Netflix has made a serious error regarding the race of one of Egypt’s pharaohs. It appears that ‘woke capital’ is distorting history. 

  “Queen Cleopatra,” released May 10, has Black actor Adele James featured as the legendary leader. The move by Jada Pinkett Smith, the producer and narrator of the series, has infuriated Mostafa Waziri, head of the Supreme Antiquities Council, who said: portraying Cleopatra as Black is “a falsification of Egyptian history.”

  Waziri said nothing was racist about his comments, which were entirely motivated by “defending the history of Queen Cleopatra, an important part of the history of Egypt in antiquity.”

  Egyptian experts insist Cleopatra had “white skin and Hellenistic characteristics.” But don’t tell ‘woke Netflix’ this… 

  

  An online petition on Change.org titled Cancel Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatra” has nearly 8,000 signatures. It alleges:

  “Afrocentrism is a pseudoscience that is pushing a group’s agenda to claim Egypt’s history and rob the actual Egyptians of it. By using false articles and zero evidence, they are still attempting to falsify history.”

  “Cleopatra was born in Alexandria, Egypt in the Ptolemaic dynasty to Greek descent. She was NOT black. This is in no way against black people, and is simply a wake up call to preserve the history and the integrity of the Egyptians and the Greeks.”

  “The show is clearly done to complement the Afrocentric movement, which claims to be the owner of the ancient Egyptian civilization, and to consolidate what the movement promotes. Egypt was never black and it was never white, Egypt is just Egypt. There are many great African/black civilizations, but Egypt was/is NOT one of them. Sign the petition to stop the falsification of history!” 

  Meanwhile, Egypt has been critical of Netflix’s content. It recently demanded the online streaming platform to drop content that runs counter to its “societal values,” such as Western-produced television shows featuring gay and lesbian characters onscreen. 

  So, in Egypt’s view, woke Netflix is distorting history. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 17:00

• In Big Win For Gun-Rights Advocates, Federal Judge Enjoins Illinois' Assault Weapons Ban
  In Big Win For Gun-Rights Advocates, Federal Judge Enjoins Illinois’ Assault Weapons Ban

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  In a major victory for gun rights advocates, U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn has granted a preliminary injunction of Illinois’ ban on assault weapons and large capacity magazines. The decision comes after two other district courts ruled in favor of the law — sending this issue to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and potentially the Supreme Court.  These long-awaited challenges will test the Democratic calls for removing all AR-15s and similar weapons, including calls from President Joe Biden.

  

  I have previously raised doubts over some of these laws, which are based on questionable factual claims and distinctions between weapons. Indeed, President Biden has made dubious constitutional and historical claims about the Second Amendment and AR-15s.

  Illinois and New York have previously supplied gun rights advocates with huge victories by drafting facially unconstitutional laws. Moderate efforts at gun control are often ramped up in the legislative process to become more and more sweeping.

  McGlynn recognized that gun bans are popular in states like Illinois but noted that “even legislation that may enjoy the support of a majority of its citizens must fail if it violates the constitutional rights of fellow citizens.”

  The court tackles the argument made by many gun control advocates that states can ban “non-essential accessories” like magazines because they are not themselves “arms” under the Second Amendment.

  PICA outlaws possession of a “semiautomatic pistol” with a detachable magazine if it is equipped with any of the following: “a threaded barrel,” “a shroud attached to the barrel or that partially or completely encircles the barrel,” “a flash suppressor,” or “arm brace.” PICA further outlaws possession of a magazine for a handgun capable of holding more than 15 rounds of ammunition and of “[a] semiautomatic pistol that has a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 15 rounds.” Defendants contend that such items are not necessary to the functioning of a firearm and are thus not “arms” and therefore not protected by the Second Amendment.

  Defendants’ argument is not persuasive. The Seventh Circuit has recognized the Second Amendment as extending to “corollar[ies] to the meaningful exercise of the core right to possess firearms for self-defense.” It is hard to imagine something more closely correlated to the right to use a firearm in self-defense than the ability to effectively load ammunition into the firearm. The Third Circuit recognized the importance of this corollary and held that “a magazine is an arm under the Second Amendment.”

  McGlynn also stated that it is “bordering on the frivolous” to claim that neither large capacity magazines nor assault weapons are protected because they were not in common use when the Second Amendment was ratified. He cited the long-standing rule that “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”

  The court also rejected the claim that the standard is whether a weapon was in common use for self-defense:

  Bruen clearly holds that the Second Amendment protects “possession and use” of weapons “in common use” not just weapons in common use for self-defense as Defendants’ argued. Even if there was a requirement that the “common use” of an “arm” be self-defense, AR-15 style rifles would meet such a test considering that 34.6% of owners utilize these rifles for self-defense outside of their home and 61.9% utilize them for self-defense at home.

  The court further noted that large capacity magazines are commonly owned and used by sporting enthusiasts and there are more AR-15s than F150s in this country.

  Judge McGlynn also noted that these weapons are commonly used for self-defense and that there are up to 2.5 million instances each year in which civilians used firearms for home defense. He added:

  “In no way does this Court minimize the damage caused when a firearm is used for an unlawful purpose; however, this Court must be mindful of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. While PICA was purportedly enacted in response to the Highland Park shooting, it does not appear that the legislature considered an individual’s right under the Second Amendment nor Supreme Court precedent. Moreover, PICA did not just regulate the rights of the people to defend themselves; it restricted that right, and in some cases, completely obliterated that right by criminalizing the purchase and the sale of more than 190 “arms.” Furthermore, on January 1, 2024, the right to mere possession of these items will be further limited and restricted Accordingly, the balance of harms favors the Plaintiffs.

  The Court recognizes that the issues with which it is confronted are highly contentious and provoke strong emotions. Again, the Court’s ruling today is not a final resolution of the merits of the cases. Nothing in this order prevents the State from confronting firearm-related violence. There is a wide array of civil and criminal laws that permit the commitment and prosecution of those who use or may use firearms to commit crimes. Law enforcement and prosecutors should take their obligations to enforce these laws seriously. Families and the public at large should report concerning behavior. Judges should exercise their prudent judgment in committing individuals that pose a threat to the public and imposing sentences that punish, not just lightly inconvenience, those guilty of firearm-related crimes.”

  Here is the opinion: 2023-04-28-Order-Granting-MPI

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 16:30

• The Great American Opt-Out: A Matter Of Willingness, Willfulness, And Will
  The Great American Opt-Out: A Matter Of Willingness, Willfulness, And Will

  Authored by Bob Maistros via American Greatness,

  A Great American Opt-Out, the partition of the world’s foremost superpower into separate red and blue nations, is certainly not a subject to be taken – nor a suggestion to be made – lightly. 
   

  

  But a superpower won’t remain super when, as Victor Davis Hanson lately lamented, it must “fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential.” 

  These existential yet insoluble problems? They are self-inflicted wounds like weakened security, economic ruin, dysfunctional cities, nonexistent borders, transgender tyranny, and the weaponization of our justice system. 

  And add as a coup de grace—the ultimate point past the point of no return—Joe Biden’s diktat disappearing the internal combustion engine. This will accelerate a death spiral for automakers and power producers already overwhelmed by renewable mandates. It will accentuate energy poverty, lead to decreased private ownership of soon-to-be-unaffordable automobiles, and ultimately actuate a forced flight from capacious suburbs to cramped spaces in family-unfriendly urbs—and a crimped American Dream.

  Why are these problems insoluble? Because any dissent from the ruling class narrative risks persecution, prosecution, “peaceful” (read riotous) protests, lawsuits, suspensions, canceling, and cutoffs of livelihoods and necessities. 

  Moreover, all meaningful avenues to counter mendacious, monolithic misrule by out-of-touch elites remain stubbornly blocked.

  Today’s executive branch is a pen-and-phone and deep state-dominated operation, utterly disdainful of the people it is ostensibly devoted to serve.

  Our justice system systematically weaponizes itself against that citizenry and the judiciary injudiciously generates inventive subversions of its will (See: Obamacare, DACA, transgender rights). 

  Corporate America co-opts portfolios and pension funds to undermine investors’ and workers’ interests in the service of a woke ideology, an even more woke corporate media colludes with one political party, and our woke culture devalues core American values. 

  We have a solve-nothing, spend-everything (and more) Congresses. 

  We have an electoral process that—whether or not irretrievably tainted by systemic fraud and rigged by an elite “cabal”—dubiously delivered not just the White House but also net midterm senatorial, gubernatorial, and state legislative gains to the party of the most decrepit, degenerate, disdained and disaster-inducing presidential incumbent in history. 

  Stein’s Law (as in Herbert) posits, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” America’s paralysis in fixing existential problems cannot go on at all, much less forever, without a ceding of its superpower status—if not a Weimar-level collapse.

  It must stop. Soon. But how? 

  Just as Issues & Insights has documented millions of citizens fleeing blue-state economic, political and social rot, the sole solution for Red America is to simply vote with its feet. 

  That is, walk. Opt out.

  Some suggest the union’s geographically dominant red counties could lead such an exodus. But a more likely route is for red states—perhaps the 18 that unsuccessfully banded together to challenge the 2020 election results—to declare the union dissolved, whether due to that illegitimate outcome or because of the unceasing, extraconstitutional thwarting of sovereignty in the swamp. Perhaps invite red counties in blue jurisdictions to be annexed into neighboring jurisdictions, or even form new states. 

  In either event, it’s not difficult to conceive the formation of a provisional government, pending a new constitution and elections, including current members of Congress and federal judges from departing states, and an executive of existing governors. 

  Nor is it difficult to conceive the negotiation of dissolution terms, as previously suggested, including a joint defense pact and shared assumption of responsibility for unfunded liabilities. (Division of “trust funds?” A mere fiction in a nation $31 trillion in debt.) 

  An overwhelmingly conservative government could otherwise set about dismantling the nanny state in its jurisdictions while instituting the remedies to current maladies Victor Davis Hanson also identified.

  In short, the logistics and implementation of partition are imaginable and manageable. The musts to muster? The willingness to admit that “out” is the only sustainable avenue to making America great again, given the hijacking of its commanding heights. The willfulness to advocate and agitate for that result. And the will to see a separation through. 

  Those elements may seem far off and unattainable given the lack of seriousness with which partition suggestions have been regarded to date, even among conservatives, and its regrettable association with the ill-fated and immoral Confederate cause. 

  But where was the transgenderism now darkly gripping America even a few years back? Who foresaw Black Lives Matter’s rapid rise and the rule of law’s sudden suspension? Or the Green New Deal’s nanosecond-long advance from political punch line to administration policy? 

  Opt-out must proceed, to succeed, with the same insistence, sense of urgency and level of volume as those efforts. Starting with igniting and incessantly fanning a fire in forums like these. Making it a theme of an unceasing series conservative gatherings and marches and hearings. Confronting candidates for every office at every level at every opportunity and thereby choosing and encouraging champions. 

  At America’s accelerated rate of decline, there is not a moment to waste. And with every elite political, economic, social, cultural, and judicial institution mobilized against its citizenry, no further “point of no return” to be passed.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 15:30

• 200 Years Of Global Gold Production, By Country
  200 Years Of Global Gold Production, By Country

  Although the practice of gold mining has been around for thousands of years, it’s estimated that roughly 86% of all above-ground gold was extracted in the last 200 years.

  With modern mining techniques making large-scale production possible, global gold production has grown exponentially since the 1800s.

  In the infographic below, Visual Capitalist‘s Govind Bhutada and Miranda Smith, using data from Our World in Data, visualizes global gold production by country from 1820 to 2022, showing how gold mining has evolved to become increasingly global over time.

  

  A Brief History of Gold Mining

  The best-known gold rush in modern history occurred in California in 1848, when James Marshall discovered gold in Sacramento Valley. As word spread, thousands of migrants flocked to California in search of gold, and by 1855, miners had extracted around $2 billion worth of gold.

  The United States, Australia, and Russia were (interchangeably) the three largest gold producers until the 1890s. Then, South Africa took the helm thanks to the massive discovery in the Witwatersrand Basin, now regarded today as one of the world’s greatest ever goldfields.

  South Africa’s annual gold production peaked in 1970 at 1,002 tonnes—by far the largest amount of gold produced by any country in a year.

  With the price of gold rising since the 1980s, global gold production has become increasingly widespread. By 2007, China was the world’s largest gold-producing nation, and today a significant quantity of gold is being mined in over 40 countries.

  The Top Gold-Producing Countries in 2022

  Around 31% of the world’s gold production in 2022 came from three countries—China, Russia, and Australia, with each producing over 300 tonnes of the precious metal.

  

  North American countries Canada, the U.S., and Mexico round out the top six gold producers, collectively making up 16% of the global total. The state of Nevada alone accounted for 72% of U.S. production, hosting the world’s largest gold mining complex (including six mines) owned by Nevada Gold Mines.

  Meanwhile, South Africa produced 110 tonnes of gold in 2022, down by 74% relative to its output of 430 tonnes in 2000. This long-term decline is the result of mine closures, maturing assets, and industrial conflict, according to the World Gold Council.

  Interestingly, two smaller gold producers on the list, Uzbekistan and Indonesia, host the second and third-largest gold mining operations in the world, respectively.

  The Outlook for Global Gold Production

  As of April 25, gold prices were hovering around the $2,000 per ounce mark and nearing all-time highs. For mining companies, higher gold prices can mean more profits per ounce if costs remain unaffected.

  According to the World Gold Council, mined gold production is expected to increase in 2023 and could surpass the record set in 2018 (3,300 tonnes), led by the expansion of existing projects in North America. The chances of record mine output could be higher if gold prices continue to increase.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 15:00

• Cash Use Rises As Households Struggle To Cope With High Inflation
  Cash Use Rises As Households Struggle To Cope With High Inflation

  Authored by Bryan Jung via The Epoch Times,

  Cash payments have made a comeback as households struggle to cope with high inflation, according to a new study.

  

  After decades of falling cash use, the impact of the rapid inflation growth has been reversing the trend toward digital.

  Credit Karma and The Harris Poll conducted a survey last month, which showed that 53 percent of adults in the United States and 46 percent in the United Kingdom are more likely to use cash than a year ago, reported Bloomberg.

  Individuals preferring cash rose 19 and 4 percentage points, respectively, over those who did not use it more.

  Roughly three in five cash users in both countries said using physical money makes them spend less.

  The change in preferences towards cash over digital is also a reaction to the growing dominance of the latter, such as Apple Pay to Venmo to tappable credit cards, which some consumers say make it too easy to spend through their budget.

  Over two-thirds of the 3,171 survey respondents admit that digital payment methods made them spend more than intended.

  Cash Use Rises Among Young

  High inflation rates have made people more self-conscious about what they spend daily, especially in the U.K., where price gains remain above 10 percent.

  “As the world is getting back to normal after the pandemic and prices are going up significantly, we see cash as being one of the most enduring ways of managing money,” said Courtney Alev, an associate director of product management at Credit Karma.

  “It really transcends generations and financial situations.”

  The surge in cash use was especially pronounced among younger generations, such as Millennials and Gen Z, the survey found.

  Younger consumers facing hard times are following the trend towards “cash-stuffing” by watching TikTok videos, that teach people how to separate their cash into different envelopes to use for different expenses, much like their grandparents or great-grandparents might have done during the Great Depression.

  Consumers are also utilizing social media venues like Facebook to avoid businesses that do not accept cash.

  Natalie Ceeney, chairwoman of Cash Access UK, told Bloomberg, “a lot of the theory on payments has been to remove friction,” and that “actually, a lot of people want friction back.”

  Cash Access’s mission is to promote easier access to cash following legislation to stem its decline.

  

  A woman holds British pound banknotes in this illustration taken on May 30, 2022. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

  Ceeney said that studies found a large increase in sales when businesses in personal contact with consumers, such as the sports industry, switch to contactless payments.

  “One of the reasons is people are more likely to just tap and buy things without thinking, ‘Gosh, that’s a lot of money.’”

  Some fintech companies are trying to assist struggling consumers by introducing features that help with setting limits on everyday spending, reported Bloomberg.

  Digital Currency Proposed

  The survey findings suggest that the recovery in payments in cash after pandemic lows might not be temporary, as studies by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England seem to confirm.

  The BOE noted in October that it had seen a “sustained, if partial, recovery in cash use” post-pandemic and that banknotes in circulation have risen close to a historic high.

  The U.K. bank, Nationwide Building Society, reported in January that more than 30.2 million withdrawals were made from its ATMs last year, a 19 percent jump from 2021, likely due to the rising cost of living.

  The British central bank said that the use of paper currency and coins are especially useful for lower-income households that are struggling to deal with inflated costs, ranging from food to rent payments.

  Meanwhile, central banks worldwide, including the BOE, are pushing ahead with plans to introduce digital versions of their currencies, which is a very unpopular move among the public.

  Privacy advocates worry about a loss of privacy and the potential for government surveillance if digital currencies become mandatory.

  The Fed itself published a paper outlining the benefits of a digital dollar, but officials say there will be no “Fedcoin” without any action by Congress.

  The continuous rise in cash use may depend on how the central banks will manage to tame stubbornly high inflation rates in the coming months.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 14:30

• Vultures Circling: Bearish Bets Against REITs Soar As CRE Meltdown Risks Mount
  Vultures Circling: Bearish Bets Against REITs Soar As CRE Meltdown Risks Mount

  As storm clouds gather over the commercial real estate market, it faces ever-darker prospects by the week. Short-seller vultures are circling above CRE REITs, targeting these investment vehicles with significant exposures to office, retail, and hotel with massive bearish bets on the hope “more borrowers will default on office debt as interest costs increase and property values fall,” as reported by Bloomberg. 

  New data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence shows short interest in some of the largest REITs with exposure to commercial properties, Blackstone Mortgage Trust Inc. and Starwood Property Trust Inc., have soared in recent weeks. 

  Hedge funds are making bearish bets in the credit derivatives and equities spaces on the premise remote and hybrid work will continue to paralyze demand for tier 2 and 3 properties and crush landlords. Data from broker Cushman & Wakefield indicates office vacancy rates are rising at alarming rates. 

  The gold-standard measure of office occupancy trends is the card-swipe data provided by Kastle Systems. The average office occupancy nationwide is around 46%, still well off the highs from pre-pandemic levels. 

  

  The problem now is borrowers lack new tenants, which means default risk increases and negatively impacts REITs. These investment vehicles generate revenue from the spread between their capital costs and the interest rates charged to borrowers for loans. 

  Gavriel Kahane, the co-founder of real estate investment firm Arkhouse, warned there’s mounting concern among top investors about “ballooning defaults on held loans” due partly to higher refinancing costs. He noted:

  “Mortgage REITs in general do better when the Fed funds rate stays constant, and in this hyper-turbulent environment distress bubbles up.” 

  The surge in bearish bets is an ominous sign market participants recognize the CRE space is headed for severe pain. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported a delinquency rate on office loans across all lenders climbed to 2.7% at the end of 2022, up from 1.6% in the previous quarter. We suspect that the rate will continue to rise throughout this year.  

  Bloomberg noted, “Office loans are a minority of the portfolios for the mortgage REITs that are being shorted.” 

  Recall last month, we pointed out that regional banking turmoil would have spillover effects in the CRE space — especially the office sector (Read: New “Big Short” Hits Record Low As Focus Turns To $400 Billion CRE Debt Maturity Wall). And since then, JPM, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs have all joined the CRE gloom parade. 

  We highlighted the next big short: BBB- tranches of CMBX Series 15, due to its outsized exposure to office commercial real estate…

  

  BBB- tranches of CMBX Series 15 is sliding again. 

  

  We also cautioned about a large maturity wall in the CRE sector, with $400 billion of debt due this year. Morgan Stanley data shows $2.5 trillion in CRE debt comes due over the next five years.

  

  Perhaps last week’s Vornado Realty Trust announcement about delaying its dividend is a harbinger of what’s to come. The REIT just hit a 27-year low. 

  

  Read this: 

  “We expect private equity and commercial real estate to suffer as regional banks were disproportionate funders of these sectors and the crisis has shut leveraged lending primary markets for the time being,” fund managers James Hanbury and Jamie Grimston of Brook Asset Management wrote in a letter to investors seen by Bloomberg.

  The latest BofA Fund Managers Survey (available to pro subs in the usual place) shows institutional players are most bearish on real estate since 2009.

  

  Meanwhile, CRE Billionaire Sam Zell recently told New York University graduate students that remote work is a “bunch of bullshit” and that they should dismiss the idea of working from home. It might be hard for Zell to persuade folks to return to the office. These work trends seem permanent and will exert pressure on the CRE space, with mounting risks of a default wave. The dominos appear to be already falling. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 14:00

• MIT Scientists Create New Nanoparticle Sensors To Detect Early Cancer Via Simple Paper Test
  MIT Scientists Create New Nanoparticle Sensors To Detect Early Cancer Via Simple Paper Test

  Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed nanoparticle sensors that could diagnose early-stage cancer through a simple urine test on a strip of paper.

  

  The scientists said these sensors, designed to detect many cancerous proteins, could also distinguish the type of tumor, how it responds to treatment, and whether it has metastasized.

  “We are trying to innovate in a context of making technology available to low- and middle-resource settings. Putting this diagnostic on paper is part of our goal of democratizing diagnostics and creating inexpensive technologies that can give you a fast answer at the point of care,” said Sangeeta Bhatia, a biomedical engineer at MIT and senior author of the study published on April 24 in Nature Nanotechnology.

  Bhatia’s team had initially investigated the concept of detecting naturally occurring cancer biomarkers, such as proteins or circulating tumor cells, in the patient’s blood samples. However, these biomarkers are hard to find, especially at early stages, prompting the team to create “synthetic biomarkers” that could diagnose cancer by amplifying small-scale changes occurring within small tumors.

  Nanoparticles previously created by the team can detect the activity of proteases, biological catalysts that can help tumor cells spread. However, since this equipment is not always available, the researchers developed new nanoparticle sensors that could be analyzed more easily and affordably using a technology that reads repetitive DNA sequences called CRISPR.

  Specifically, the nanosensors are designed so that when they encounter a tumor, they shed short sequences of DNA that will eventually end up in the patient’s urine. The urine sample can be analyzed using a paper strip that recognizes a signal activated by a CRISPR enzyme called Cas12a. When a particular DNA “barcode” is present, Cas12a enhances the signal so it appears as a dark strip on the paper test.

  In a study conducted in mice, the scientists showed that a panel of five DNA barcodes could accurately distinguish tumors that first arose in the lungs from tumors formed by colorectal cancer cells that had metastasized. The team also collaborated with other institutions to build a device to distinguish at least 46 DNA barcodes in a single sample.

  The scientists said they are now working on further developing the nanoparticles, with the goal of testing them in humans.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 13:30

• Democrat Cities Have Biggest Homicide Rate Problem, Study Finds
  Democrat Cities Have Biggest Homicide Rate Problem, Study Finds

  The Democratic Party aggressively promoted the idea of ‘defunding the police’ after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer in 2020, which was supposed to improve public safety. A few years later, a new study found the homicide rate in Democrat cities is on the rise and a sign progressive policies are failing. 

  In a study published by WalletHub, researchers found “homicide rates have risen by an average of roughly 10% in 45 of the most populated U.S. cities between Q1 2021 and Q1 2023, and are still rising.” 

  The cities with the biggest homicide rate problems include Memphis, Tennesse; New Orleans, Louisana; Richmond, Virginia; Washington, DC; and Detroit, Michigan. Democrat mayors lead all five cities. 

  

  Researchers pointed out that murders were rising faster in Democrat-led cities than Republican-led cities. 

  

  Separately, Chidike Okeem, an assistant professor at Western New England University, told the NYPost that defunding the police movements directly correlates with the rise in violence. 

  “As a response to the social unrest, some officers have embraced ‘de-policing,’ which is the idea of not engaging in proactive policing practices in order to avoid increased scrutiny and censure. Without pronounced police presence, violence proliferates,” Okeem said.

  A University of Central Missouri Professor, Gregg Etter, went further and blamed no-cash bail as a significant driver in the alarming rise of homicide rates in major cities. 

  “If you have a problem with police use of force in isolated instances, rather than deal with the problem or the problem officers, defund the police. This results in a less-effective police force, increased response times, lower police morale, and an increasing unwillingness by the police to engage in proactive policing,” Etter said.

  And it’s not just homicide rates that are moving higher. Retail thefts and carjackings are soaring. Democrats have yet to take accountability for their failed social justice reforms. As a result, businesses and people are quickly exiting these dangerous cities for safer places. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 13:00

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• 'Equity' And The Race To The Bottom
  ‘Equity’ And The Race To The Bottom

  Authored by Jack Miller via RealClear Wire,

  Over the last few years, the rallying cry of “woke” activists has become “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (often abbreviated to DEI). There is little reason to object to such principles on the surface. After all, America was founded on the principle that all people are created equal. Unfortunately, the meaning of words can change over time.  

  

  Rather than the Founders’ vision of equal opportunity for all, the use of the word “equity” today denotes equal outcomes for all. The implementation of this “equity agenda,” however well-intentioned, will lead to terrible consequences. 

  One of the prophets who warned us about the dangers of this understanding of equity was the great twentieth-century novelist Kurt Vonnegut. In his 1961 short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” Vonnegut imagined a society with perfect equity. “Nobody was smarter than anybody else,” the narrator says. “Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” 

  As Vonnegut shows, a society looking to equalize outcomes for all citizens is no utopia – it is instead a nightmarish horror. The only way to guarantee equal results is to handicap everyone so that they perform at the lowest common level. In the terrifying world of “Harrison Bergeron,” for instance, the government burdens ballerinas “with sashweights and bags of birdshot” so they cannot move more beautifully than anyone else.

  The push for “equity” in American society today resembles Vonnegut’s dystopia – but nowhere more dangerously than in the education system. 

  At the university level, DEI bureaucracies have grown to absurd sizes, and they dominate much of campus life. A 2021 Heritage Foundation report found 163 DEI personnel at the University of Michigan, 94 at the University of Virginia and 94 at Ohio State, 86 at the University of California Berkeley, 83 at Virginia Tech, and 80 at Stanford (where Associate Dean for DEI Tirien Steinbach was recently put on leave for galvanizing an unruly protest by confronting a U.S. circuit judge who was trying to deliver a campus lecture). 

  In a growing number of K-12 schools across the country, such as at Culver City High School in the Los Angeles area, honors classes are being eliminated so as not to “perpetuate inequality.” Proponents of this idea say that some students can still obtain an honors “label” by doing extra work. 

  But more often than not, teachers are simply slowing down instruction for everyone. Students are increasingly taught at the lowest common denominator rather than being challenged to do their best. As one student recently told the Wall Street Journal, “There are some people who slow down the pace because they don’t really do anything and aren’t looking to try harder.” 

  Current DEI regulations at the federal and state level, as well-intentioned as these regulations may be, are fostering this approach and handicapping our education system. For example, the Department of Education’s 2022 Equity Agency Plan goes so far as to connect DEI policies directly to federal funding for local schools. In their pursuit of “ensuring equity,” ideologues are killing opportunity for America’s students. 

  The American Dream is that all citizens will have an equal opportunity to achieve their goals based on their individual talents and hard work. The Declaration of Independence does not guarantee happiness to every citizen – it only guarantees the pursuit of happiness. 

  But the pursuit of the modern idea of “equity” rather than true equality is simply a race to the bottom. Socialist regimes in Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, and so many other places show that radical egalitarianism simply does not work. America is more successful than these failed experiments because we cling to the principle of equality rightly understood. We cannot let that slip away. 

  The good news is that many parents are mobilizing against far-left excesses. At the ballot box, school board meetings, and even at the dinner table, parents are standing up and saying enough is enough. They do not want to sacrifice academic excellence for grand social experiments. They want their kids to become educated and ambitious, not indoctrinated and complacent.

  Most Americans believe in equality. We want to make sure that everyone has, to the greatest extent possible, an equal place at the starting line. From there, each individual has the freedom to achieve what their desires, ability, and hard work make possible. 

  Achieving that kind of equality is the American dream, the engine that enables people from any walk of life to realize their dreams. Equity, as activists preach it, trades away this American heritage for abstractions and fantasies. Americans should instead hold fast to the political principles that have guided us to marvelous success and prosperity for nearly 250 years.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/30/2023 – 00:00

• Texas Senate Passes Legislation Banning 'Hostile Foreign Nations' From Buying Farmland
  Texas Senate Passes Legislation Banning ‘Hostile Foreign Nations’ From Buying Farmland

  The Texas state senate passed legislation this week banning the purchase of farmland by citizens and entities linked to hostile foreign nations, a move which the author of the bill says will provide “sweeping state and national security protections.”

  

  “This bill protects Texas farmland, oil and gas, rare earth materials and timber from being owned by foreign entities classified as hostile by the Director of U.S. National Intelligence for three consecutive reports. These nations currently include China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran,” wrote Sen . Lois Kolkhorst (R) following the passage of her legislation by a vote of 19-12 in the state Senate on April 26.

  According to a 2022 threat assessment report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), China, Russia, Iran and North Korea pose the biggest threats to US national security. The report says that the CCP presents “the broadest, most active, and persistent cyber espionage threat to the U.S. Government and private sector networks.”

  The Texas bill, SB 147, was introduced last November by Kolkhorst, and has the support of Gov. Greg Abbott (R). That said, the language of the original bill was toned down following criticism from some Democrats and locals over the bill banning property purchases of any individual who is “a citizen of China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia.”

  In the final draft, the ban does not apply to lawful permanent residents, US citizens or dual citizens.

  The property which the bill applies to includes agricultural land, improvements, mines and quarries, mineral deposits, and standing timber.

  It also grants the Texas attorney general the authority to investigate potential violations if “reasonable suspicion” exists that an individual or entity making a property purchase is associated with one of the designated countries.

  “Texas is rich in its natural resources and is home to invaluable strategic military bases and installations. With SB 147, we can protect our Texas food supply and energy resources as well,” wrote Kolkhorst – who built this legislation to dovetail with SB 2116 – the state’s “Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act,” which makes it illegal for Texas governments and businesses to make critical infrastructure deals with entities from the banned list.

  Texas Democrats are upset.

  “Even with the amendments offered, this legislation still takes away the rights of an entire class of people without due process and solely on the basis of their national origin,” wrote Rep. Gene Wu, an outspoken critic of Kolkhorst’s legislation, adding that he’s “frustrated by the Senate’s passage of SB 147 in its current form.”

  “National security is a serious issue, but if we are concerned about the actions of foreign governments, then legislation should only affect foreign governments and their agents,” Wu continued. “Our community will continue to work, in the Texas House, to eliminate the unnecessarily discriminatory aspects of this bill.”

  Not all Texas Democrats…

  State Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, a co-author of SB 147, is the lone Democrat who voted in favor of the bill on Wednesday.

  “We’re not trying to target people. We’re trying to target nations that pose a security risk to this great nation of ours,” he said. “It’s incorrect to say that this bill is discriminatory.”

  “We should not overlook the point that many of these nations are a threat to our security,” Hinojosa continued, adding that these countries “have made it very clear that they want to destroy our country, destroy our democracy, destroy our way of life.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 23:30

• CJ Hopkins Advice To RFK Jr: "F**k It, F**k Them… Tell The Truth… The Angry, Uncensored Truth"
  CJ Hopkins Advice To RFK Jr: “F**k It, F**k Them… Tell The Truth… The Angry, Uncensored Truth”

  Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

  The Great Divide

  Robert Kennedy, Jr. is running for president. I could not possibly be more excited. So, I’m going to give Bobby some unsolicited advice, which, if he knows what’s good for him, he will not take.

  I feel OK about doing this because, even if Bobby, in the wee hours of the night, when the mind is vulnerable to dangerous ideas, were to seriously consider taking my advice, I am sure he has people — i.e., PR people, campaign strategists, pollsters, and so on — that would not hesitate to take him aside and disabuse him of any inclination to do that.

  OK, before I give Bobby this terrible advice, I have to do the “full disclosure” thing. I’m a pretty big fan of RFK, Jr. I don’t generally get involved in electoral politics, but, if I were a Democrat, I would definitely vote for him. Also, he was kind enough to blurb my book (which isn’t going to make his PR people happy) and invite me onto his podcast, RFK, Jr. The Defender, to talk about “New Normal” totalitarianism. So, I am fairly biased in favor of Bobby Kennedy. I think he is an admirable, honorable human being. I would love to see him in the Oval Office.

  

  That isn’t going to happen, of course. The global-capitalist ruling classes are never going to let him near the Oval Office. They learned their lesson back in 2016. There are not going to be any more unauthorized presidents. The folks at GloboCap are done playing grab-ass, and they want us to know that they are done playing grab-ass. That’s what the last six years have been about.

  As I put it in a column in January, 2021 …

  “… This, basically, is what we’ve just experienced. The global capitalist ruling classes have just reminded us who is really in charge, who the US military answers to, and how quickly they can strip away the facade of democracy and the rule of law. They have reminded us of this for the last ten months, by putting us under house arrest, beating and arresting us for not following orders, for not wearing masks, for taking walks without permission, for having the audacity to protest their decrees, for challenging their official propaganda, about the virus, the election results, etc. They are reminding us currently by censoring dissent, and deplatforming anyone they deem a threat to their official narratives and ideology … GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it. They just installed a new puppet president, who can’t even simulate mental acuity, in a locked-down, military-guarded ceremony which no one was allowed to attend, except a few members of the ruling classes. They got some epigone of Albert Speer to convert the Mall (where the public normally gathers) into a ‘field of flags‘ symbolizing ‘unity.’ They even did the Nazi ‘Lichtdom‘ thing. To hammer the point home, they got Lady Gaga to dress up as a Hunger Games character with a ‘Mockingjay’ brooch and sing the National Anthem. They broadcast this spectacle to the entire world.”

  Does that sound like the behavior of an unaccountable, supranational power apparatus that is prepared to stand by and let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., or Donald Trump, or any other unauthorized person, become the next president of the United States?

  So, here’s my bad advice for Bobby.

  Fuck them. They’re not going to let you win, anyway. They are going to smear you, slime you, demonize you, distort every other thing you say, and just generally lie about who you are and what you believe in and what you stand for. They are going to paint you as a bull-goose-loony, formerly smack-addled, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-vax fanatic no matter what you do. If you tone down your act and try to “heal the divide” and “end the division,” they are going to have you for lunch, and then sit around picking their teeth with your bones. You know, and I know, and the American people know, that the things you say you want to do as president — which I know you sincerely want to do as president and are crazy enough to actually try to do, i.e., “to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country” — are things … well, as Michael Corleone once put it, that they would “use all their power to keep from happening.”

  So, fuck it, and fuck them. Tell the truth.

  Not the ready-for-prime-time truth. Not the toned-down-for-mainstream-consumption truth.

  The truth. The ugly, unvarnished truth. The scary, crazy-sounding truth.

  The angry, divisive, uncensored truth.

  Yes, there is a “divide.” A great divide. A chasm. A schism. A gulf. An abyss. A gaping, yawning, unbridgeable fissure. A Grand Canyon-sized fault in the foundation of society. A rupture in the very fabric of reality.

  As I noted in another 2021 column, the global-capitalist ruling classes have decommissioned one “reality” and are replacing it with another “reality” … corporate feudalism, pathologized totalitarianism, global corporatism, or whatever anybody wants to call it. Whatever we call it, everyone feels it. OK, I’m going to be obnoxious and quote myself again …

  “During the changeover from the old ‘reality’ to the new ‘reality,’ the society is torn apart. The old ‘reality’ is being disassembled and the new one has not yet taken its place. It feels like madness, and, in a way, it is. For a time, the society is split in two, as the two ‘realities’ battle it out for dominance. ‘Reality’ being what it is (i.e., monolithic), this is a fight to the death. In the end, only one ‘reality’ can prevail.”

  The folks at GloboCap are right on the verge of permanently implementing their new “reality.” In that “reality,” an apocalyptic virus (with a survival rate of roughly 99.7%) nearly wiped out the entire planet, and would have, if not for the Emergency Health Measures (i.e., mass house arrest, forced conformity rituals, cancellation of constitutional rights, censorship of dissent, official propaganda on a scale that even Goebbels could never have dreamed of, fomenting of mass hysteria and hatred, segregation and persecution of a designated scapegoat underclass) imposed on society by our admittedly imperfect but well-intentioned government and global health authorities. In that “reality,” the “vaccines” they forced on billions of people (who did not need them) are “safe and effective” (despite the fact, which even they now acknowledge, that they have seriously injured or killed millions of people). In that “reality,” a few hundred unarmed Trump supporters horsing around in the Capitol Building was an “insurrection,” or “attempted coup,” or … well, you get the picture. There are no neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. The Russians blew up their own pipelines. And so on.

  What I am trying to get at, Bobby, is that those of us who have refused to convert to the new “reality” — which I am guessing is approximately 25-30% of the global population — are not looking for a leader who can “heal the divide.” We are in a fight. We are fighting for reality. We’re fighting for what’s left of reality.

  And, at the moment, we are getting our asses kicked.

  

  So, fuck it. What have you got to lose? Throw out the playbook. Fire your PR people. Go for broke. Tell the truth. Tell folks what we’re up against. That it isn’t something an election is going to fix. That it isn’t something a new president can fix. That it isn’t fixable. That it is a fucking fight. And not one according to the Queensberry Rules. A ball-kicking, eye-gouging, chair-swinging, bar fight. And that sometimes, like now, when there is nowhere to run to … well, you have to stand and fight, even if you know you’re going to lose.

  That’s it. That’s my bad advice for Bobby. Hopefully, one of his staff will spot it and delete it before he reads his email.

  Otherwise, I’m afraid he might be tempted to take it. He’s already leaning in that direction.

  And … well, you know how those Irish love a good fight.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 23:00

• Vegas Baby! (Or South Korea's 'Hawaii'): These Are The Busiest Air Routes In The World And Stateside
  Vegas Baby! (Or South Korea’s ‘Hawaii’): These Are The Busiest Air Routes In The World And Stateside

  The busiest air routes in the world are all domestic flights. Yet, the frequent flyer nation of the United States can’t hold the candle to the high demand for air travel in Asia.

  There, the busiest route has the capacity to transport more than three times as many people in a month than the busiest U.S. route.

  Data published for the month of April by air travel analytics firm OAG shows that the route connecting Gimpo airport in the South Korean capital of Seoul and country’s Jeju island is the world’s busiest.

  

  The “Hawaii of South Korea” is popular among domestic tourists.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Among the world’s and the U.S.’ most flown routes, tourism and entertainment destinations pop up repeatedly, while island locations also have a leg up.

  This includes the world’s second-busiest route between Tokyo and Japan’s Northern island of Hokkaido, a year-round tourist destination.

  In the U.S., the two most-flown routes connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas as well as two Hawaiian islands.

  Some island routes have also popularized short flights as ground transportation is either not an option or is the more complicated, time-consuming and expensive choice. While the inter-Hawaiian route is the briefest in the ranking, the world’s busiest leg between Seoul and Jeju island is the third-shortest. The flight route linking the United States’ biggest cities across a distance of almost 2,500 miles is an outlier in that sense. As the most popular air routes over land are typically 400-700 miles long, the inclusion of the JFK-LAX route does highlight the extraordinary reliance the U.S. places on air travel to keep the country connected.

  International flights are a more pricy and sometimes more complicated way to travel and therefore attract fewer passengers.

  The busiest route this April is connecting Egyptian capital Cairo with Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, the gateway to Muslim pilgrimage place Mecca.

  This month (which falls into Hajj season) almost 450,000 people will be flying on the route – still more than on the busiest U.S. journey.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 22:30

• AOC Is Wrong – Deplatforming Never Works
  AOC Is Wrong – Deplatforming Never Works

  Authored by John Mac Ghlionn via The Epoch Times,

  Soon after Tucker Carlson left Fox News, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, more commonly known by her initials AOC, celebrated on social media, telling her followers that “deplatforming works.”

  .@AOC on @TuckerCarlson: “Deplatforming works and it is important.” pic.twitter.com/AZZj0wd3S9

  — Donna, Independent 🌺🗽🇺🇸⏳ (@TruthFreedomPe1) April 25, 2023

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

  Deplatforming, the practice of preventing an individual with specific views from voicing those views, might work for her, but it’s a disaster for broader society, according to a new peer-reviewed study (pdf).

  

  The research, carried out by four esteemed cyber experts, warns that deplatforming regularly backfires, because it creates a sense of deep-seated resentment, driving the disenchanted and disillusioned to seek out “alternative platforms where these discussions are less regulated and often more extreme.”

  In this particular study, the researchers analyzed changes in social media usage following the “Great Deplatforming” of 2021. For the uninitiated, the “Great Deplatforming” occurred shortly after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Following the event, a number of major platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, banned thousands of accounts. Ostensibly, as the researchers note, this was done to “limit misinformation about voter fraud and suppress calls for violence.” However, other less regulated platforms like Parler and BitChute were quick to give the homeless a home. In this age of maximum choice, with no shortage of alternative social media platforms, deplatforming is an ineffective tool. It’s the equivalent of taking a soup spoon to a knife fight. You simply can’t make people with alternative points of view disappear. These people will almost always find new homes.

  One of the authors of the study, Martin Innes, a professor of crime, intelligence, and security at Cardiff University, told me that “deplatforming can have complex effects and not always those that are intended, including boosting the popularity of the target.”

  Furthermore, “deplatforming can actually increase the toxicity of discourse and make the problems worse on the platform that people migrate to.”

  In truth, he added, deplatforming tends to just displace the problem, not actually solve it.

  As Innes and his colleagues note in the paper, contrary to popular belief, deplatforming is not “an effective tool for reducing the impact of malign actors on the public.” In fact, they contend, “deplatforming is ineffective at improving the information space,” simply because “banned actors can migrate to less regulated platforms, potentially promoting even more radical ideas.”

  These findings echo the findings of other research papers. In 2021, Innes was part of another study that examined the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of deplatforming. Innes and his co-author coined the term “minion accounts” to describe how, following a “de-platforming intervention,” a number of secondary accounts are established to “continue the mission.”

  When it comes to the creation of “minion accounts,” Andrew Tate, a man I have discussed in great detail elsewhere, is a shining example of the ineffectiveness of deplatforming. When he was unceremoniously booted off the Holy Quadrinity—YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok—last year, a whole host of fake accounts, powered by real people and tireless bots, quickly popped up, helping to keep the Tate-fueled fire burning.

  Those in charge would have us believe that deplatforming is for our own good, that it’s a tool designed to curb the spread of disinformation. However, one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Deplatforming is, first and foremost, a form of social control. It’s designed to amplify certain narratives and silence others, perhaps explaining why AOC, a controversial individual with a very strict set of beliefs, appears to be such a fan of the practice.

  All of this brings us back to Tucker Carlson, a man who won’t (and can’t) be silenced. Carlson is, in many ways, bigger than Fox News. He’s a brand, a celebrity, a highly bankable star. One needn’t possess more than a few functioning neurons to know that Carlson is going to be OK. In fact, because of his ouster, he has never been in a stronger position. Carlson is more marketable now than ever before.

  Where will he go next? Rumble, perhaps. The remarkably popular online video platform service gives content makers a great degree of freedom. Russell Brand, one of the most popular public intellectuals in existence, is Rumble’s biggest asset. He currently boasts more than 1 million followers. Adding Carlson to its ever-expanding family would boost Rumble’s profile. It would also give Carlson a platform to continue preaching his rather unique gospel. The provocateur extraordinaire will be back. Watch this space.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 22:00

• The State Of 'Democracy' Around The World
  The State Of ‘Democracy’ Around The World

  Only 8% of the world’s population actually lives in a full, functioning democracy, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

  Meanwhile, another 37% of people live in some type of “flawed democracy”, while 55% of the world does not live in democracy at all, based on the EIU’s latest Democracy Index Report.

  As Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop and Joyce Mas detail below, events such as the war in Ukraine and restrictive, long-lasting COVID-19 measures, have caused numerous declines to country democracy scores in recent years. Since the source report first began tracking scores in 2006, the global average has fallen from 5.52 to 5.29.

  

  The Methodology

  The EIU measures democracy by assessing 60 indicators across five key categories:

  1. Electoral process and pluralism
  2. Political culture
  3. Political participation
  4. Functioning of government
  5. Civil liberties

  Each category has a rank of 0-10 based on how the indicators fared, and the overall democracy score is an average of each of the five categories. For example, here’s a look at the U.S.’ scoring out of 10 in each of the overall categories in 2022:

  

  This score defines the U.S. as a flawed democracy and ranks it 30th overall in the world, down four spots from last year’s ranking.

  “Flawed” in this case simply means there are problems, ranging from poor political culture to governance issues, but flawed democracies are still considered to have free and fair elections, as well as civil liberties.

  The World’s Democracies by Region

  Below we map out the state of democracy across various regions around the world.

  The Americas

  

  One of the best performers year-over-year was Chile, with its score increasing by nearly 0.3. The country moved out of the flawed democracy category last year, largely because of the shift towards constitutional reform alongside President Gabriel Boric moving towards the political center, reducing polarization.

  Only three other countries in the Americas are also considered full democracies: Costa Rica, Canada, and Uruguay—the latter of which is #1 regionally.

  On the flipside, some of the world’s worst performers year-over-year are located specifically in Latin America, namely: El Salvador and Haiti. Much of the low scores in the region are associated with high crime rates and corrupt governance.

  Africa

  

  The only full democracy in Africa is the small, island nation of Mauritius. Overall, Africa is one of the lowest scoring regions with only five of the continent’s 54 countries ranking as some type of democracy.

  Tunisia’s score decreased significantly in 2022. President Kais Saied dismissed parliament early in the year and took control of the electoral council, slowly shifting towards centralized power. And although there were critics, many have since been arrested, downgrading them in the EIU’s eyes from a flawed democracy to a hybrid regime.

  Europe

  

  Spain and France regained status as full democracies in 2022, mainly improving in the civil liberties and functioning of government categories thanks to the easing of COVID-19 restrictions. However, both countries face political polarization; in Spain this is largely exemplified in the attitudes surrounding the Catalan separatist movement.

  Some of the lowest scoring regimes in the region are in Russia and Belarus. Russia’s war in Ukraine has violated international law, as well as another country’s sovereignty, decimating its score by 0.96 in the index. Belarus has continually allied itself with Russia, allowing troops—and likely missiles—to enter Ukraine from its borders.

  Oceania and East Asia

  

  In this region, levels of democracy were severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hong Kong only removed restrictive policies like mask mandates in early 2023. In contrast, Thailand lifted these restrictions a year prior, providing more individual freedom, according to the report.

  Malaysia’s fairly high score of 7.3 could face scrutiny, as the former Prime Minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, who was in office during COVID-19, is currently facing corruption charges for money laundering of COVID-19 stimulus package funds.

  Central Asia and The Middle East

  

  Finally, in the Middle East and Central Asia, there are no full democracies at all. The lowest scoring country globally is Afghanistan at only 0.32.

  Israel, the only democracy of any kind of the region, actually moved down six spots in the global ranking from the year prior. Its lowest scoring category in 2022 was civil liberties. This year, the country is in the spotlight due to its judicial reforms proposed by the ruling nationalist party, and civil response has been strong. Mass protests continue around the country.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 21:30

• California Teachers Sue School District Over Transgender Policy Allegedly Forcing Them To Lie To Parents
  California Teachers Sue School District Over Transgender Policy Allegedly Forcing Them To Lie To Parents

  Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Teachers from a California middle school are suing officials in their school district in federal court over policies that they say force them to conceal the transgender status of young students from parents.

  

  The lawsuit happens to come after President Joe Biden’s remarks earlier this month in support of the nation’s teacher of the year angered parents by suggesting government knows best when it comes to the raising of children.

  Biden quoted the teacher when he said, “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child.” The president then said, “Our nation’s children are all our children.”

  The legal complaint (pdf) in the new case, Mirabelli v. Olson, was filed April 27 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. The teachers involved in the lawsuit are devout Christians.

  The defendants are officials with the Escondido Union School District (EUSD), which is in San Diego County, and officials with the California State Board of Education.

  The lawsuit was prompted by the K-8 school district’s recent policies affecting transgender or gender-diverse students.

  The policies require teachers to assist in a student’s transgender “social transition” by accepting a child’s assertion of a transgender or gender-diverse identity and using during school hours any pronouns or a gender-specific name requested by a student.

  At the same time, the policies also require teachers to revert to biological pronouns and legal names when speaking with parents in order to cover up information about a child’s purported gender identity from the child’s parents, according to the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit public interest law firm that filed the lawsuit.

  “All of this is to be done without parent or guardian agreement or knowledge,” said Paul Jonna, Thomas More Society special counsel and a partner at LiMandri and Jonna.

  “Schools routinely send notes home to parents about trivial matters, like missing homework, so it is unfathomable that Escondido Union School District has a policy that forces teachers to withhold from parents some of the most fundamental and basic information about their children,” Jonna said.

  EUSD requires all elementary and middle school teachers to “unhesitatingly accept a child’s assertion of a transgender or gender diverse identity, and … [to] ‘begin to treat the student immediately’ according to their asserted gender identity,” according to the legal complaint.

  “There is absolutely no room for discussion, polite disagreement, or even questioning whether the child is sincere or acting on a whim,” the complaint continues. “Once a child’s social transitioning has begun, EUSD elementary and middle school teachers must ensure that parents do not find out.”

  “EUSD’s policies state that ‘revealing a student’s transgender status to individuals who do not have a legitimate need for the information, without the student’s consent’ is prohibited, and ‘parents or caretakers’ are, according to EUSD, individuals who ‘do not have a legitimate need for the information,’ irrespective of the age of the student or the specific facts of the situation.”

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 21:00

• The Number Of Jailed Journalists Reaches Record High
  The Number Of Jailed Journalists Reaches Record High

  In 2022, more journalists than ever before were imprisoned for doing their job.

  As Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports, some 363 journalists were imprisoned in 30 different countries last year, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  By 2021, the number of detainees had already exceeded 300 – roughly doubling since 2015. An alarming trend that, according to the experts, is a sign of the deterioration of press freedom worldwide.

  In 2022, the largest number of journalists were held in an Iranian prison (62 people), in China (43), and Myanmar, where 42 people were locked away at the end of the year.

  Developments in Eastern Europe are also cause for concern – the arrest of ‘Wall Street Journal’ journalist Evan Gershkovich by Russian authorities one recent indicator of the situation there. Gershkovich was arrested while reporting on the Ukraine war and is the first U.S. journalist since the end of the Cold War to be detained on espionage charges in Russia.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 20:30

• California Doctor Faces $290 Million In COVID-19-Related Fraud Charges
  California Doctor Faces $290 Million In COVID-19-Related Fraud Charges

  Authored by Jason Blair via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A doctor in Orange County, California, has been charged by federal prosecutors for orchestrating approximately $230 million worth of fraud during the COVID-19 pandemic.

  

  The Department of Justice announced the charges against Dr. Anthony Ha Dinh and 17 other individuals on April 20. The total “intended fraud loss” among all 18 defendants is over $490 million, in which Dinh accounts for about 60 percent.

  They said the charges are part of a coordinated nationwide effort of law enforcement to fight COVID-19 health care fraud.

  Dinh allegedly billed the government through the HRSA Uninsured Program with uninsured claims for patients who actually either had insurance, were never treated, or had treatments that weren’t medically necessary, according to the DOJ.

  The HRSA Uninsured Program was intended to provide reimbursement to medical providers who treated uninsured patients for certain COVID-19-related treatments during the pandemic.

  Authorities say Dinh was the second highest biller to the program in the country. He allegedly used over $100 million of the money for high-risk options trading.

  Dinh also allegedly worked with Hanna Dinh, also of Orange County, and Dr. Matthew Ho of Brevard County, Florida, to submit more than 70 fraudulent loan applications, obtaining over $3 million from the PPP and Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs, according to the Justice Department.

  Dinh is scheduled for arraignment on May 22 in federal court in Santa Ana. If convicted on all charges, he could face up to 50 years in prison, according to federal prosecutors.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 20:00

• Colorado Gov Signs Four New Gun Control Measures Into Law
  Colorado Gov Signs Four New Gun Control Measures Into Law

  Joining Washington state in a 2023 western-United States gun control blitz, Colorado Governor Jared Polis on Friday put his signature on four bills restricting the exercise of the human right of armed self-defense.  

  “No action can ever bring back the loved one that you lost,” said Polis, surrounded by gun control advocates and shooting victims and family members. “But turning your own personal tragedy into action in a way that will make others safer, will really prevent others from having to go through what you went through.”

  

  Here’s what they do: 

  • Increase the legal age for purchasing firearms to 21. The law grandfathers anyone who was 18 when the law was enacted, and has exceptions that include hunting, attending shooting classes, being a peace officer or active duty military. 

  • Create a 3-day waiting period for firearms purchases. The law appears to put the burden solely on sellers, who face a $500 fine for a first offense and fines between $500 and $5,000 for subsequent offenses. 

  • Expand the list of people who can submit “red flag” gun-confiscation petitions. Colorado already had an “Extreme Risk Protection Order” law, under which family/household members and law enforcement officers/agencies could petition for disarming an individual. Now, petitions can be accepted from medical care providers, mental health-care providers, educators and district attorneys. 

  • Remove gun manufacturers’ protection from liability. Previously, firearm and ammo manufacturers could only be sued over defects. The new law repeals that limit and requires broadly-defined “firearm industry members” to “establish and implement reasonable controls and precautions related to the industry product in its control.” It allows individuals or the Colorado attorney general to pursue actions against violators, and “unlawful misuse” of a firearm or ammo is not a defense. 

  There’s one type of restriction conspicuously absent from Friday’s bundle: an “assault weapon” ban, like the one recently enacted in Washington state.

  A Monmouth University poll released last week found 49% of Americans oppose such bans, with 46% supporting them and 6% unsure. “That marks a nine-point decline in support and a seven-point increase in opposition since Monmouth asked the same question in June 2022,” notes Stephen Gutowski at The Reload.

  Already poised to counterstrike, gun rights advocates began filing legal challenges to the new laws on the same day Polis signed them. Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO) sued Polis and the state over the waiting period and the age-21 requirement. The group plans to challenge the other two laws after finding plaintiffs with standing to challenge them. (Read the filed complaints here: Waiting Period / Age 21)

  🚨 BREAKING 🚨

  We have filed lawsuits against three day waiting periods and the 18-20 year old gun bans.

  Press release to follow. #coleg #copolitics #2A pic.twitter.com/0S2dY14Dk1

  — Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (@RMGOColorado) April 28, 2023

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

  “Gun owners’ rights are being ravaged in the Colorado legislature by the puppets of Everytown for Gun Control and Michael Bloomberg,” said RMGO executive director Taylor Rhodes in a statement. He added:

  “They will not be happy until all law-abiding gun owners are disarmed, and only the criminals have guns. When a single mother is being harassed by a violent, abusive former partner, the Democrats at the Capitol think it is fine to make her wait at least three days to defend herself and her baby. And if she is twenty, these gun control fanatics insist she is completely defenseless.”

  While not assured of victory, the challenges will have a mighty tailwind, thanks to last summer’s Supreme Court Bruen decision requiring that, to be held constitutional, gun control laws must be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Applying that test, federal judges across the country have been knocking down and imposing injunctions against gun laws left and right. 

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 19:30

• What The End Of Fed Rate-Hikes Means For Stocks
  What The End Of Fed Rate-Hikes Means For Stocks

  Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

  According to this week’s Commerce Department report, U.S. GDP increased at an annualized rate of 1.1 percent during Q1 2023.  The experts thought GDP would grow by 2 percent.  They were wrong.

  By now, it’s very well possible GDP has already slipped into reverse.  We won’t know until the Commerce Department’s Q2 report is released in late July.  In the interim, there’s an important question to be asked:

  Is a recession bullish or bearish for stocks?

  Next week, following the federal open market committee (FOMC) meeting on May 2 and 3, it’s widely anticipated that the Federal Reserve will hike interest rates by 25 basis points.  This will take the federal funds rate to a range of 5.00 to 5.25 percent.

  It is also anticipated that this will be the last rate hike of this rate hiking cycle.  That the Fed will then hold interest rates, before cutting them later this year to offset the recession.

  Interest rate cuts are commonly recognized as being bullish for stocks and stimulative for the economy. 

  Here at the Economic Prism, we have some reservations.

  In short, we expect there will be a great stock market purge that will take the major indexes to unimaginable lows.  We also expect this will coincide with the slashing and burning of interest rates.  Here’s why…

  The last time a Fed rate hike took the federal funds rate to 5.25 percent was June 29, 2006.  If you recall, the Fed then paused and held the federal funds rate at 5.25 percent for roughly 15 months.  Then on September 18, 2007, the Fed cut rates 50 basis points.

  A lot happened beneath the surface over these 15 months when the federal funds rate was held at 5.25 percent.  Massive stressors were formed, as this rate was relatively higher than the preceding years.  In June 2003, for example, the federal funds rate touched 1.00 percent, and remained there until June of 2004.

  Cheap Credit Spawns Bad Debt

  When credit is cheap, opportunities to borrow and spend money are much more manageable.  When interest rates are ultra-low, consumers, businesses, and governments can make their cash flow pencil out for purchases that would otherwise be extravagant.

  But when the federal funds rate is 5.25 percent, and credit markets are tighter, the cash flow comes up short.  Debts go unpaid and slip into arrears.  Defaults occur.

  Yet the effects of cheap credit spawning bad debt takes time to filter its way through the economy.  Sectors that largely rely on financing to move products – such as real estate and automobiles – are generally hit first.  While demand for bricks of dry ramen noodles, which even with today’s inflation can still be bought with pocket change, remains even.

  When the Fed brought the federal funds rate to 5.25 percent in June 2006, and then signaled a pause, there was a sense of relief.  Professional economists thought the worst of it had come and gone.  They believed the stress of higher interest rates had already been realized.

  In fact, on May 17, 2007, Fed Chair Ben Bernanke gave a speech before the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, where he said:

  “The subprime mess is grave but largely contained.  Given the fundamental factors in place that should support the demand for housing, we believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited.”   

  Did he believe what he was saying?  Because at the precise moment he spoke these words the nation’s housing market was rotting just beneath his nose.  Did he not smell it?

  Sowing the Seeds of Chaos

  Apparently, Bernanke was missing his sense of smell.  Because when Bear Stearns blew up in March 2008, Bernanke was again quick to dismiss it.  On June 8, 2008, Bernanke, said:

  “The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.”

  At the same time, Bernanke was slashing the federal funds rate.  Bringing it from 5.25 percent in September 2007 to a range of 0.00 to 0.25 percent by December 2008.  Perhaps he thought this would buoy the economy and float stocks higher.

  But then, on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers blew up and credit markets frosted over like the Alaskan tundra.  Three days later Bernanke, along with Hank “my squirt gun’s a bazooka” Paulson, went to Congress and demanded a mega-bailout of the financial system.

  On September 18, 2008, at an emergency meeting in the Capitol, Bernanke told Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd: “If we don’t do this tomorrow, we won’t have an economy on Monday.”

  Two months after firing off Paulson’s bazooka, Bernanke commenced QE1.  In doing so, he corrupted financial markets and the economy without end…and sowed the seeds of today’s financial and economic chaos.

  Over this time, as the federal funds rate was being slashed and QE began flooding the financial markets with liquidity, the stock market didn’t go up.  Instead, it went down.

  The S&P 500, for example, peaked out at about 1,586 in October 2007.  It then slowly slid down to about 1,200 in August 2008.  Over this time, investors thought they were buying the dip.  That the Fed had engineered a soft landing.  They were dead wrong.

  By September 2008, the S&P 500 was freefalling like common ravens descending upon fresh roadkill.  Taking it down to a bottom of 666 on March 6, 2009.  This amounted to a top to bottom decline of 58 percent.  It was brutal.  Yet it was also the buying opportunity of a lifetime.

  What’s the point?

  What the End of Fed Rate Hikes Means for Stocks

  Here in the wooded mountains of East Tennessee the vegetated growth is so dense it shuts off the adjacent view.  Hollers, as they’re called in southern Appalachia, are undetectable.  And in an instant, things can go terribly wrong.

  Take Dennis Martin, for instance.  On June 14, 1969, he wandered off a Smoky Mountain trail never to be seen again.  Approximately 1,400 search and rescue workers – including the National Guard, Green Berets, and Boy Scouts of America – walked narrow transects across a 56 square mile area.

  All that was found were footprints leading to a stream, one shoe, and one sock.  Martin vanished with hardly a trace.

  Where did he go?  Did a black bear eat him?

  To this day, no one knows.  It’s an unsolved mystery. 

  What to make of it…

  As we’ve just documented, the Fed stopped hiking rates in June 2006.  The S&P 500 continued to inflate until October 2007.  The Fed then began cutting rates in September 2007.  The stock market didn’t bottom out until March 2009 – 18 months after rate cuts were first initiated.

  “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” is a cliché that’s often attributed to Mark Twain.  We don’t know if he actually said it.  And we really don’t care.  The insight, however, is edifying.

  The stresses that are plaguing financial markets and the economy in 2023 are certainly different than those of 2008. 

  The world has dramatically changed over these 15 years.  But if you listen with a trained ear, there are similar rhymes.

  Namely, there’s massive amounts of bad debt out there that relatively higher interest rates over the past 14 months have exposed.  The commercial real estate market is absolute toast.  Pension funds, having stretched for yield, are holding a bag of assets that’s backed by eroding collateral.  At the same time, the S&P 500 is still well overvalued relative to its historical mean.

  By this, the likely end of the Fed’s rate hiking cycle next week does not mean we’re out of the woods.  Rather, it means we’re just entering the woods…

  

  And, assuming the Fed starts cutting rates in October of this year, the S&P 500 may not reemerge from the woods until it bottoms out in April 2025.

  *  *  *

  Like this article?  If so, please Subscribe to the Economic Prism.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 19:00

• Europe Is Buying Record Amounts Of Refined Russian Fuels Through India, And Paying A Huge Markup
  Europe Is Buying Record Amounts Of Refined Russian Fuels Through India, And Paying A Huge Markup

  Last August, we were the first to show how Russia was bypassing Europe’s so-called commodities embargo: it was selling LNG to China which was then re-selling it to Europe at a substantial mark up. And while we also frequently reported that Russia was using a similar sanctions bypass for oil, this time using India instead of China, few were willing to confirm as much: after all, it would seem very shortsighted if European consumers were paying an extra surcharge to India, while Russia was not suffering any adverse consequences from Europe’s laughable “sanctions.”

  Not any more: on Friday, Bloomberg reported that for all of Europe’s fire and brimstone about an embargo (which has gotten decidedly quieter in recent months), “Russian oil is still powering Europe just with the help of India.“

  As we reported at the time, last December the EU barred almost any seaborne crude oil imports from Russia. It extended the prohibition to refined fuels two months later. However, the rules didn’t stop countries like India from snapping up cheap Russian crude, turning it into fuels like diesel, and shipping it back to Europe at a big markup: as shown in the chart below, just the Brent to Urals price differential, a byproduct of the Russian sanctions, is about $25/bbl, almost a third of the price of a barrel of crude. The markups on Russian product are even greater when dealing with refined products such as gasoline or diesel.

  

  In fact, India has become so good at reselling Russian oil to the same Europeans who refuse to buy it directly from Moscow for a much lower price, that the Asian country is on track to become Europe’s largest supplier of refined fuels this month while simultaneously buying record amounts of Russian crude, according to data from analytics firm Kpler.

  In other words, Europe is still buying Russian oil, keeping Putin’s military machine well-funded, but because of the virtue signaling exercise of buying Russian oil though a mediator, the transaction ends up costing Europeans billions more than if they simply had purchased the oil directly.

  pic.twitter.com/exdke9mX0p

  — Derek J. Grossman (@DerekJGrossman) April 29, 2023

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

  “Russian oil is finding its way back into Europe despite all the sanctioning and India ramping up fuel exports to the west is a good example of it,” said Viktor Katona, lead crude analyst at the firm. “With India taking in so much Russian barrels, it’s inevitable.”

  

  As Bloomberg notes, “the development is double-edged for the EU. On the one hand, the bloc needs alternative sources of diesel now that it has cut off direct flows from Russia, previously its top supplier. However, it ultimately boosts demand for Moscow’s barrels, and means extra freight costs.” In other words, Europe achieves none of its embargo goals (i.e., keeping Russian oil out of the market, preventing Putin from using oil to finance the war in Ukraine), while being hit with far higher energy prices.

  It also means more competition for Europe’s oil refiners who can’t access cheap Russian crude, and comes amid wider market scrutiny about where the region’s diesel imports are coming from.

  Repsol SA’s CEO Josu Jon Imaz said on Thursday that Russian diesel is entering Europe illegally and called on authorities to clamp down on the activity. He wasn’t talking about the trade via India but flows of diesel that originated in Russia… which of course is the same thing.

  Hilariously, a preliminary inquiry into the matter by Spanish authorities didn’t find evidence that Russian diesel was entering the country, a government official said Friday, adding that a probe is ongoing. Of course, nobody in Europe wants to admit that they are indirectly funding Putin, so expect many more such “discoveries” as all other countries try to find if they are importing Russian oil only to find that everyone but them is using it.

  Meanwhile, Europe’s refined fuel imports from India are set to surge above 360,000 barrels a day, edging just ahead of those of oil exporting titan Saudi Arabia, Kpler’s data show.

  And the cherry on top: Russian crude oil arrivals to India are expected to surpass 2 million barrels a day in April, representing almost 44% of the nation’s overall oil imports, according to Kpler data. India then quickly re-exports the oil or processes it first into diesel and gasoline, and then sells it to European customers.

  More than half of Russia’s seaborne oil shipments were to the European Union and Group of Seven nations before the bloc began to cut purchases in response to the nation’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

  Finally, the question of what the point is of continued Russian “sanctions” remains, as the IIF’s Robin Brooks explains in the following twitter thread, which once again makes clear that western sanctions against Russia have been a catastrophic failure… perhaps as was intended all along.

  Evaluation of our sanctions policy

  1. Only 2 questions matter. First, have our sanctions meaningfully curtailed Russia’s ability to wage war? Second, are our sanctions a deterrent to countries that may wage war in the future? Unfortunately, the answer to both questions is: “No!”

  

  2. Root problem is an infatuation with financial sanctions. These can be effective when used on current account deficit countries – Turkey in 2018 is an example – but they don’t work on current account surplus countries. This is a key point that cannot be emphasized enough.

  

  3. Russia shows how our financial sanctions failed. We sanctioned some banks, including the central bank (red), but not all. This meant that all the cash from Russia’s current account surplus got routed through non-sanctioned Russian banks (blue). Putin still got all his cash…

  

  4. So our financial sanctions did not prevent Putin getting all his cash in return for energy exports. All this cash just got routed through different banks than before. As a result, financial conditions in Russia eased back to pre-war levels, a big plus for Russia’s war economy.

  

  5. We could have avoided this, but it would have required sanctioning ALL Russian banks. That’s the same as a trade embargo, since Putin no longer gets paid and stops exporting. This shows what’s needed to hurt c/a surplus countries: a trade embargo! Not financial sanctions…

  

  6. Number one lesson from Russia is that our infatuation with financial sanctions must end. They don’t work on c/a surplus countries, unless we sanction all banks, in which case we’re just doing a trade embargo. We need to be doing trade embargos instead of financial sanctions…

  7. Had we done a hard energy embargo on Russia, this would have come at a cost to the West, but Russia would have gone into financial crisis, making the war harder for Putin to fight. An embargo would have also scared other potentially hostile current account surplus countries.

  8. It’s not too late. First, the West needs to end its focus on financial sanctions. Second, we need to start talking about hard trade-offs that are needed to confront c/a surplus countries. We need to stop giving them cash, which means we need to stop buying their stuff…

  9. A footnote on the G7 oil price cap. The cap is recognition of the fact that Russia’s current account surplus needs to be cut. But – thanks to Greek shipping oligarchs – the cap was set at $60 and wasn’t binding. A mistake that can be fixed now by lowering the cap…

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 18:30

• Saturday Satire: The Diversity Officer Employment Aptitude Test
  Saturday Satire: The Diversity Officer Employment Aptitude Test

  Authored by Stanley Ridgley via American Greatness,

  Demand for Diversity Officers may have peaked and may even be on the wane.

  The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion hustle is running its course and may soon be out of steam, but it’s not too late to collect your share of the loot.

  This means you shouldn’t delay applying for one of the lucrative positions carrying the generic title of “DEI Officer.” 

  

  While the typical DEI position requires no expertise of any sort, it does require a collection of attitudes toward your fellow men and women, an ability to utter shameless platitudes and clichés, and embrace a clearly identifiable and primitive Manichean worldview grounded in paranoia.

  If you aim to become a promising candidate for a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) position, either in the corporate world or in academia, you can easily discover if you have the necessary self-conscious virtue by taking this five-minute employment aptitude survey.

  Answer “Yes” to the following statements if you agree, and add or subtract the points assigned for each question based on your Yes answer.

  Then score yourself by comparing your results with those in the chart at the end. Good luck!

  1) I am not appreciated for my many talents. +3

  2) I am inherently suspicious of others. +3

  3) I believe that America is the land of opportunity. -3

  4) I believe that I have access to truths denied to others. +5

  5) I believe that I must work hard for my reward. -3

  6) I believe in a world that is divided into oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited and that these groups are easily identified by the color of their skin.  +5

  7) I believe that I can work to give in-groups preferential treatment while simultaneously saying that there are no racial or gender preferences at our institution. +3

  8) I believe that I should bring my “authentic self” to work, irrespective of any other considerations. +5

  9) I believe, like Frederick Douglass, that in America, one can pull oneself up “by the bootstraps” to succeed. -7

  10) If I fail in my job, I immediately search for the reason in causes external to me, such as the “system” or the “unearned advantages” available to other people. +7

  11) If people question me and ask for evidence for what I say, I immediately attack them for their “resistance” to the truth that I offer in my story.  +5

  12) I believe that “indigenous” forms of knowledge such as the “medicine wheel” and the “talking stick” should be incorporated into our scientific discourse. +7

  13) I always list my pronouns in my email signature and social media profiles. +3

  14) I recognize that today’s “Diversity” office resembles the Soviet Union’s old Political Commissariat, where political ideologues occupied positions to report on the political reliability of those who actually worked to accomplish the mission. -10    BONUS POINTS:  If you know this but believe it’s a good thing.  +15

  15) Anyone who disagrees with the lofty goals of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” is guilty of “diversity resistance.”  +5

  16) I believe that a doctorate in education, sociology, or gender studies is every bit as important and impressive as a doctorate in physics. +3

  17) When people respond to my charges of “racism” in a particular company or university, with bothersome requests for evidence, examples, or proof, I complain of being attacked, invalidated, and dehumanized rather than taking the opportunity to prove my point.  +5

  18) I believe that “stories” and “narratives” are just as important and as convincing as knowledge grounded in logic, reason, and the scientific method. +7

  19) As women are 50 percent more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees than men, this shows we need to do everything we can to support women in higher education. +3

  20) I am familiar with the racialist statement “skinfolk aren’t always kinfolk,” and I look with suspicion at persons with whom I share the superficial characteristic of race but who disagree with me. +7

  21) I routinely drop the word “systemic” into conversations. +3

  22) I use the terms “white supremacy” and “white privilege” comfortably and un-ironically, without awareness that they are equivalent to scapegoat devil terms such as the bourgeoisie, or Kulaks, or International Jewry, or infidels to explain all the bad that happens. +5

  23) I believe that the best method for advancing our knowledge and understanding of the physical world is logic, reason, and the type of inquiry we call the scientific method. -10

  24) I believe that people like Ijeomo Oluo, Paulo Freire, Ibram Kendi, and Derald Wing Sue have important things to say about our society that get to the inner truth. +5

  24) I don’t pay much attention to the fantasies, “stories,” and pseudoscience of Ijeomo Oluo, Paulo Freire, Ibram Kendi, and Derald Wing Sue. -7

  25) I believe in something called “diversity science,” which substantiates the basic beneficial tenets of the diversity agenda. +5

  26) I believe that “diversity science” is pseudo-scientific twaddle fabricated by off campus nonprofits and imported into universities and the corporate world. -10

  27) The Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed inspires me to work for social justice, emancipation, and against oppression in all its forms.  +5

  28) I know that Paulo Freire was a crypto-Maoist who borrowed almost all of his education theory from Mao Zedong’s murderous Cultural Revolution, which Freire greatly admired. -5 BONUS POINTS:  If you know this but believe it’s a good thing.  +15 .

  29) I believe any disagreement with my worldview can be overcome with more “education.” +3

  30) I divide society into “oppressors” and “oppressed,” “exploiters” and “exploited,” and I know that this is a primitive Manichean way of looking at society that resembles a medievalist world divided into “infidels” and “believers.”  +5 BONUS POINTS:  If you do this and believe it’s a good thing.  +5

  31) I believe in “inclusion and belonging” as fervently as any member of Reverend Moon’s Unification Church believes in “peace and unity.” +3

  32) I believe that I have attained “critical consciousness” and that those who disagree with my ideology are afflicted with “false consciousness” and must be taught to embrace a new belief system. +5

  33) I believe that “critical consciousness” and “false consciousness” constitute a tautological contrivance that updates Karl Marx’s notion of “class consciousness” for race and gender sensibilities. -5  BONUS POINTS: I recognize that critical consciousness is the latest play on Plato’s cave allegory from his Republic of the 4th century B.C. -5  DOUBLE-BONUS POINTS:  If you know the foregoing and believe they are good things. +15 I don’t know who Plato is. +10

  34) I believe that the poetry of Audre Lorde is profound, particularly her “master’s tools” line. +2

  35) I recognize that Audre Lorde’s “master’s tools” line is pedestrian. -7

  36) “Inclusion and belonging” sounds too close to a cult slogan for me to feel comfortable with it. -7

  37) I believe that I should be called “Doctor” just like Jill Biden because I wrote a 120-page “dissertation” for my Ed.D. that explores my feelings about the education program I just completed, and which required zero research.  +7

  38) I am thrilled—thrilled—that “I finally get to use my master’s degree” in educational leadership to bring people to critical consciousness.  +3

   *  *  *

  Good candidate? You make the call!

  +40 and above: Welcome aboard, commissar!  Get ready to Do the Work!

  +39-30: Not the perfect package but you’re ready to share authentic stories, struggle against “supremacy,” and do some dismantling!

  +29-20: A few more weeks of amplifying “marginalized voices” should bolster your score

  +19-10: You’re not committed enough—time for a “difficult dialogue” and a “courageous conversation,” capped off with a “Brave Space”

  +9-0: Hands behind your back—your struggle session is through that door.

  -1 and below: Racist!

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 18:00

• Poland Seizes Russian School, Kremlin Vows Retaliation For "Blatant Violation"
  Poland Seizes Russian School, Kremlin Vows Retaliation For “Blatant Violation”

  Moscow is furious after on Saturday Polish police reportedly raided a Russian school attached to the Russian embassy in Warsaw and took it over. School staff were then given hours to pack up their things and vacate the building, according to RIA Novosti, following local authorities bursting into the grounds using a crow bar.

  Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Lukasz Jasina said the state was enforcing a court ruling over the building building which says it was “illegally leased by the Russian embassy for years.” Thus Poland is asserting that the building and school isn’t protected under diplomatic status, which Moscow disputes.

  

  Russia’s foreign ministry blasted the “hostile actions” of Polish authorities which are a “blatant violation” of official Russian diplomatic property.

  “Such an impudent step by Warsaw, which goes beyond the framework of civilized interstate communication, will not remain without our harsh reaction and consequences for the Polish authorities and Poland’s interests in Russia,” the ministry stated.

  “We view these new hostile actions of the Polish authorities as a flagrant violation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and an attempt against Russian diplomatic real estate in Poland,” it continued.

  “Official Warsaw has been violating the law for many years: international legislation, bilateral agreements, domestic legislation. Behaves defiantly and unlawfully. What can be described in one word – provocation,” the ministry said, vowing a severe response.

  Employees of the school at the Russian embassy in Poland, which was raided and seized by Polish police today, packing their things to the tune of “Farewell of Slavianka” pic.twitter.com/sjCD0KGGqL

  — Russians With Attitude (@RWApodcast) April 29, 2023

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  But Polish foreign ministry spokesman Lukasz Jasina retorted that Warsaw authorities are fully within their rights and are enforcing Polish law.

  “Our opinion, which has been confirmed by the courts, is that this property belongs to the Polish state and was taken by Russia illegally,” he said.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 17:30

• "Something Clearly Went Wrong" – Fauci & Friends Desperately Try To 'Close The Book' On COVID
  “Something Clearly Went Wrong” – Fauci & Friends Desperately Try To ‘Close The Book’ On COVID

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

  Billed as the most in-depth interview yet, the New York Times published a very long piece that contains some rather startling admissions, claims, and defenses from Anthony Fauci, the face of lockdowns and shot mandates.

  The author and interviewer is David Wallace-Wells, who before (and now after) Covid specialized in writing about climate change, invokes every predictable trope.

  

  So there was a sense in which this interview was a lovefest between the two.

  Still it netted some interesting results.

  Here are my top-ten picks of Fauci quotes.

  1. Fauci: “Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries.”

  This seems promising but one quickly realizes that there is an axiom among the people responsible for lockdowns. They were completely correct in their thinking. The problem was not enough centralization, prior planning, or resources.

  Also there was too much disinformation and non-compliance, leading to a low vaccine uptake compared with other countries. The vaccines are the miracle and the greatest achievement of the pandemic, a point on which they admit no argument.

  This is also the conclusion of a thing called The Covid Crisis Group (funded mostly by the Charles Koch and Rockefeller Foundations) which has released the new book Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report. There is no PDF. You have to buy it. The lead author is the well-known fixer Philip Zelikow, who wrote the 9-11 Commission report.

  Included among the team is none other than Carter Mecher, who bears more responsibility for school closings than anyone else. Also there is Rajeev Venkayya, the one-time Bush administration official who is widely credited with having invented the very concept of lockdowns.

  It’s their story and they are sticking to it.

  2. Fauci on vaccine mandates: “Man, I think, almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this? And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive. And you have that smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country.”

  If you didn’t think you needed the vaccine or didn’t trust it, Fauci proclaims that you are responsible for divisiveness and anti-science feeling. The “independent streak” is called freedom, which for him is the real problem. The lesson for next time? Hard to know. Maybe he thinks the mandates should have been enforced with more energy.

  3. Fauci on the economics of the lockdowns: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint.

  It was for other people to make broader assessments — people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health. Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something.”

  There we go with the great divide between public health and real life, as if one does not impact the other. Public health cared not for economics — the science of human cooperation — and, sadly, the economists were too often unschooled on public health. The compartmentalization of speciality fields played into the haphazard totalitarianism we experienced.

  But there’s more — a lot more. Read on to see Fauci’s other important quotes, and what they really mean.

  4. Fauci on why he is not responsible for anything: “when people say, ‘Fauci shut down the economy’ — it wasn’t Fauci. The C.D.C. was the organization that made those recommendations. I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.”

  He was merely deferring to a giant bureaucracy where no one takes responsibility either!

  5. Fauci on how they should have locked down earlier: “We were not fully appreciative of the fact that we were dealing with a highly, highly transmissible virus that was clearly spread by ways that were unprecedented and unexperienced by us. And so it fooled us in the beginning and confused us about the need for masks and the need for ventilation and the need for inhibition of social interaction.” Should they have shut down in February 2020? “We should have, probably, if we knew what we know now.”

  Inexperienced in a textbook respiratory virus? It’s because they thought it was a bioweapon that could be handled like AIDS. Masks were the condoms. Lockdowns were the behavioral changes. Minimizing of cases was the metric of success. On every point, they were wrong.

  Plus they didn’t even learn from the AIDS experience. It wasn’t the vaccines that cooled the crisis. It was the therapeutics innovated in clinical experience. Instead, Fauci shut down all efforts at early treatment to wait for the vaccines. Having done it earlier would have been even worse!

  6. Fauci on the effectiveness of masking: “From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work. But I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don’t know.”

  He doesn’t know. At least he admits it. And yet the CDC is still suing for the legal right to impose masking on the whole population whoever it wants.

  7. Fauci on not understanding the virus: “Herd immunity is based on two premises: one, that the virus doesn’t change, and two, that when you get infected or vaccinated, the durability of protection is measured in decades, if not a lifetime. With SARS-CoV-2, we thought protection against infection was going to be measured in a long period of time. And we found out — wait a minute, protection against infection, and against severe disease, is measured in months, not decades. No. 2, the virus that you got infected with in January 2020 is very different from the virus that you’re going to get infected with in 2021 and 2022.”

  To be clear, nothing about herd immunity requires lifetime immunity and it certainly is not premised on unchanging virus. Indeed, it is astonishing that he claims they had no idea the virus would mutate.

  It’s an established reality that such widespread and mostly non-deadly pathogens like this mutate, which is precisely why they cannot be eradicated through vaccination. Why must anyone have to explain virus basics to Fauci of all people?

  8. Fauci on the huge age gradient of medically significant risk: “Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes. But somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. Like 85% of the hospitalizations are there.”

  In fact, their solution was to shut down the whole of society for a virus that was mostly if not entirely a danger to the aged and sick. And to justify that, they absolutely did obscure the risk gradient, which is why most everyone was running around like their hair was on fire. The attempt was precisely to create population fear and panic, as Fauci said many times in private.

  9. Fauci on whether the NIH funded the lab that leaked the virus. “ Now you’re saying things that are a little bit troublesome to me. That I need to go to bed tonight worrying that N.I.H.-funded research was responsible for pandemic origins…. Well, I sleep fine. I sleep fine. And remember, this work was done in order to be able to help prepare us for the next outbreak. This work was not conceived by me as I was having my omelet in the morning. It is a grant that was put before peer review of independent scientists whose main role is to try to get data to protect the health and safety of the American public and the world. And it was judged that this type of research was important.”

  Once again, if the NIH had anything to do with funding the research that led to the virus, he is not responsible for that either. It was those pesky independent scientists. He has again thrown colleagues under the bus.

  10. Fauci on gain-of-function research: “Some want to pass a law: All gain-of-function should be stopped. But if all gain-of-function stops, you will have no vaccines for flu. You will have no vaccines for any of the other diseases, because all of that manipulates a virus or a pathogen to gain a certain function to be able to make a vaccine.”

  That’s a very hard claim. I asked ChatGPT about that and it quickly spat out the following:

  “No, the flu vaccine does not require gain-of-function research. The development of flu vaccines typically involves studying the behavior of the virus and its strains, identifying the most common strains and predicting which one will be most prevalent in the upcoming season. The vaccine is then developed using inactivated or attenuated versions of the virus, which do not require gain-of-function research. Gain-of-function research, which involves genetically modifying viruses to make them more infectious or deadly, is sometimes used for studying the flu virus, but it is not required for the creation of flu vaccines.”

  If not for the flu vaccine, what is gain-of-function’s purpose? The creation of bioweapons and vaccines to confound them? The track record of this looks awful.

  Fauci and his friends keep trying to close the book on the Covid epoch. They have settled on the messaging and are doing everything possible to tie it all up in a bow in hopes that everyone will move on. The mainstream media wants to move on too. Everyone guilty for the wreckage wants to do the same, particularly the elites in every sector that pushed for and celebrated the mass violation of human rights.

  They are wrong. The book is not closed and will not be until we get honest answers.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 17:00

• CNN Host Shockingly Blasts Teachers Union Boss Over School Closure Lies
  CNN Host Shockingly Blasts Teachers Union Boss Over School Closure Lies

  Randi Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a member of the AFL–CIO, but she’s perhaps best known as being the key advocate for shutting schools down during the onset of the Covid pandemic.

  

  Weingarten was called to task this week on the Don Lemon-less CNN by senior political commentator Scott Jennings, who excoriated the union boss after she engaged in historical revisionism over her role in school shutdowns – insisting before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, that she had instead advocated for reopening schools as quickly as possible.

  AFT President Randi Weingarten: “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.” pic.twitter.com/1qNL05VD3u

  — Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 26, 2023

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  Not so fast, Randi…

  “Speaking on behalf of millions of American parents, I had to teach them at home,” Jenning said. “My wife had to teach them at home. I am stunned at what you have said this week about your claiming to have wanted to reopen schools.” 

  

  In 2020, Weingarten called attempts to reopen schools in the fall of 2020 “reckless, callous and cruel.”

  What’s more, her union pushed aggressively for closures at the local level, while areas with high union influence remained closed much longer.

  CNN‘s Jennings continued to shred Weingarten, stating: “I think you’ll find that most parents believe you are the tip of the spear of school closures. There are numerous statements you made over the summer of ’20 scaring people to death about the possibility of opening schools. And I hear no remorse whatsoever about the generational damage that’s been done to these kids.” 

  “I have two kids with learning differences. Do you know how hard it is for them to learn at home and not in a classroom that was designed for them? And for you to sit in front of Congress and the American people and say, oh, ‘I wanted to open up them the whole time,’” I am shocked. I’m stunned. I’m stunned,” he continued. “And there are millions of parents who feel the exact same way.”

  Watch:

  .@ScottJenningsKY to @rweingarten: “I am stunned at what you have said this week…I think you’ll find that most parents believe you are the tip of the sphere of school closures…I hear no remorse whatsoever about the generational damage that’s been done…” pic.twitter.com/gVCDgpP3dN

  — Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) April 28, 2023

  Additionally, the NY Post reported last week that one epidemiologist claimed Weingarten even “fudged a scientific study” that showed low levels of Covid transmission in schools in order to keep schools closed during the pandemic. 

  Co-author of the study, Dr. Tracy Høeg, wrote on Twitter last week: “We saw remarkably low in school transmission & no known transmission to teachers.”

  She added: “The fact the [CDC] was taking the advice of the [AFT] & not the scientists publishing on this topic in their own journal and without considering the data from Europe seems to have played a role in the massive error that left millions [of] US kids out of school unnecessarily.”

  Weingarten had used the study “multiple times as evidence schools needed ‘layered mitigation’ to reopen”, she said during a congressional hearing. 

  “The way Ms. Weingarten mentioned me in her testimony, one might have thought I was being consulted all along but this was not the case,” Høeg said, shredding the assumptions of the union leader.

  “Despite the wording in [Randi Weingarten’s] written testimony, I consistently *disagreed* w/ what she & AFT were requesting in terms of mitigation to reopen schools & I’ve said that consistently (on social media, in op-eds, on news interviews) since our study was published.”

  Meanwhile, Weingarten has doubled down on Twitter – and locked down replies from the general public!

  Covid scared the nation, but we tried to do everything we could to reopen schools safely. It would have helped if Trump/DeVos helped instead of hectored. Now we must do everything we can to help kids learn & overcome the effects of the pandemic. https://t.co/waWT8BuCQh

  — Randi Weingarten 🇺🇦🇺🇸💪🏿👩‍🎓 (@rweingarten) April 28, 2023

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  Community notes to the rescue;

  

  Then and now;

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  A post shared by Defiant Ls (@defiant.ls)

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  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 16:55

• 'Modern-Day Slave Traders': Hawley Demands Probe Into 85,000 'Lost' Migrant Children
  ‘Modern-Day Slave Traders’: Hawley Demands Probe Into 85,000 ‘Lost’ Migrant Children

  Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is demanding that the FBI investigate the exploitation of thousands of unaccompanied alien children (IUAC) who may have been brought into the United States via child smuggling operations.

  

  According to data from US Customs and Border Protection, approximately 345,000 minors have crossed into the United States unaccompanied since President Joe Biden took office, while a report from the NY Times suggests that the Department of Health and Human Services has lost contact with 85,000 of these minors.

  “The Biden Administration is morally responsible for their fate. The President lifted Title 42 restrictions on unaccompanied children in early 2021,” wrote Hawley in a Friday letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Reporting reveals that HHS loosened vetting processes for sponsors and retaliated against whistleblowers who raised these concerns. As a result, thousands of children have been handed over to modern-day slave traders.“

  Hawley also threw Biden under the bus, noting that under his watch, lost minors are often forced into factory work under harsh conditions, denied food and education, suffer sexual violence, and fear for their lives.

  “In a country that claims to value the rule of law and the protection of children, this is unconscionable,” Hawley added.

  During a Senate Finance Committee hearing in late March, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra denied knowledge of the 85,000 figure.

  “I have never heard that number of 85,000, I don’t know where it comes from and … so I would say it doesn’t sound at all to be realistic, and what we do is we try and follow up as best we can with these kids,” he said, adding “Congress has given us certain authorities. Our authorities end when we have found a suitable sponsor to place that child with. We try and do some follow-up, but neither the child or the sponsor is actually obligated to follow up with us.”

  In addition to urging the FBI to mount a “full-scale” effort to locate the missing children and bring to justice the criminals who are holding them in modern-day slavery, Hawley also demanded a probe into HHS and the Department of Homeland Security.

  “The FBI must also investigate HHS and the Department of Homeland Security for their role in facilitating the exploitation of these children, in violation of the law,” Hawley wrote.

  “The pervasive maltreatment of migrant children plainly violates both the Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibits the abuse of underage workers, and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which designates human trafficking offenses as federal crimes,” Hawley wrote.

  Hawley demanded a “full report” from the FBI priority by May 25. –Epoch Times

  On Wednesday, an HHS whistleblower told officials that unaccompanied children have been “suffering in the shadows” of the US immigration system for almost a decade.

  “I have to confess I knew nothing about their suffering until 2021 when I volunteered to help the Biden administration with the crisis at the southern border as part of operation Artemis,” said Tara Lee Rodas, who appeared as a witness at “The Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children” hearing held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement.

  Rodas said she was deployed to help HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) reunite UACs with adult sponsors in the United States.

  “I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes. Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with recruiting in home country, smuggling to the U.S. border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to a sponsor—some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of transnational criminal organizations, some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income.”

  In some cases, Rodas says she witnessed adult sponsors who were allowed to take in “10, 20, 30 and 40 children” without any concerns from HHS.

  “I saw sponsors trying to simultaneously sponsor children from multiple ORR sites at one time. I saw sponsors using multiple addresses to obtain sponsorships of children, and I saw numerous cases of children in debt bondage—and the child knew they had to stay with the sponsor until the debt was paid,” she said.

  The next day, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) wrote to Becerra and demanded answers.

  “I am deeply concerned regarding the recent reports that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has mishandled unaccompanied migrant children by placing them with unvetted sponsors, leading to their exploitation and forced labor,” she wrote.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 16:30

• A Conservative Conversation With A Bothered Bot
  A Conservative Conversation With A Bothered Bot

  Authored by Lloyd Brown via AmericanThinker.com,

  According to the media, Artificial Intelligence (AI), is the greatest thing since sliced bread. AI is so smart that some worry it could take over the world and rule mankind.

  But skeptics have found AI chatbots to be more than a little left-wing.

  

  Recently, I argued with one over the worn-out liberal claim that conservatives are fascists, a notion that the left continues to mouth even though it was well refuted by Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism.

  It was like pulling a tooth, but I got this crucial admission: “…conservatism and fascism are not the same thing.”

  Here’s how the discussion went:

  Me: What’s the difference between socialism and fascism?

  AI: Socialism and fascism are two different political ideologies, although there can be some overlap in their policies and practices. Socialism is a political and economic system where the means of production are commonly owned and controlled by the state, or by worker cooperatives, with the goal of achieving greater equality and reducing societal inequalities. Socialism espouses the idea of collective ownership and distribution of resources. Fascism, on the other hand, is a far-right authoritarian political system that puts the nation and its interests above everything else, including individual rights and freedoms. Fascism advocates for a powerful government with a leader who has absolute power over the state and a strong military to maintain order and control. In summary, socialism aims at achieving economic and social equality, while fascism prioritizes the nation’s interests and gives the government absolute power.

  Me: How can that be possible when the right, conservatives, oppose big government? Isn’t what you said total nonsense and liberal propaganda?

  AI: I apologize if my previous response was unclear. I was attempting to provide an objective and neutral explanation of socialism and fascism. However, you are correct that conservatism is generally associated with small government and a free-market economy, which is in contrast to socialism. Conservatives generally believe in limited government intervention in the economy, low taxes, and individual freedom. Socialism, on the other hand, advocates for greater government involvement in the economy and the redistribution of wealth to create a more equitable society. While there may be some similarities between socialist policies and conservative policies in terms of their emphasis on protecting the interests of the common people, their approaches to achieving these goals are quite different. Regarding your comment about “liberal propaganda,” it is important to recognize that political ideologies and perspectives can be influenced by a variety of factors, and it is important to seek out diverse perspectives to form a more comprehensive understanding of issues.

  Me: Conservatives value individual freedom, as you said. So if conservatives are right-wing, in what way is fascism right-wing if it puts the nation and its interests above everything else? If the left-wing, or liberals, are for big government, aren’t they the real fascists?

  AI: Fascism is considered to be right-wing because of its authoritarian and nationalist tendencies. It is a political ideology that emphasizes the supreme authority of the state over individuals and groups, as well as the importance of the nation above all else. This means that individual liberties and freedoms are typically suppressed in the name of national unity and power. However, it’s important to note that conservatism and fascism are not the same thing. While conservatism does value individual freedom, it also places a high value on traditional values, limited government, and free-market capitalism. Fascism, on the other hand, seeks to achieve power through authoritarian means and has a strong tendency towards anti-democratic and anti-individualistic policies. Additionally, the idea that the left-wing or liberals are the real fascists is a common misconception. While some left-wing ideologies such as communism can be authoritarian, fascism is a distinctly right-wing ideology. It’s important to avoid oversimplifying political ideologies and to understand their complexities in order to have informed political discussions.

  Notice that it was struggling with its answer at this point and beginning to ignore its own advice about “oversimplifying.”

  Curiously, at that exact time, I got a notice that the ”socket” had failed and was advised to reload the page. When I did the discussion disappeared.

  I had intended to bear down on the differences between fascism, socialism, and communism, which the bot already had conceded had similarities although it continued to insist that liberals were not fascists and fascism was “right wing.”

  We must remember that artificial intelligence is artificial. It is programmed and he who writes the code is the master of its “thoughts.” My experience provides further evidence the code is not bipartisan.

  But it was smart enough to reject the far Left’s claim that conservatives are fascists.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 16:00

• Weapons Makers Suffering Worker Shortages As Ukraine War Drives Demand
  Weapons Makers Suffering Worker Shortages As Ukraine War Drives Demand

  The war in Ukraine is so profitable for defense companies in the US and Europe that they’re having trouble finding thousands of skilled workers to satisfy a record influx of orders, according to the Wall Street Journal.

  

  Part of the issue is that jobs in the defense industry require niche skills and security clearances – a problem compounded by a flood of defense companies trying to hire at the same time in an industry which has long struggled to meet recruitment goals.

  “Our first priority is really to ramp up capacity, which, of course, means increasing staff,” according to Patrice Caine, CEO of French component maker Thales, which plans to hire 12,000 people this year to make submarine sensors, jets, and other military items. Caine described the situation as “tensions on some labor markets,” which they plan to deal with by outsourcing to ‘foreign engineering centers,’ as well as relying on corporate partners.

  In 2022, global military spending rose 3.7% to a record $2.24 trillion – with European expenditures increasing at its steepest YoY rate in at least 30 years, according to data released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a think tank.

  The labor shortage among US defense contractors has been an issue since last year, when efforts to replace workers from pandemic furloughs were accelerated – and most companies failing to hit their recruitment goals. That said, hiring has improved in recent months according to the report.

  In Europe, however, the problem may actually get worse – with European governments increasing military spending, causing weapons makers – particularly munitions manufacturers – to launch large recruitment drives.

  Europe’s largest defense company, BAE Systems PLC, is hiring 2,600 this year for its apprentice and graduate training programs, and several thousand more for other roles. Missile maker MBDA wants to add 2,000 workers, equivalent to more than 15% of its workforce. Others including Saab AB, the Swedish maker of the Gripen jet fighter, and Rheinmetall AG, the German company that helps make the Leopard tank, also plan to hire thousands of new workers. -WSJ

  “Defense companies are worried at the moment about recruitment,” according to ADS Group Chief Economist, Aimie Stone, citing competition for talent within the industry, along with a revived civil aerospace sector and an emerging space industry. According to Stone, ADS members had 10,000 job openings at the end of last year.

  UK-based recruiter, Kieran Slaughter, says the defense industry has always posed recruitment challenges, as automakers and airplane manufacturers are competing for the same talent pool, tend to pay more, and don’t require security clearances – a process which can take 2-8 weeks in Europe, and several months in the US.

  

  “Some candidates don’t want to wait around,” said Slaughter.

  What’s more, many jobs in the defense industry are highly specialized – such as warhead engineers – which Colin McClean, a managing director at BAE Systems, says are a “rare commodity.”

  US Navy shipbuilder, General Dynamics, was in one of the hardest-hit sectors during the pandemic. In 2022 it hired 24,000 staff – yet, due to attrition and retirements, its net head count was up only 3,400 to 106,500.

  Another shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls Industries, is focusing on recruiting from apprentice schools and community colleges, according to CEO Chris Kastner.

  “If people choose the career, they stay,” he said. “There’s the high chance of attrition now with walk-in individuals.”

  

  Lockheed Martin VP of enterprise performance, Paula Hartley, says the space is “a tough place sometimes to recruit people to,” referring to the company’s facility in Camden, Arkansas – located around 100 miles from the state capital – which employs around 1,000 staff and plans to hire another 200 to make Javelin missiles and Himars rocket launchers. Despite holding job fairs and recruiting farther afield with sign-on bonuses and pay raises, they still have open positions posted since January.

  Saab, the Swedish manufacturer, has taken to posting billboards, online ads, holding student job fairs, and a social media campaign.

  Today Saab delivers Sweden’s new SIGINT-ship HMS Artemis to the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration, FMV. Read the story here –> https://t.co/w1UeI3xAS8#proudshipbuilders pic.twitter.com/olKEmruNmG

  — Saab (@Saab) April 28, 2023

  Imagine what would happen if peace broke out?

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/29/2023 – 15:30

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• Escobar: De-Dollarization Kicks Into High Gear
  Escobar: De-Dollarization Kicks Into High Gear

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

  The US dollar is essential to US global power projection. But in 2022, the dollar share of reserve currencies slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades…

  

  It is now established that the US dollar’s status as a global reserve currency is eroding. When corporate western media begins to attack the multipolar world’s de-dollarization narrative in earnest, you know the panic in Washington has fully set in.

  The numbers: the dollar share of global reserves was 73 percent in 2001, 55 percent in 2021, and 47 percent in 2022. The key takeaway is that last year, the dollar share slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades.

  Now it is no longer far-fetched to project a global dollar share of only 30 percent by the end of 2024, coinciding with the next US presidential election.

  The defining moment – the actual trigger leading to the Fall of the Hegemon – was in February 2022, when over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves were “frozen” by the collective west, and every other country on the planet began fearing for their own dollar stores abroad. There was some comic relief in this absurd move, though: the EU “can’t find” most of it.

  Now cue to some current essential developments on the trading front.

  Over 70 percent of trade deals between Russia and China now use either the ruble or the yuan, according to Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov.

  Russia and India are trading oil in rupees. Less than four weeks ago, Banco Bocom BBM became the first Latin American bank to sign up as a direct participant of the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), which is the Chinese alternative to the western-led financial messaging system, SWIFT.

  China’s CNOOC and France’s Total signed their first LNG trade in yuan via the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange.

  The deal between Russia and Bangladesh for the construction of the Rooppur nuclear plant will also bypass the US dollar. The first $300 million payment will be in yuan, but Russia will try to switch the next ones to rubles.

  Russia and Bolivia’s bilateral trade now accepts settlements in Boliviano. That’s extremely pertinent, considering Rosatom’s drive to be a crucial part of the development of lithium deposits in Bolivia.

  Notably, many of those trades involve BRICS countries – and beyond. At least 19 nations have already requested to join BRICS+, the extended version of the 21st century’s major multipolar institution, whose founding members are Brazil, Russia, India, and China, then South Africa. The foreign ministers of the original five will start discussing the modalities of accession for new members in an upcoming June summit in Capetown.

  BRICS, as it stands, is already more relevant to the global economy than the G7. The latest IMF figures reveal that the existing five BRICS nations will contribute 32.1 percent to global growth, compared to the G7’s 29.9 percent.

  With Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, Indonesia, and Mexico as possible new members, it is clear that key Global South players are starting to focus on the quintessential multilateral institution capable of smashing Western hegemony.

  Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) are working in total sync as Moscow’s partnership with Riyadh in OPEC+ metastasizes into BRICS+, in parallel to the deepening Russia-Iran strategic partnership.

  MbS has willfully steered Saudi Arabia toward Eurasia’s new power trio Russia-Iran-China (RIC), away from the US. The new game in West Asia is the incoming BRIICSS – featuring, remarkably, both Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose historic reconciliation was brokered by yet another BRICS heavyweight, China.

  Importantly, the evolving Iran-Saudi rapprochement also implies a much closer relationship between the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a whole and the Russia-China strategic partnership.

  This will translate into complementary roles – in terms of trade connectivity and payment systems – for the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), linking Russia-Iran-India, and the China-Central-Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor, a key plank of Beijing’s ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

  Today, only Brazil, with its President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva caged by the Americans and an erratic foreign policy, runs the risk of being relegated by the BRICS to the status of a secondary player.

  Beyond BRIICSS

  The de-dollarization train has been propelled to high-speed status by the accumulated effects of Covid-linked supply chain chaos and collective western sanctions on Russia.

  The essential point is this: The BRICS have the commodities, and the G7 controls finance. The latter can’t grow commodities, but the former can create currencies – especially when their value is linked to tangibles like gold, oil, minerals, and other natural resources.

  Arguably the key swing factor is that pricing for oil and gold is already shifting to Russia, China, and West Asia.

  In consequence, demand for dollar-denominated bonds is slowly but surely collapsing. Trillions of US dollars will inevitably start to go back home – shattering the dollar’s purchasing power and its exchange rate.

  The fall of a weaponized currency will end up smashing the whole logic behind the US’ global network of 800+ military bases and their operating budgets.

  Since mid-March, in Moscow, during the Economic Forum of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CSI) – one of the key inter-government organizations in Eurasia formed after the fall of the USSR – further integration is being actively discussed between the CSI, the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the BRICS.

  Eurasian organizations coordinating the counterpunch to the current western-led system, which tramples on international law, was not by accident one of the key themes of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s speech at the UN earlier this week. It is also no accident that four member-states of the CIS – Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – founded the SCO along with China in June 2001.

  The Davos/Great Reset globalist combo, for all practical purposes, declared war on oil immediately after the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. They threatened OPEC+ to isolate Russia – or else, but failed humiliatingly. OPEC+, effectively run by Moscow-Riyadh, now rules the global oil market.

  Western elites are in a panic. Especially after Lula’s bombshell on Chinese soil during his visit with Xi Jinping, when he called on the whole Global South to replace the US dollar with their own currencies in international trade.

  Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), recently told the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations – the heart of the US establishment matrix – that “geopolitical tensions between the US and China could raise inflation by 5 percent and threaten the dominance of the dollar and euro.”

  The monolithic spin across western mainstream media is that BRICS economies trading normally with Russia “creates new problems for the rest of the world.” That’s utter nonsense: it only creates problems for the dollar and the euro.

  The collective west is reaching Desperation Row – now timed with the astonishing announcement of a Biden-Harris US presidential ticket running again in 2024. This means that the US administration’s neo-con handlers will double down on their plan to unleash an industrial war against both Russia and China by 2025.

  The petroyuan cometh

  And that brings us back to de-dollarization and what will replace the hegemonic reserve currency of the world. Today, the GCC represents more than 25 percent of global oil exports (Saudi Arabia stands at 17 percent). More than 25 percent of China’s oil imports come from Riyadh. And China, predictably, is the GCC’s top trading partner.

  The Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange went into business in March 2018. Any oil producer, from anywhere, can sell in Shanghai in yuan today. This means that the balance of power in the oil markets is already shifting from the US dollar to the yuan.

  The catch is that most oil producers prefer not to keep large stashes of yuan; after all, everyone is still used to the petrodollar. Cue to Beijing linking crude futures in Shanghai to converting yuan into gold. And all that without touching China’s massive gold reserves.

  This simple process happens via gold exchanges set up in Shanghai and Hong Kong. And not by accident, it lies at the heart of a new currency to bypass the dollar being discussed by the EAEU.

  Dumping the dollar already has a mechanism: making full use of the Shanghai Energy Exchange’s future oil contracts in yuan. That’s the preferred path for the end of the petrodollar.

  US global power projection is fundamentally based on controlling the global currency. Economic control underlies the Pentagon’s ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ doctrine. Yet now, even military projection is in shambles, with Russia maintaining an unreachable advance on hypersonic missiles and Russia-China-Iran able to deploy an array of carrier-killers.

  The Hegemon – clinging to a toxic cocktail of neoliberalism, sanction dementia, and widespread threats – is bleeding from within. De-dollarization is an inevitable response to system collapse. In a Sun Tzu 2.0 environment, it is no wonder the Russia-China strategic partnership exhibits no intention of interrupting the enemy when he is so busy defeating himself.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 23:40

• How Smart Is ChatGPT?
  How Smart Is ChatGPT?

  ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI, has become incredibly popular over the past year due to its ability to generate human-like responses in a wide range of circumstances.

  In fact, ChatGPT has become so competent, that students are now using it to help them with their homework. This has prompted several U.S. school districts to block devices from accessing the model while on their networks.

  So, how smart is ChatGPT?

  In a technical report released on March 27, 2023, OpenAI provided a comprehensive brief on its most recent model, known as GPT-4. Included in this report were a set of exam results, which Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu and Rosey Eason visualized in the graphic above.

  

  GPT-4 vs. GPT-3.5

  To benchmark the capabilities of ChatGPT, OpenAI simulated test runs of various professional and academic exams. This includes SATs, the bar examination, and various advanced placement (AP) finals.

  Performance was measured in percentiles, which were based on the most recently available score distributions for test takers of each exam type.

  Percentile scoring is a way of ranking one’s performance relative to the performance of others. For instance, if you placed in the 60th percentile on a test, this means that you scored higher than 60% of test-takers.

  The following table lists the results that we visualized in the graphic.

  

  The scores reported above are for GPT-4 with visual inputs enabled. Please see OpenAI’s technical report for more comprehensive results.

  As we can see, GPT-4 (released in March 2023) is much more capable than GPT-3.5 (released March 2022) in the majority of these exams. It was, however, unable to improve in AP English and in competitive programming.

  Regarding AP English (and other exams where written responses were required), ChatGPT’s submissions were graded by “1-2 qualified third-party contractors with relevant work experience grading those essays”. While ChatGPT is certainly capable of producing adequate essays, it may have struggled to comprehend the exam’s prompts.

  For competitive programming, GPT attempted 10 Codeforces contests 100 times each. Codeforces hosts competitive programming contests where participants must solve complex problems. GPT-4’s average Codeforces rating is 392 (below the 5th percentile), while its highest on a single contest was around 1,300. Referencing the Codeforces ratings page, the top-scoring user is jiangly from China with a rating of 3,841.

  What’s Changed With GPT-4?

  Here are some areas where GPT-4 has improved the user experience over GPT-3.5.

  Internet Access and Plugins

  A limiting factor with GPT-3.5 was that it didn’t have access to the internet and was only trained on data up to June 2021.

  With GPT-4, users will have access to various plugins that empower ChatGPT to access the internet, provide more up to date responses, and complete a wider range of tasks. This includes third-party plugins from services such as Expedia which will enable ChatGPT to book an entire vacation for you.

  Visual Inputs

  While GPT-3.5 could only accept text inputs, GPT-4 has the ability to also analyze images. Users will be able to ask ChatGPT to describe a photo, analyze a chart, or even explain a meme.

  Greater Context Length

  Lastly, GPT-4 is able to handle much larger amounts of text and keep conversations going for longer. For reference, GPT-3.5 had a max request value of 4,096 tokens, which is equivalent to roughly 3,000 words. GPT-4 has two variants, one with 8,192 tokens (6,000 words) and another with 32,768 tokens (24,000 words).

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 23:20

• We Should Really Be Having More Kids
  We Should Really Be Having More Kids

  Submitted by Jack Raines via Young Money,

  In 27 BC, Caesar Augustus was crowned the first Roman emperor. Widely considered one of Rome’s greatest leaders, Augustus’s reign marked the beginning of the 200-year Pax Romana.

  One reason that the Roman Empire flourished during this time was its first-class transportation and sewage infrastructure that supported densely-populated cities, with Rome itself boasting an estimated one million residents at its peak.

  However, these population centers were also susceptible to epidemics, disease, and lead poisoning (lead was commonly used in pipes, eating utensils, and even food and drinks), yielding high infant mortality rates and low life expectancies (maximum ~33 years).

  

  Low life expectancy + expansive territories meant that the Roman Empire needed high birth rates to maintain enough soldiers to defend its borders, and Rome struggled to keep its birth rates above the population replacement rate. This issue was so important that Augustus offered tax breaks for large families and cracked down on abortion and adultery because he believed that “too many men spent their energy with prostitutes and concubines and had nothing for their wives, causing population declines.”

  But government efforts never succeeded in meaningfully increasing birth rates.

  At the conclusion of the Pax Romana, low birth rates, combined with plague and war, wreaked havoc on Rome’s population, and the power structure of the empire shifted to the newer Constantinople. Rome never recovered, with the city’s population dwindling from a peak of 1,000,000 residents in the late second century to ~30,000 by 600 AD.

  We humans draw parallels and analogies across time and space because they help us better understand the world around us, and no two Western civilizations have attracted more comparisons than the Roman Empire and the United States of America.

  Both nations experienced explosions of wealth and eras of unprecedented peace, both nations were the dominant global powers of their respective eras, and today, the US faces the same issue that plagued Rome 2,000 years ago: declining birth rates.

  In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway penned this now timeless exchange:

  “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

  Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises

  We worry about global warfare and pandemics because they’re big and scary and sudden and could wipe us out with a sudden BANG! But the real existential threat, declining birth rates, will progress like Mike’s bankruptcy: gradually, and then suddenly.

  Allow me to demonstrate through some basic arithmetic.

  ~2.1 children per woman is the typical population replacement rate in a developed country, and the US currently has a total fertility rate (which measures the average number of children that would be born per woman if all women lived to the end of their childbearing years and bore children according to a given fertility rate at each age): of 1.84. This means that (assuming this rate holds constant) every 100 parents will yield 92 children and ~85 grandchildren. And keep in mind, rates have been on a steady decline for years.

  It’s a bear market for babies.

  This isn’t just a US problem. We’re seeing these trends of sub-replacement fertility rates occurring all over the developed world:

  • South Korea: 1.11

  • Spain: 1.29

  • Japan: 1.39

  • China: 1.45

  • Austria: 1.51

  • Canada: 1.57

  • Germany: 1.58

  • United Kingdom: 1.63

  • Sweden: 1.67

  So now you might be thinking, “Okay, declining birth rates ‘sound’ scary, but who cares? Like, why does it matter?”

  At the individual level, it doesn’t matter. You have every right to think, “It’s no one else’s business if I don’t have kids!” But once a critical mass of individuals decides not to have kids, there are societal consequences.

  In her recent piece, Everything’s a Pyramid Scheme, Katie Gatti Tassin highlighted a logical fallacy in the “retire early” movement:

  I’ve long pointed out the fact that financial independence and early retirement cannot exist at scale, because our economic system would cease functioning. If every young person in their thirties or forties achieved financial independence and quit working, the workforce would be limited to those under the age of 35, effectively removing roughly 66% of the current labor force, or the equivalent of about 44 million people…

  Of course, there’s a funny redundancy in the system: If 44 million working-age people retired en masse and ceased most discretionary spending…corporate profits would drop, the stock market would stutter to a halt, and the returns required to support early retirement would vanish, driving everyone back to work.

  Katie Gatti Tassin

  Basically, retiring early works for individuals, but it could never work at scale because our economy would collapse without enough workers to keep it functioning smoothly. The Financially Independent, Retire Early (FIRE) movement only works as long as the majority of society fails to FIRE.

  Now, back to the babies.

  One big reason that our advanced and wealthy societies have become so advanced and wealthy is that growing populations created a growing labor force which, coupled with technological advancements, powered growing economies and widespread wealth creation.

  And now, our advanced, wealthy societies have devised systems that allow folks to retire and live their golden years in relative ease and decadence thanks to a combination of personal savings/investments and social safety nets.

  These social safety nets are supported by taxes, which are funded by taxpayers, aka workers. And our number of workers has been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution.

  But now people are having fewer kids, meaning that down the road, we’ll have fewer workers. And when life expectancies are higher than ever while birth rates are lower than ever and everyone still wants to retire on time… well, you see where I’m going with this? The math doesn’t add up.

  (Katie actually made this same observation to highlight the absurdity of individualism).

  So not to be a complete doomer here, but it feels a lot like we’re climbing the initial ascent on a rollercoaster, and we’re about to hit the apex.

  What does the descent look like? I don’t really know, because we haven’t actually seen a large-scale population decline in the modern era, but I imagine it would go something like this:

  • Social programs that we take for granted will no longer be feasible.

  • People will have to work longer (you’re already seeing protests about this in France after the pension reform).

  • Stock and real estate markets will decline as lower populations reduce consumer demand, hurting corporate profits and property values.

  So after considering why declining birth rates matter, I had another question: Why, given the risks associated with birth rate declines, are we still experiencing said declines in developed countries?

  Like, this problem is pretty obvious, so why aren’t we making more babies?

  I have a few hypotheses:

  1) Kids are expensive (both in perception and reality).

  The US Department of Health & Human Services estimates that the average family with infants would need to pay $16,000 per year to cover the true cost of childcare, and half of US households make less than $70,000 per year. That’s a big chunk of cash going to raising a kid each year.

  Besides the real costs, the perceived costs of childcare scale exponentially with one’s social group. Say you’re a high earner, and you and your spouse take home $200k+ per year.

  Do you want your kid to attend a private middle school to improve their chances of gaining acceptance to an elite boarding school to ensure they secure a seat in an Ivy League university which will help them land a coveted job on Wall Street?

  Are they going to play travel sports and take music lessons and eat organic foods and drive a nice car?

  That’s going to cost a lot more than $16,000 per year.

  Even high-earners are hesitant to have children because they don’t know if they can afford their desired lifestyle for their kids.

  2) Widespread contraceptives.

  Thousands of years before Planned Parenthood, the ancient Greeks and Romans discovered this cool plant called Silphium. Silphium had a number of medical uses, but it was most popular for its role as a contraceptive: ingesting a chick-pea-sized dose of Silphium prevented pregnancy.

  There was just one problem with Silphium: it could only be grown in a narrow strip of fertile land in present-day eastern Libya. The Romans loved Silphium so much that they overused the wonder plant, eventually driving it extinct.

  After the disappearance of Silphium, the world didn’t have an effective, safe contraceptive that could be ingested until 1950, when the birth control pill hit the market.

  For the first time in 2,000 years, women controlled when and if they wanted to have children. When we have a high degree of control over the childbirth process, the number of unplanned pregnancies will decline, which means the number of total pregnancies will likely decline too.

  3) Everyone, regardless of their sex, is focused on their careers.

  100 years ago, it was normal for husbands to go to work while their wives took care of the house and/or raised the children. But now? Everyone works. And kids really throw a wrench in climbing the corporate ladder.

  Ambitious women don’t want children to derail their careers, and ambitious men don’t want to step off the fast track to partner to spend a few years as stay-at-home dads. So both sexes delay having kids until they have achieved some threshold of success in their professional lives. But the clock doesn’t stop ticking, and every year spent chasing paper is one year not spent chasing two-year-olds around the house.

  4) The Bored Parent Hypothesis.

  I have this half-baked idea that one’s number of children is inversely related to their availability of fun/interesting alternative activities. If you are a 20-something living on a few dollars a day in an undeveloped country, you don’t really have many things to do (excluding work) besides creating an army of your own miniature genetic replicas.

  But if you live in a developed, first-world country in the Year of Our Lord 2023, you have a lot of ways to spend your time that does not involve making babies. You can enjoy a luxury previously unknown to most of our ancestors: chill with your friends. You can travel for fun, ski, engage in this weird modern phenomenon known as “hobbies,” create art, and learn a foreign language.

  You have options.

  Subconsciously, we know that children mark the end of this period of vast optionality by introducing a really, really big responsibility. This is the first-world problem of all first-world problems, but I do think that some young people in developed countries today are hesitant to have kids because there’s just a ton of fun stuff to do when you don’t have kids.

  Of course, I’m speaking as a young dude in a developed country who thinks there’s a ton of fun stuff that doesn’t involve having kids.

  5) There are literally too many potential partners.

  While birth rates have been steadily declining, the average age of first marriage has been steadily increasing. These two numbers are related: if you get married later, you literally have less time to have kids.

  Something, something, biological clock.

  So why are people getting married later? One reason is that the internet has given us a damn-near-infinite number of potential partners.

  Historically, guy likes girl, girl likes guy (or the parents arrange the marriage without consulting the kids at all), and then guy and girl get married and have kids.

  But now, guy likes girl, girl likes guy, guy refuses to show how much he likes girl while girl plays hard-to-get to keep guy interested, and guy and girl enter a 4-month relationship-adjacent purgatory where they go on dates and sleep together but don’t acknowledge the relationship itself until one party inevitably stops talking to the other party to see what else is out there, and then the whole cycle repeats.

  “Dating” looks the way it does today because everyone is replaceable when the dating pool has millions of options. Instead of working through a road bump in one’s relationship, you can treat every minor inconvenience as an opportunity to look for someone “better.”

  This weird dating carousel can last for years as we take longer and longer to commit, giving us less and less time to have kids.

   

  The irony of this whole thing is that it was our very economic prosperity that created the conditions that could unwind the whole thing:

  • The desire for everyone to “get ahead” has made it really expensive for your kids to get ahead

  • Medical advancements have allowed us to be tactical with our pregnancies

  • Previously unavailable career opportunities have led many folks to put off having children to pursue those opportunities

  • Our abundance of wealth has provided us with near-limitless entertainment and activities that don’t involve having kids

  • And the internet turned the whole world into a potential dating pool, making commitment next to impossible

  And now we face this really weird Prisoner’s Dilemma:

  Any individual person can delay having children to enjoy our abundance of everything, and their world will function just fine. But if every individual person neglects to have kids any time soon, the whole system grinds to a halt. The only way to ensure that everyone wins is by everyone having more kids.

  Maybe society really is just one big pyramid scheme.

  So I guess we should probably start having more kids. Or at least y’all should, anyway. I don’t really want to be part of the solution anytime soon, respectfully.

  – Jack

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 23:00

• Majority Of US States Have 'Stand Your Ground' Laws
  Majority Of US States Have ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws

  After a series of highly publizised shootings in the U.S., Stand Your Ground laws – also called Shoot First laws – are back in the news.

  Data by the Giffords Law Center shows that these type of laws are common across U.S. states.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, they specify that people are allowed to use deadly force if they feel like their life or health is threatened in a public place without needing to try to retreat.

  According to Giffords, U.S. law largely agrees that this is also the case for private property, for example if a homeowner feels threatened by an intruder. In several more states that don’t have Stand Your Ground laws – including California, Illinois, Oregon and Washington – precedents exist that could influence how an assault, manslaughter or murder case goes after a trial has started (while in Stand Your Ground states, police could decide to not bring any charges based on these laws).

  On April 13, Black teenager Ralph Yarl was shot by a homeowner after going to the wrong address in Kansas City and was seriously injured. Andrew D. Lester, a 84-year-old white man, was charged with assault in the first degree.

  On April 17, Kaylin Gillis, a 20-year-old white woman, was fatally shot in upstate New York after the car she was riding in went into a wrong driveway. The shooter, 65-year-old Kevin Monahan, was charged with murder.

  In another case where public area Stand Your Ground laws could apply, two cheerleaders were shot and wounded in Texas after one of them accidentally got into the wrong car in a supermarket parking lot after their practice on April 18. However, the subject – 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr. – has been charged with deadly conduct, meaning he used a weapon recklessly, threatening, or dangerously.

  While in all three cases, charges have been brought, Stand Your Ground laws as well as laws pertaining to private property – also referred to as Castle Doctrine laws or Make My Day laws – could still influence these cases and could theoretically see charges dropped or cases won for the defendants.

  

  However, in the Kansas City case, the prosecuter has said he does not see the necessary pre-condition of threatening behavior and self-defense fulfilled when Ralph Yarl was shot through the door of the home. In the New York state case, the county’s sheriff was quoted as saying that “there was no reason for Mr. Monahan to feel threatened, especially as it appears the vehicle was leaving.” While no such info was available on the third case, the subject is reported to have followed the two women to their car before shooting, likely exceeding the limits of Stand Your Ground legislation. What remains is the question how perceived rights under these types of laws and doctrines influence shooters’ seemingly erratic behavior following what could be considered everyday mix-ups.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 22:40

• Armstrong: Kamala's Affair – Sleeping Her Way To The Top
  Armstrong: Kamala’s Affair – Sleeping Her Way To The Top

  Authored by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

  Since the media is shining a light on Trump’s affair, it is only fair to point out similar actions taken by those on the other side of the aisle. Kamala Harris is not a particularly intelligent or charismatic individual, but she managed to work her way to the top by dating men in positions of power. In the 1990s, 29-year-old Kamala Harris dated married 60-year-old San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Harris was 31 years younger than Brown, who was married with a family at home.

  

  Harris accompanied Brown on his campaign trail and made connections along the way. She cannot deny the affair and claims that it is now “an albatross hanging around my neck.” Clinton used to call Brown “the real Slick Willie” for his playboy ways, which is saying something coming from blue dress Bill. “The measure of his flamboyance is he’ll go to a party with his wife on one arm and his girlfriend on the other,” James Richardson, a reporter for the Sacramento Bee told People Magazine in 1996.

  

  New San Francisco mayor Willie Brown points out his new hat “Da Mayor” as he claimed victory Tuesday night, December 12, 1995, while at his victory party in San Francisco. (CONTRA COSTA TIMES/JON MCNALLY)1995

  Kamala Harris secured a job at the California Medical Assistance Commission through Slick Willie, although she had no medical background.

  He also appointed her to the state’s Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.

  She was later appointed as the district attorney in San Francisco in 2004.

  Meanwhile, Slick Willie was under investigation for gifting his friends city contracts. He never came under fire for promoting Harris to positions of power.

  But by then, Harris was on her way to becoming attorney general and did not need the support of her older married boyfriend.

  “His career is over. I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing,” Kamala shrewdly stated.

  Still, Brown assisted her in her 2016 bid for the Senate and spoke favorably of her over the years.

  Harris refuses to acknowledge that her time as Slick Willie’s mistress is what propelled her career.

  

  Brown is not remaining quiet.

  “I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker. And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians. The difference is that Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I ‘so much as jaywalked’ while she was D.A. That’s politics for ya.”

  But it is (D)ifferent!

  And that, folks, is how the leading world power found its second-in-command with absolutely no qualifications for the job.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 22:20

• JPMorgan, PNC To Buy First Republic After FDIC Seizure First Leaves Taxpayers Holding The Toxic Stuff
  JPMorgan, PNC To Buy First Republic After FDIC Seizure First Leaves Taxpayers Holding The Toxic Stuff

  Update (2210ET):  As the weekend begins, the WSJ reports late on Friday that big banks including JPMorgan and PNC are set to buy First Republic Bank but not in a private, market-arranged deal but rather in a transaction that would follow a government seizure of the troubled lender. A seizure and sale of First Republic, which would wipe out the equity of FRC and potentially impose losses on creditors, could come as soon as this weekend, the WSJ sources said.

  And so JPM, which is already the largest US bank is about to get even bigger, by scooping up all the good FRC assets while leaving US taxpayer holdings on to the toxic ones.

  That said, it wasn’t immediately clear whether the $30 billion in deposits funneled by JPM and other banks into FRC will be treated as insured funds (why should they should be insured?), nor was it clear how a wipeout of this capital, which would spark a systemic crisis simply because the Fed is now running policy of “monetary tightening through bank collapse”, having failed to contain inflation and tighten policy using conventional means.

  * * *

  Update (1640ET): As many expected given the intraday collapse of FRC, Reuters reports after the bell that The FDIC will imminently the bank into receivership.

  First Republic most likely headed for FDIC receivership – CNBC https://t.co/9HT5s9Yoqj pic.twitter.com/FRenLK8juh

  — Reuters (@Reuters) April 28, 2023

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  Shares collapsed to a $1 handle in the after hours trading, down 70% on the day…

  

  FRC was trading at $120 at the start of March… and now it’s trading close to $1.20…

  

  …Aaaaand it’s gone…

  

  *  *  *

  Update (1045ET): First Republic Bank shares are halted for volatility having collapsed 50% back to record lows as hopes of a ‘private’ deal fade…

  

  Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers criticized Washington regulators and US banking giants for not having already figured out a solution for the beleaguered lender First Republic Bank.

  “I’m surprised and disappointed that this situation has continued to linger as long as it has, with the bank’s stock down 95%” and credit gauges deteriorating, Summers said on Bloomberg Television’s “Wall Street Week” with David Westin.

  “I hope that between the banks, the FDIC, the other public authorities, that the best way forward will be found within the next week or 10 days.”

  “These are things like forest fires, it is much easier to prevent them than it is to contain them after they start to spread,” Summers said.

  He didn’t offer a preference for either an FDIC takeover or “some private sector oriented” workout.

  “But we need to figure out the answer to that question as quickly as possible and move on.”

  Imagine the deposit outflows occurring today!

  ‘The question now is simple – will they make it to the close without the FDIC stepping in?

  *  *  *

  The First Republic farce rolls on…

  After reporting dramatically worse deposit outflows (and aggregate banking system flows suggesting things are getting worse, not better in April), The FT reports that there had been a shift in tone among the First Republic Bank’s advisers compared with Tuesday and Wednesday when First Republic’s shares fell 65 per cent and fears grew that it was close to being taken over by the FDIC.

  The conversations about the bank reportedly remain fraught, and the people cautioned that it was not clear that a solution would be found.

  The banks are reluctant to put their shareholders at risk of losses without some sort of government participation.

  

  Which is notable since Reuters reports that, according to three sources familiar with the situation, US officials are coordinating urgent talks to rescue the beleaguered regional bank as private-sector efforts led by the bank’s advisers have yet to reach a deal.

  The government’s involvement (and presumably some hope of backstopping commitments) is reportedly helping bring more parties, including banks and private equity firms, to the negotiating table, one of the sources added.

  Reuters adds though that it is unclear whether the U.S. government is considering participating in a private-sector rescue of First Republic.

  However, the government’s engagement, however, has emboldened First Republic executives as they scramble to put together a deal that would avoid a takeover by U.S. regulators.

  Specifically, The FT reports that one proposal that may be part of an eventual solution is for some of the banks to buy some of First Republic’s long-dated assets for more than their current market price, allowing the lender to shrink its losses.

  But people familiar with the situation say that this would probably not be enough to stabilize First Republic on its own.

  Bear in mind that the ‘Big Banks’ have $30 billion in deposits at the embattled bank… so the FDIC has a problem already.

  FRC Bonds ain’t buying it at all…

  

  First Republic shares were up around 5% in the pre-market, but have already erased the earlier stronger gains…

  

  Just to put that into context, here’s FRC this week…

  

  Finally, First Republic Bank’s membership in the S&P 500 Index could be in jeopardy after the troubled bank’s stock set a new all-time low on Wednesday that briefly pushed its market capitalization below $1 billion.

  

  At roughly $1.2 billion, FRC has by far the smallest market cap in the S&P 500 after wiping out more than $21 billion in market value. As Bloomberg notes, this is a problem because companies must have a market cap of at least $12.7 billion to be considered for inclusion in the S&P 500.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 22:10

• Trapped Americans In Sudan "Shocked & Disgusted" – Left By Biden To Fend For Themselves
  Trapped Americans In Sudan “Shocked & Disgusted” – Left By Biden To Fend For Themselves

  Update(1302ET): Sudan is continuing to stare into the abyss of full-blown civil war as the battle for control of the capital of Khartoum between two rival generals – now reaching the two week mark – results in a mounting death toll. Currently, dozens of countries have for days been racing to get their citizens out via military transport planes, ships, and via cross-border land routes into Ethiopia and neighboring countries, but not the United States.

  A surprisingly blunt report voicing intense criticism toward the Biden administration has been issued by CNN Friday, which writes, “As the crisis in Sudan continues to unfold, there is mounting anger among Americans who feel abandoned by the US government and left to navigate the complicated and dangerous situation on their own.”

  CNN further points out that robust evacuation efforts are underway by many other countries. As we detailed below, a C-130 evac flight sent by Turkey even took on small arms fire while landing outside the capital. And the Chinese government has said it has successfully evacuated at least 1,300 of its nationals thus far, with state media confirming evacuation operations ongoing by “land and sea”.

  “I am incredibly shocked and disgusted by the American lackluster response to the health and safety of their citizens,” Muna Daoud told CNN, whose parents were forced to exit via Port Sudan to Saudi Arabia. And CNN follows with this: 

  Despite a number of nations evacuating their citizens, the US government has continued to say that the conditions are not conducive to a civilian evacuation. All US government personnel were evacuated in a military operation this weekend. US officials have said they are in “close communication” with US citizens and “actively facilitating” their departure from Sudan.

  However, CNN spoke with multiple people whose family members are among the “dozens” of Americans who want to leave Sudan, and they said the State Department has provided “barely any assistance” since the deadly violence between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) broke out more than a week ago.

  Another American stuck in Sudan called the embassy and State Department “useless”. “To be honest with you, the State Department was useless, utterly useless throughout this entire period,” a man named Imad said in an interview. “We expected the Department to provide some kind of guidance, but the guidance was the template, just shelter in place, no critical information being provided.”

  

  Already two American have lost their lives. CNN further presents that more are coming close to getting shot in near-miss situations due to the lack of formal US effort to get citizens safely out:

  “The might of our military and resources does not get used to save our lives in war zones,” she said.

  When CNN spoke to Daoud, her 69-year-old father and 66-year-old mother – both of whom are US citizens – were making the “harrowing” nine hour bus journey from Khartoum to Port Sudan.

  “They had to find a bus this morning after waiting outside on the side of the road,” she said. Daoud said that the bus had been stopped three times by RSF soldiers “and at one checkpoint they held my father at gunpoint because they believed he was in the Sudanese Army.”

  “They told all the men to step off the bus and searched and questioned them,” but they kept her father at gunpoint, she described to CNN.

  “My mum believed he was going to be taken or shot. Luckily they decided to let him go,” Daoud said.

  Meanwhile, Chinese media pundits are mocking and gloating…

  Where is he? https://t.co/m3jVxdhWPP pic.twitter.com/Vx7RCGJRJ6

  — Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) April 28, 2023

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

  China’s Foreign Ministry has confirmed it is sending the PLA Navy to help evacuate Chinese nationals from Sudan, with defense ministry spokesman Tan Kefei announcing Thursday that that more navy ships are on their way. 

  Already, Chinese evac ships have been spotted at Sudan ports in the Red Sea:

  The Chinese military dispatched naval vessels to evacuate Chinese personnel in #Sudan. Chinese nationals line up for boarding the vessels, some hold Chinese national flag. This is the third time the Chinese navy takes the mission of evacuation of Chinese nationals overseas. pic.twitter.com/OuPxUGEYLb

  — Qingqing_Chen (@qingqingparis) April 26, 2023

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

  “Due to the recent continually deteriorating security situation in Sudan, the Chinese army sent naval vessels to Sudan on April 26 to evacuate and transport our citizens to protect the lives and property of Chinese personnel in Sudan,” Tan said, also confirming over 1,300 Chinese citizens have already fled, and that more are exiting through land borders. “So far, more than 1,300 Chinese citizens have been safely transferred, some have left Sudan on Chinese warships and boats, and some are on their way out,” Tan detailed. 

  Germany and other European nations too…

  A German military plane with 101 citizens evacuated from #Khartoum is on its way to Jordan, the armed forces say, with two more aircraft still in #Sudan.https://t.co/qXg3cGp0Fi

  — Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) April 24, 2023

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  Jordan has also been among the countries organizing military transport flights to and from the restive capital.

  It’s funny how the United States can invade countries at drop of a hat.. but rescue citizens? Apparently not. A prime question which remains concerning many of those among the 16,000 Americans (many of them dual nationals no doubt) is: where’s Joe Biden?

  * * *

  Heavy explosions and gunfire have continued to rock parts of Sudan’s capital Khartoum and its twin city Omdurman despite a ceasefire. At least 500 people have been killed, including reportedly two American citizens, as fighting reaches two weeks amid the power struggle between two rival generals representing Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces.

  “Many areas that saw very active fighting at the beginning have become quieter than before. Yet, I cannot say there is a total ceasefire in those places,” a Khartoum resident told Al Jazeera on Friday. “I don’t think anyone has gone to school in the last 14 days. I don’t think anyone has been to a hospital.”

  

  A massive foreign evacuation effort involving many countries sending military transport planes has continued for the better part of a week. The United States administration, however, has said that it is not conducting a large-scale evacuation operation for the estimated 16,000 US citizens who live in Sudan, many of them dual nationals who have made the country their home. 

  But this international rescue effort appears to now be coming under threat, after new reports that a Turkish evacuation plane came under gunfire while landing at Wadi Seyidna airport outside Khartoum. The aircraft, a C-130, had its fuel supply system damaged by the ground gunfire. 

  The Turkish defense ministry confirmed the damage but without naming a culprit. “Light weapons were fired on our C-130 evacuation plane … Our plane landed safely. Although there are no injuries to our personnel, necessary repairs are being carried out on our aircraft,” it said.

  The national army said the Rapid Support Forces of Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo mounted the attack on the plane as it was landing, but the RSF rejected the accusation as part of the national army “spreading lies”. 

  “Our forces have remained strictly committed to the humanitarian truce that we agreed upon since midnight, and it is not true that we targeted any aircraft in the sky of Wadi Seyidna in Omdurman,” the RSF said. Fighting has been witnessed elsewhere in the country, which could signal a slide toward full-scale civil war, as the AFP is reporting 74 dead in two days of fighting in the West Darfur capital of El Geneina.

  Sudan army and a rival force agree to extend an existing ceasefire even as battles rage.

  Fighter jets have pounded paramilitaries in Khartoum while deadly fighting and looting flared in Darfurhttps://t.co/W2PQp0X2M1 pic.twitter.com/KwpzkAwkSj

  — AFP News Agency (@AFP) April 28, 2023

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  The rival military factions reached an agreement to extend their ceasefire from midnight local time (22:00 GMT on Thursday) for an additional three days, but by many accounts it’s barely holding, if at all.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 22:02

• Biden DOJ: Kids have A Constitutional Right To Puberty Blockers
  Biden DOJ: Kids have A Constitutional Right To Puberty Blockers

  Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary (emphasis ours),

  The Biden Administration has a new and unhinged constitutional theory: the 14th Amendment protects the right of a child to take puberty blockers. Bans on hormone treatments for children with gender dysphoria, such as the prescription of testosterone to a transgender 12 year-old, violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

  

  That’s the Administration’s position in LW v. Skrmetti, a lawsuit filed in a Nashville, Tennessee federal court by the families of three transgender children – a fifteen year-old transgender daughter (who thought he was transgender at age 12), a fifteen year-old transgender son, and a twelve year-old transgender son. They’re challenging a new Tennessee law that “establishes prohibitions related to the performance on minors of certain medical procedures related to gender identity, creates private causes of action for violations, and establishes additional penalties for violations.”

  The families of these transgender kids allege that the Tennessee law (1) violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by targeting the transgender; (2) violates the right of parental autonomy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment’s due process clause; and (3) that the law is preempted by the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination “on the basis of sex.”

  All the children are “currently receiving medical care” that would be prohibited by the recent Tennessee legislation.

  What is this medical care? The 15 year-old transgender “girl” – born a male – is currently undergoing estrogen hormone therapy so that his body will “undergo feminine pubertal changes.” The 15 year-old transgender “boy” who was born a girl came out as transgender around the 5th grade. She is on testosterone.

  The 12 year-old transgender “boy” – born a female – was diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the second grade, when she then began her transition. This occurred after her mom “contacted a local LGBTQ resource center” who then connected her with a therapist. The young girl’s mom was also a key factor in the biological changes endured by her daughter, having influenced the girl’s decision to start taking puberty blockers.

  The “treatment” (hormones and puberty blockers) received by these children, and similar treatments we see across the country, including surgical genital mutilation, are considered “necessary” to remedy the effects of gender dysphoria (a purported medical condition somehow recognized as legitimate by major medical associations in the US). The Tennessee law at issue does not issue a blanket prohibition of hormone therapy. For example, a male child with a hormone imbalance or a congenital defect may receive testosterone. The prohibition only concerns treatment of gender dysphoria.

  And that’s the objection by the Biden DOJ – that the treatment of gender dysphoria cannot be categorically banned, even if a state’s lawmakers consider the treatment to be dangerous, ineffective, and ultimately harmful. The Biden Administration argues that the law “threatens irreparable injury” to these children and any other “transgender” children in the state of Tennessee. It says that a transgender person, whom it defines as “someone whose gender identity is inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth,” should be a protected class – that “transgender status warrants heightened scrutiny” because it is “immutable” like gender. Thus, laws that target the treatment of gender dysphoria should be given intermediate scrutiny by the courts.

  The Biden Administration’s position that one’s identification as transgender should elevate them to a protected class similar to gender has not been adopted by the Supreme Court or a majority of federal appeal circuits. If this were to be accepted it would cause significant shift in the law and put at risk numerous state laws banning childhood gender mutilation or the administration of puberty blockers to the young. In other words, it’s their way to circumvent the legislative process.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 21:40

• How America's Middle Class Is Shrinking
  How America’s Middle Class Is Shrinking

  America’s middle class has been shrinking for the past 50 years.

  

  While middle class Americans remain the biggest income group by number of people, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, the same can’t be said of the aggregate income earned by them.

  From 1970 to 2021, the share of U.S. aggregate income earned by the middle class shrunk massively, from formerly 62 percent to just 42 percent.

  During the same time, aggregate earnings by high income Americans increased from 29 percent to 50 percent – despite the fact that the high income class is still less than half as big as the middle class in America.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  A report by Pew Research Center includes these numbers and also shows that unmarried women and those in single-earner households are less likely to belong to the middle class.

  The report considers anyone whose household earns between two thirds and double of the U.S. median income to belong to the middle class.

  Both the low income and the high income class have been growing in America – squeezing the middle class from both sides. One especially alarming trend that only pertains to the low income class is that while it has been increasing in size, it has been decreasing in its share of aggregated income. Between 1970 and 2021, earnings of the low income class decreased from an already meager 10 percent to just 8 percent.

  Black and Latino Americans are still much more likely to belong to the low income class – at around 40 percent of each group in this category compared to 24 percent of white people.

  However, the report attests one of the biggest upwards movements for Black Americans and moderate gains for Latinos. Yet, the Black middle class is still barely expanding as some gains seem to have gone straight to the Black high income class, which more than doubled in size in the past 50 years. Over the past half century, the white low income class has been expanding, but it remains much smaller than Black and Latino low income classes in relative terms.

  Looking at people who have experienced a big amount of downwards mobility in America independent of race, it has been those with less educational attainment.

  This includes people with only a high school diploma as well as those who didn’t finish college.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 21:20

• Unease In Israel As US Depletes Reserve Stockpiles To Fuel Ukraine War
  Unease In Israel As US Depletes Reserve Stockpiles To Fuel Ukraine War

  Via The Cradle,

  Officials in Israel have raised concerns about the dwindling stockpile of US munitions stored in the country, as in recent months, Washington has been quietly shipping the armament via the Port of Ashdod to Ukraine.

  “These are Israel’s reserve stockpiles for times of war … The move has had a bigger implication in light of the threats on Israel in multiple theaters,” an unnamed former cabinet minister told Israel Hayom.

  

  “US equipment stored in Israel was handed over to the US armed forces, in accordance with an American request,” the Israeli army said in response to a query by the news outlet.

  A US official also confirmed that “it is still not clear when the reserves will be restocked,” as the US war machine has pivoted from fueling conflict in West Asia to new fronts in Ukraine and Taiwan.

  While Kiev prepares for a critical spring offensive against the Russian army, western states have been scrambling to supply the European nation with enough arsenal to turn back the tide of war, as Ukrainian troops reportedly blow through 90,000 artillery shells per month – twice the rate produced by the US and Europe combined.

  Reports of the US Army tapping into its reserve stockpiles in Israel first surfaced in January.

  “[The Pentagon has drawn from] a vast but little-known stockpile of American ammunition in Israel to help meet Ukraine’s dire need for artillery shells,” the New York Times revealed on 17 January.

  Tel Aviv reportedly agreed to allow the shipments on the condition that the Pentagon replenishes the stockpile, with Washington pledging earlier this year to “immediately ship ammunition in a severe emergency.”

  According to Israel Hayom, the “implicit understanding” between Tel Aviv and Washington has been that munitions stored in US military storage facilities “would be earmarked for Israel in times of emergency if the Jewish state faces a major attack along the scale as the 1973 Yom Kippur War.”

  Unease in the apartheid state has also spiked due to President Joe Biden’s iciness towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ongoing rapprochement between Iran and several Arab states under the auspices of China.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 21:00

• Biden Forgets He Went To Ireland, Tacitly Disowns Grandchild-Via-Stripper
  Biden Forgets He Went To Ireland, Tacitly Disowns Grandchild-Via-Stripper

  On Thursday, we wrote about President Biden being caught with a cheat sheet providing the full text of a question he would be asked by a reporter at a White House press conference. Just hours after we posted that article, Biden demonstrated why his staffers go to great lengths to limit situations where the 80-year-old is asked to think and speak extemporaneously.  

  The Biden communications team has fully tamed the White House press corps, but the same can’t be said of the group of children who visited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Thursday as part of Take Your Child to Work Day. 

  

  Things went off the rails when one of those children asked Biden a simple question — what was the last country the US head of state had visited? 

  “The last country I’ve traveled — I’m trying to think the last one I was in — I, I’ve been to 89 — I’ve met with 89 heads of state so far, so, uh — I’m trying to think. What was the last — Where was the last place I was? It’s hard to keep track. Um, I was — “

  The dark comedy grew richer when it was another child who mercifully bailed Biden out, by shouting “Ireland!”

  “Yeah, you’re right, Ireland,” Biden replied. “That’s where it was. How’d you know that?” Biden this week announced his re-election bid; he would be 86 years old at the end of a hypothetical second term. 

  Joe Biden is asked by a kid the last country he visited and he can’t remember. He was in Ireland last week, which he didn’t remember until a kid told him. Good lord: pic.twitter.com/xpnklgA6sP

  — Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) April 27, 2023

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  Biden spent three days and nights in Ireland, in a trip that ended just 13 days before Thursday’s question. It included what should be a memorable visit to his ancestral home of County Mayo. 

  If this were an episode of Veep, we’d be treated to some poor White House staffer under a withering barrage of profane insults for their child having stumped the president with the simple question.

  Also at Thursday’s event, Biden ventured to name all his grandchildren. He listed six of them, but he omitted Navy Joan Roberts, the 4-year-old daughter of Hunter Biden that was born to former stripper Lunden Roberts, having been conceived while Hunter was still in a relationship with his dead brother Beau’s widow.

  

  “I have six grandchildren and I’m crazy about them, and I speak to them every single day. Not a joke.” Biden told the kids at the White House. After a long-winded description of the six that omitted Hunter’s child, Biden concluded, “And guess what? They’re crazy about me because I pay so much attention to them.”

  Hunter met Roberts when she was a stripper at a DC club. In a child support hearing last week, Roberts asked an Arkansas judge to throw Hunter in jail for having repeatedly failed to turn over financial records as part of the lawsuit’s discovery process. Hunter initially denied his fatherhood, but a paternity test established that fact. 

  

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 20:40

• Is China Winning, Part Two: "How Do You Stop A Superpower"
  Is China Winning, Part Two: “How Do You Stop A Superpower”

  By Russell Clark, author of the Capital Flows and Asset Markets substack

  How do you stop a country from developing? That is the question that is confronting US policy makers. At the moment, the US is adopting a number of policies including stopping technology transfers, tariffs and other regulatory barriers. The US has used this type of policy against North Korea, Cuba Venezuela and Iran, and these policies have indeed led to economic decline in these nations. The problem with this analysis, is that all of these countries lacked the economic and military heft of the US, so it was a no-brainier decision for the rest of the world to fall in line with sanctions. China is too big to assume the same results.

  

  If we want to analyze a China/US conflict, we have to go back to the Cold War era from some comparisons to think about. In my mind, broadly speaking the US was losing the Cold War during the 1970s. Not only did the US lose the Vietnam War, but Russian influence helped galvanize OPEC to place an oil embargo on exports to the US, which had built it economy around cheap and abundant oil. Hostility in the Middle East to US support for Israel played into Russia’s hands in helping to organize the oil embargo.

  China is obviously aware of this historic episode, and policy in China has been to deliberately favor suppliers of commodities from non-US allies. But when we look at commodities such as corn, iron ore, LNG for example, China is still heavily reliant on the US and Australia for supplies. Could the US enforce a corn, iron ore or LNG embargo? Given the example of Russia, this would seem likely in the face of Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but otherwise unlikely.

  Speaking of Taiwan, China is, like the rest of the world, heavily reliant on Taiwan for high end semiconductors. The obvious bottleneck for semiconductors is the lithography equipment produced by ASML. While I know that R&D needed to produce the EUV equipment was huge and took many years, Chinese competitors have a huge advantage over ASML. They know the technology works – which makes the R&D commitment much easier to justify. After nuclear weapons were developed and used by the US, USSR tested it own bomb 4 years later, and despite aggressive curbs on nuclear proliferation, India, Pakistan, North Korea all have nuclear weapons. I really wonder how long EUV lithography technology can stay contained to ASML.

  However, while economic sanctions such as the oil embargo definitely slowed the US, the 1970s also showed that you can stop economic development more successfully through political means, rather than through trade or technology.

  How did the US defeat the Soviet Union? The received wisdom that the Soviet Union and they eventually bankrupted themselves trying to keep up with the US militarily. But I am going to argue that China and Nixon were the real catalysts for the end of the Soviet Union.

  Prior to and immediately after World War II, China was a close ally to the US, and was reliant on US military aid to battle Japan in Manchuria. The problem with this was that by then the average Chinese person had seen a century of humiliations at the hands of the Great Powers, who had carved out various territories and concessions from the Chinese government. The Opium Wars had seen the British force China to import narcotics, so that the British could export silk, silver and other goods. To put in mildly, Western Imperialism and trade had developed a bad name in China. This is why the Communist Revolution caused so much excitement in China. The ideas behind Communism were anti-imperialism, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-religion and very pro-development. They also included strong land reform element, which also helped in the appeal of communism. It was the appeal of these ideas, and chronic mismanagement of the economy by the Chinese government of the day, that led to the eventual triumph of Chinese Communist Party in 1949.

  With China joining the Soviet Union as communist, you could make a legitimate argument that the world’s ideology was now communism rather than capitalism, particularly as India had fairly strong communist leanings. That is the majority of the world now operated under a planned economy (the famous 5 year plans that China still uses). So how did the US break apart this communist hegemony? Problems began when the Soviet Union had to use force to keep its Eastern European states in line. The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 was put down by force. To Chinese eyes, this made the Soviet Union just another imperial power, and led China to make a distinct political break from the Soviet Union. This meant there was fissure between the Soviet Union and China that could be opened up by a skilled politician, and it took another 16 years for Nixon to finally visit China, and the US to begin normalizing relations with China.

  It is classic diplomacy – divide and conquer. And it has been practiced everywhere and all the time. So the question to ask, can the US divide and conquer China? The West is trying to apply obvious pressure to areas like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang and Tibet where Chinese rule is not universally accepted. India has also been co-opted to help put more pressure on China, and President Trump, in a semi-Nixon style, tried to break Russia away from Chinese influence. From a realpolitik point of view, turning Russia anti-Chinese would have had real repercussions for China, so I understand the logic – but with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I do not see anyway to turn Russia away from China.

  When we look at China today, we again see large income inequality. Property prices are unaffordable for many city dwellers. Politically, China seems ripe for a communist revolution, and I would argue that is exactly what Xi is providing. A reasserting of Communist policy, where economic gains are more decisively directed at the weakest part of society. With large business under control, it is hard to see who exactly would oppose this policy, and the biggest domestic risk to China is more from the failure of these policies rather than their success.

  But here is the rub, is that when I think along these lines, then rather than China being at the risk of failure, I wonder if the West is the one at risk of fracture. It increasingly looks like the next US Presidential Election will be a rerun of the last one, with Trump facing off against Biden. Let’s say that Trump wins, if he follows through on his statements, then the US will reduce support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. If this happens, then NATO is effective dead in the water as a military alliance. Given the real and present threat of Russia to members of the EU, then the EU would have to upgrade itself from an economic grouping to a military grouping, a process that is already gathering pace. It would be hard to not see how this outcome not benefiting China, as a reduced NATO would be less of a counterweight to Chinese economic influence.

  Furthermore, problems with income inequality and excess corporate power exist in the US, and the Biden administration has been acting to reverse some of this. Would a polarizing figure such at Trump be able to follow through? Or would he reverse these policies? The right to bear arms, and the build up of arms within the US makes it in some ways more likely to see civil unrest than the US. The events of January 6, rising levels of gun violence, and an increasingly assertive Supreme Court all make me nervous. What makes me very nervous, is that the political build up to the OPEC oil crisis, made it look inevitable in hindsight, but was ignored in the run up. The break between China and Russia and the normalisation of relations with the US was a huge deal, but again seemed inevitable in hindsight. I keep asking myself which of these events seems hard to believe today, but will seem inevitable once it happens. Is the collapse of the Chinese economy, or breakdown in civil society in the United States more likely? What really scares me as I think the evidence points more to the latter – but is that just because the US is more open? No easy choices – but one thing that does make me lie awake at night is that excessive political power led Japan into World War II – and I do wonder who can curb US corporate power? I struggle to think of anyone.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 20:20

• Jenny Craig "Winding Down Physical Operations", Mulling Bankruptcy
  Jenny Craig “Winding Down Physical Operations”, Mulling Bankruptcy

  Iconic weight loss company Jenny Craig is shedding some pounds of its own, it was reported this week. The company is going to be “winding down physical operations” and is reportedly looking for a buyer, according to NBC News. 

  The company’s employees have been warned about “potential mass layoffs”, the report says, noting that the company says it “has been going through a sales process for the last couple of months.”

  A company FAQ document related to the transition said: “While we had to issue Warn Notices specifically for sites where we had more than 50 people potentially impacted, this will likely impact all employees in some manner.”

  It continued: “We do not know the exact employees/groups whom will be impacted, and if any employees may be retained. As a result, we would suggest that you anticipate that your employment may be impacted and begin to seek other employment.”

  

  The company was founded in 1983 and was recently bought by HIG Capital in April 2019, for an undisclosed amount. At the time it operated 500 stores in the U.S. and Canada, mixed between company-owned and franchised.  

  The company didn’t return requests for comments by NBC. Bloomberg reported separately that the company is considering bankruptcy and that a filing could come “as soon as next week”, according to people with knowledge of the matter. 

  CEO and President Mandy Dowson told Bloomberg: “Like many other companies, we’re currently transitioning from a brick-and-mortar retail business to a customer-friendly, e-commerce driven model. We will have more details to share in the coming weeks as our plans are solidified.”

  NBC says it found “dozens” of users on LinkedIn who list Jenny Craig as their employer who are now “open to work”. Severance for its current employees is supposed to be “based on job level and tenure with the company”, according to the FAQ, which then, also states: “However, at this time, it is highly unlikely that these will be paid.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 20:00

• Doug Casey On The US Government Declaring War On Mexican Drug Cartels
  Doug Casey On The US Government Declaring War On Mexican Drug Cartels

  Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

  International Man: There has been a recent push by some US politicians of the neocon variety to use the US military against Mexican drug cartels.

  Senator Lindsay Graham has proposed designating them as “terrorist organizations.”

  Representative Dan Crenshaw introduced an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) to target drug cartels inside Mexico.

  What’s your take on this?

  

  Doug Casey: That’s just what the US needs: another war, and this one on the border.

  The people who back the use of military force in Mexico can only be described as thoughtless warmongers with no grasp of either ethics or history. If the war against organizations like the Taliban in Afghanistan was a world-class disaster, would an invasion work out better in Mexico, which has three times the population of Afghanistan, is much richer and much better organized? And they’re right on the border, which is really asking for trouble.

  The solution to the drug cartel problem is to legalize all drugs. The fact is that anybody who wants drugs today can get them easily, even if they’re in high-security prisons. From a practical point of view, making drugs illegal doesn’t work. All it does is greatly increase the price of the drugs in the US and create huge profit margins to import them. Even if you destroyed every cartel in Mexico, people that want drugs will still want them. As long as drugs are illegal, their prices will remain high and new cartels will arise.

  But despite the relaxation of penalties on cannabis, it’s highly unlikely drugs will be legalized. The DEA, one of the most corrupt Federal agencies, is a permanent lobby to keep them illegal. And there’s way, way too much money in keeping them illegal.

  The only solution is to learn a lesson from Prohibition in the 1930s. When they illegalized alcohol in the 1920s, it created the profits that allowed the Mafia to grow. It certainly didn’t cut down the amount of drinking; it just increased the amount of crime. Similarly, the insane War on Drugs is responsible for the success of the cartels.

  They say fentanyl, an important medical drug, kills 50,000 to 100,000 Americans per year. That’s mostly because its quantity and quality are uncertain, a consequence of its illegality. But the real question is ethical: Does government have a right to “protect” people against themselves? My answer is: No. If people like it, it’s their body and their business. Prohibition of alcohol—which is also quite a dangerous drug—was costly, destructive, immoral, and stupid. Fentanyl, the current bete noir of busybodies, is no different.

  If drugs were as easily available as aspirins through pharmacies, users would know what they were getting, and people who want them could get them at a cheap price in known doses.

  Apart from recognizing that you can’t protect people from themselves, it’s important to look at the root of why many people get lost in drugs. The answer, I believe, is that they’re trying to hide from reality and blot it out. Why is that? It’s a subject for another conversation. But the irrationality and coercion caused by State intervention in private lives are part of the answer.

  International Man: Mexican President Obrador has stated he will not allow the US government or military to enter Mexican territory.

  It’s also well known that Mexican cartels have a significant presence inside the US.

  Suppose the US government sends the military into action in Mexico anyways.

  What do you think could happen?

  Doug Casey: It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that the US has invaded Mexico.

  In the 1840s, the US basically stole all the territory in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, from Mexico. I know you shouldn’t say that—it sounds unpatriotic. But patriotism should be focused on American values, not necessarily on supporting the actions of politicians in Washington.

  In the Marine Corp’s hymn, one of the lines is “From the Halls of Montezuma” because US forces were actually fighting in Mexico City.

  It happened more recently when during the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, Pancho Villa raided across the Rio Grande, and General Pershing’s troops crossed into Mexico to (unsuccessfully) pursue him.

  There’s plenty of precedent for Americans invading Mexico, but perhaps the shoe is on the other foot now. 20 million or more Mexicans live in the US, mostly in the Southwest. Believe it or not, many of them talk about a Reconquista.

  It’s uncertain what effect it will have on the US border if warmongers like the smarmy and foolish little Lindsey Graham succeed in fomenting an invasion of Mexico. It could turn into a counterinvasion, an active shooting war unnecessarily created to quash the Mexican drug business. Which—insofar as it’s even a real problem—is a US problem.

  International Man: No matter what happens with the US military in Mexico, the situation at the border remains a mess.

  What do you think should be done?

  Doug Casey: The violence of the cartels is said to be one of the motivators for migration to the US. There appear to be at least one or two million people—nobody has the exact number—annually migrating from Mexico and other places into the US. Once they arrive, many become wards of the vast US welfare system. It’s a problem.

  The solution, as with so many social ills, is strict observance of property rights. That implies the border should be defended. Why? The migrants usually cross the privately owned land of Americans; they have no right to trespass. Even when the land is owned by the federal or state government, they have no right to trespass. It’s a question of strictly enforcing property rights.

  There’s a sign that often appears out west, “If you’re found here at night, you’ll be found here in the morning.” It’s a justified sentiment.

  Entering the US, or, more importantly, onto anybody’s private property without permission, is a serious offense. Property rights are the basis of all rights.

  It’s hard to know exactly, but I suspect a major attraction to migrants is that they know that once in the country, they’re basically guaranteed free food, medical care, schools, housing, and numerous other forms of welfare. That attracts the wrong kind of people. The immigrants of the 19th century were also penniless but got absolutely nothing when they came to the US. Now migrants get lots of freebies. Part of the answer is to eliminate any and all types of welfare both for Americans and immigrants—as well as strict enforcement of property rights.

  International Man: Renowned trends forecaster Gerald Celente has said, “When all else fails, they take you to war.”

  Do you agree?

  Doug Casey: Gerald is absolutely correct.

  Looking at America’s war history, when the US fought Germany and Japan, those countries were transformed because they were totally flattened, devastated, and dispirited—that made it easy to reform them in the image that the US government wanted.

  In the Korean War, which was really a war fought against China on Korean territory, the US dropped more bombs than in all of World War II. The country was totally flattened, and South Korea also transformed itself in the image that we wanted.

  But Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and for that matter, Vietnam, were more on the order of sport wars against primitive countries. They were all embarrassing disasters.

  What kind of war are we looking at with Mexico?

  Will Washington flatten the country in order to change its government? I question whether the Mexicans will accept that. Or will Washington get involved in a protracted guerrilla war where drug gangs are designated as terrorists? Randolph Bourne was right when he said: “War is the health of the State.” Unfortunately, the average American seems to have lost the power of critical thinking. He robotically equates the health of the State with the health of America.

  Either way, it’s a bad idea for America. But Washington isn’t America. The Deep State will, however, find somebody to fight. Unfortunately, it looks like Russia and China are next on the dance card, although they could certainly add Mexico to the naughty list while further bankrupting and corrupting the US.

  

  International Man: The US government is becoming more desperate and reckless by the day.

  How can the average person protect themselves and profit from this situation?

  Doug Casey: The US government is increasingly designating any real or imagined enemy du jour— whether they’re Mexican drug cartels, the Russians, foreign separatist movements, or various American citizens—as terrorists. Once someone is termed a terrorist, the gloves are off, and it becomes possible to commit any kind of crime to combat him.

  As the US destabilizes in many ways, Washington is finding its real danger lies within the country. What we’re looking at is a war of the US government against numerous and various groups, as well as dissident individual citizens. The FBI, CIA, DEA, and other praetorian agencies are being transformed into domestic secret police forces.

  One way to protect yourself from this is to vacate the premises until it becomes safe to live in the US again.

  Let me emphasize the importance of having a second residency or a second citizenship in case the US goes in the direction of so many countries in the past. And it’s not just the US. Many supposedly free Western countries are becoming quite repressive.

  In fact, it’s dangerous being a US citizen in the US these days, at least if you speak out too loudly. It certainly concerns me personally. Even though I don’t believe it’s possible to change the course of events, I say what I do because it’s right, not because it’s smart.

  That said, you should plan on the US government becoming much more virulent in the future. Washington, not Mexican cartels, is the real danger.

  That’s absolutely the case for the next two years, while genuine Jacobins control the government. But perhaps beyond that. There’s no telling who’s going to be elected or what they’re going to do. Since we’re likely going to be in the middle of a huge financial, economic, political, social, and military crisis, anything is possible. Little of it is good.

  The trend in motion is probably going to stay in motion.

  *  *  *

  It’s clear there are some ominous social, political, cultural, and economic trends playing out right now. Many of which seem to point to an unfortunate decline of the West. That’s precisely why legendary speculator Doug Casey and his team just released this free report, which shows you exactly what’s happening and what you can do about it. Click here to download it now.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 19:40

• Quiet US Seizure Of Iranian Crude Prompted Iran's Capture Of Houston-Destined Tanker
  Quiet US Seizure Of Iranian Crude Prompted Iran’s Capture Of Houston-Destined Tanker

  When on Thursday the US Navy announced that Iranian commandos had seized a Marshall Islands-flagged oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, conveniently absent from the narrative was the fact that just days prior the United States seized a ship laden with Iranian crude, identified as the Suez Rajan which was destined for China.

  “US authorities ordered a tanker of Iranian crude oil to redirect towards the US in recent days, in a move officials believe was the trigger for Iran’s decision to capture a US-bound tanker on Thursday,” the FT reports. “Three people briefed on the situation said the US had intervened to summon a ship loaded with Iranian crude, originally destined for China, as Washington looks to step up enforcement of sanctions on Tehran.”

  

  The Thursday seizure of the Advantage Sweet Suezmax crude tanker by the Iranians, which had been chartered by Chevron to move product from Kuwait to Houston, had resulted in swift condemnation by the Biden administration, with the US calling on Iran’s government to immediately release the oil tanker.

  While the Advantage Sweet incident grabbed international headlines, Washington’s action against the Suez Rajan (a Greek tanker carrying Iranian product) was not widely publicized or even known about.

  But US officials are now making the following belated admission: 

  The previously unreported US action towards the Suez Rajan shines a new light on Iran’s decision to capture the Advantage Sweet, a US-bound tanker of Kuwaiti crude that was chartered by Chevron.

  A US official said Thursday’s “seizure appears to be in retaliation for a prior US seizure of Iranian oil, which Iran recently attempted to get back but failed”.

  The ship with Iranian crude had been destined for China, and reportedly the Iranians had tried to pursue it when it was diverted toward the US after a court order from the DOJ. One of the companies involved with the vessel had helped with the US apprehension.

  In recent years the US has seized a number of tankers with Iranian oil for alleged sanctions-busting activities, including recent interventions against vessels headed to highly sanctioned Syria.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 19:20

• House Rejects Rep. Gaetz’s Bill To Withdraw US Troops From Somalia
  House Rejects Rep. Gaetz’s Bill To Withdraw US Troops From Somalia

  Authored by Savannah Hulsey Pointer via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  

  The House rejected legislation from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) that would require President Joe Biden to withdraw most U.S. troops from Somalia in an April 27 vote.

  Opponents of the legislation said it would hurt national security by making it harder to fight al-Shabaab, designated as a terrorist group by the United States over a decade ago.

  House lawmakers, including its sponsor, claim that 900 U.S. troops in Somalia on an uncertain mission will never bring peace. Despite his claims, the House rejected the legislation, H.Con.Res.30, in a vote of 102-321.

  Gaetz said during a floor discussion that to accept Biden’s decision last year to send soldiers back to Somalia, one would have to believe that 900 U.S. troops are what is going to save a country of 17 million from a hardened group of 7,000.

  “I think that strains not only logic but our understanding of the history of Somalia,” Gaetz said during the floor debate on the bill.

  “The future of Somalia must be determined by Somalia. And to the extent that foreign influences could be helpful, I would argue that the African Union is far better positioned to build a stronger sense of national identity and national unity among clans that have been warring in Somalia for generations than U.S. troops,” he added.

  

  Coup Concerns

  In recent weeks, Gaetz has also claimed that U.S.-trained Somali soldiers had staged coups across Africa. Gaetz questioned U.S. Africa Command Gen. Michael Langley, USMC, why taxpayers should continue paying for this endeavor in March, citing claims that certain U.S.-trained soldiers had led many coups and coup attempts.

  “The American people have extremely low confidence in our military leaders and their ability to assess their own efficacy,” Gaetz said in March when he introduced his resolution.

  “How do they expect Americans to believe their justification for occupying Somalia when they can’t even determine who in their own training programs will lead a violent coup afterward?”

  Terror Group Aligned With al-Qaeda

  Violence in Somalia has continued to be an issue of concern, with al Qaeda-linked al-Shabab seeking to establish an Islamic state through force.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 19:00

• US Sends "Shadowy Unit" Of Atomic Experts To Wire Ukraine With Nuke-Blast-Detecting Sensors
  US Sends “Shadowy Unit” Of Atomic Experts To Wire Ukraine With Nuke-Blast-Detecting Sensors

  The Biden administration is following through in a big way on its past denunciations of nuclear rhetoric and threats coming from Russian leadership of the past months and year. The Kremlin is likely to see it as an ultra-provocative and unnecessary step, revealed in fresh New York Times reporting on Friday…

  “The United States is wiring Ukraine with sensors that can detect‌‌ bursts of radiation from a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb and can confirm the identity of the attacker,” the Times report says. The goal, according to the report, is for US officials to be made immediately aware of if a radioactive weapon detonates inside Ukraine, and to be able to identify Russian forces as the culprit.

  

  NYT describes the measure as “the hardest evidence to date that Washington is taking concrete steps to prepare for the worst possible outcomes of the invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s second largest nation.”

  Interestingly, an elite team under an Energy Department organization which the Times calls “shadowy” has been tasked with deploying the sensors with the help of Ukrainian partners on the ground: 

  The Nuclear Emergency Support Team, or NEST, a shadowy unit of atomic experts run by the security agency, is working with Ukraine to deploy the radiation sensors, train personnel, monitor data and warn of deadly radiation.

  In a statement sent to The New York Times in response to a reporter’s question, the agency said the network of atomic sensors was being deployed “throughout the region” and would have the ability “to characterize the size, location and effects of any nuclear explosion.” Additionally, it said the deployed sensors would deny Russia “any opportunity to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine without attribution.”

  Further this would ensure that alternative or less conventional nuclear ‘dirty bomb’ deployment methods such as delivery by truck or boat could conceivably be more traceable (in addition to the more obvious: a mushroom cloud).

  

  Russia last year on multiple occasions alleged the Ukrainians could be planning a small nuclear dirty bomb false flag attack, in order to draw in NATO forces directly into a ground war in Ukraine.

  US officials and the Times report addresses this in saying “For instance, Moscow could falsely claim that Kyiv set off a nuclear blast on the battlefield to try to draw the West into deeper war assistance.” With the sensors in place, officials say, “in theory… Washington would be able to point to its own nuclear attribution analyses to reveal that Moscow was in fact the attacker.”

  So now it seems the US is prepping for the eventually of a false-flag blame game, disturbingly enough. Already last year iodine pills had been widely distributed in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. 

  

  Nuclear Emergency Support Team has meanwhile said in a statement that–

  “If a nuclear emergency were to occur in Ukraine, whether a radiation release from a nuclear reactor or a nuclear weapon detonation, scientific analyses would be rapidly provided to U.S. government authorities and decision-making centers in Ukraine and the region to make actionable, technically informed decisions to protect public health and safety.”

  There’s no way they could be preparing for a false flag. I’m sure they’re just putting the sensors in as a precaution.https://t.co/FYD887xXsd

  — Rich Coupe (@rich_coupe) April 28, 2023

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  But it remains that Moscow says its nuclear doctrine hasn’t changed. This includes the nuclear option in instances where the nation’s survival is deemed under existential threat. The Kremlin has further repeatedly denounce what it calls Western media and officials’ twisting Putin’s words anytime he speaks on the matter of nuclear weapons.

  Russian leadership has also asserted it doesn’t intend to use tactical or strategic nukes in Ukraine; however, Putin’s recently announcing “plans” to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus has certainly rattled the West. He described it along with sending nuclear-capable bomber aircraft as a necessary decision in response to the UK giving Ukraine armor-piercing shells containing depleted uranium.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 18:40

• Nationwide Support For Assault Weapons Ban Slides, New Poll Finds 
  Nationwide Support For Assault Weapons Ban Slides, New Poll Finds 

  Authored by Stephen Gutowski via The Reload (emphasis ours),

  Americans are less interested than ever in imposing an “assault weapons” ban.

  Those are the results of a Monmouth University poll released on Monday. That poll found 49 percent of Americans opposed a ban on the sale of assault weapons while 46 percent supported one, and six percent were unsure. That marks a nine-point decline in support and a seven-point increase in opposition since Monmouth asked the same question in June 2022.

  “Despite continued incidents of mass shootings, public support for banning assault weapons has dipped,” Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, said in a press release.

  

  The poll is just the latest to show a decline in support for the policy, which targets guns like the AR-15 and AK-47. It indicates Americans are growing increasingly skeptical of new broad-based restrictions on different kinds of guns, despite their presence in high-profile mass shootings. The deterioration of public opinion toward assault weapons bans may negatively affect the recent renaissance the policy has enjoyed in recent years and may be why several states where Democrats hold complete control, such as Colorado and New Mexico, failed to pass one this year.

  Monmouth’s poll comes a few months after an ABC News/Washington Post survey found a majority of Americans now oppose a ban on the sale of assault weapons, often defined as semi-automatic centerfire guns capable of accepting detachable magazines and featuring banned cosmetics like pistol grips or telescoping stocks. A Quinnipiac University poll from the same time frame found more Americans opposed a ban than supported one. The downward trend in support has persisted even after mass shootings that have captured public attention and House Democrats passing the first proposed federal ban in nearly 20 years.

  A poll from The Economist/YouGov has been one of the only consistent outliers from major polling firms on the issue. It shows support for a ban at over 60 percent. Although, that poll further confuses already-nebulous terminology by asking about a ban on “assault rifles,” which are traditionally defined as being capable of automatic fire–unlike common AR-15s.

  While gun-control advocates and President Joe Biden (D.) have continued to pursue a federal assault weapons ban as their top policy solution for mass shootings, the popularity of the guns they are seeking to remove from store shelves has skyrocketed. Late last month, a Washington Post/Ipsos poll found tens of millions of Americans own an AR-15.

  It isn’t the only estimate that puts the number of legally-owned ARs in the tens of millions.

  The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s trade group, estimated there were over 24.4 million AR-15s and similar rifles in circulation last year. Georgetown professor William English found in his 2021 National Firearms Survey that “30.2% of gun owners, about 24.6 million people, indicated that they have owned an AR-15 or similarly styled rifle.”

  Monmouth’s survey found political affiliation significantly impacted whether a respondent supported banning assault weapons. A majority of Democrats support such a ban, while a majority of Republicans and independents oppose it. Similarly, liberals support a ban, but conservatives and moderates do not.

  Breakdowns along age and racial lines were apparent too. The 55+ age group was the only one to feature majority support for a ban. White Americans were more likely to oppose a ban than support one, while a bare majority of non-White Americans support a ban.

  Support for other gun-control policies fared better in the Monmouth poll, though slight declines were present. 81 percent of adults said they support universal background checks, down two points from 2022 and accompanied by the caveat that only 28 percent believe it should be accomplished through an executive order. Support for a federal “Red Flag” law came in at 72 percent, down three points. The split on requiring permits for those who want to conceal a gun in public remained steady, with 56 percent supporting them and 41 percent opposed.

  Monmouth conducted the poll of a random sample of 805 adults between March 16th and 20th.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 18:20

• Russia Mounts First Large-Scale Air Raids On Ukraine In Nearly 2 Months
  Russia Mounts First Large-Scale Air Raids On Ukraine In Nearly 2 Months

  Russia launched Friday attacks on the central Ukrainian cities of Dnipro Uman – and other locations, marking the first large-scale missile and aerial raids in almost two months, and resulting in a mounting civilian death toll. 

  Ukraine’s defense ministry had previously warned the population it believed that major aerial strikes were imminent. The strikes occurred in the early night hours of Friday, with Ukrainian rescue operations ensuing throughout the day.

  

  Some large residential buildings were reportedly struck in the missile barrage, with Ukrainian rescue and health authorities telling international press that 26 people, including five children, were killed.

  The attack included over 20 cruise missiles and as well as some ‘suicide drones’ at a moment Ukraine is preparing for a spring counteroffensive: 

  Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford reporting from Kyiv said that the attack, according to the Ukrainian government, was executed by one of “23 cruise missiles and so-called kamikaze drones that Russia fired in the early hours of Friday morning. Some were reportedly launched from as far away as the Caspian Sea,” he said.

  The attacks show “Russia’s ability to strike targets across this country whenever and wherever it pleases”, he said.

  A Russian Defense Ministry statement also said it utilized strategic bombers to target Ukrainian army reserve unites, with an aim toward preventing additional troops from reaching the frontlines.

  Russian missile hit residential apartments block in Uman, Cherkasy region of Ukraine.
  Russia launched new massive missile attack against Ukrainian cities this night after weeks-long pause. Explosions were reported in Kyiv, Dnipro, Kremenchuk, Mykolaiv https://t.co/C4KIVXZPVW pic.twitter.com/N4DS9pIMJL

  — Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) April 28, 2023

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  Russia is also denying that it targeted civilians. “Overnight, the Russian Air Force carried out a collective rocket strike using long-range high-precision weapons targeting temporary deployment sites of Ukrainian army reserve units,” Russian MoD spokesman Igor Konashenkov told reporters later in the day.

  “The target of the strike was achieved. All designated facilities were struck. The advance of the enemy’s reserves into combat zones was thwarted,” Konashenkov said.

  

  Ukraine’s military meanwhile claimed its anti-air defenses had intercepted many of the inbound missiles. Given the reported rising high death toll, Kiev is likely to press its Western backers even harder at this point for more advanced anti-air systems.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/28/2023 – 18:00